Bryant’s Story—Clapping & Propaganda

Singing, Clapping, Feminism and Propaganda

By Bryant Vega

Singing, clapping, feminism, and political propaganda were all part of tonight’s annual Fife Folklore lecture series held by Utah State University inside of the Kent Concert Hall with guest lecturer Peggy Seeger.

Seeger, 73, has produced political theatre, run a record company and magazine, she has made over 22 solo CD’s and has been the subject of a BBC documentary. Seeger’s mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was an important modern American composer, and her father, Charles Seeger was an imminent musicologist. Her older siblings Mike and Pete Seeger are both still prominent in the music scene. The Seeger family must be what happens when nurture and nature collide in all the best ways.

Shortly after her introduction Seeger asked the audience to sing along to a short courtship song. “Oh when you coming to see me my pretty little buffalo boy?” When the song was completed the audience became hypnotized by a woman with a tissue in her bra, and prescription medicine bottle and coffee mug on front stage. But as Seeger said “folk music is not about the person singing the song it’s about the music.”

“Folk music is not made as a commercial commodity, not made to sing at bars or places of large entertainment, it’s not meant for patronage,” said Seeger. “In an ideal community, folk music was the creation of the lowest economic class, they were the people who did all the work got dirty, died of starvation. They made this music out of their hopes and dreams.”

Folk music, before the 1800s, was orally transmitted and the author was usually anonymous. The instruments were portable, “I can sing any of the songs I know while traveling the interstate,” says Seeger. The harmonic structure is very simple, generally the one chord, four chord and five chord; “anyone can play Folk music, you don’t have to go to school to learn it”

“You can’t write a folk song, the folk create the song,” says Seeger, “I have made up one Folk song in my life, it’s called “The Ballad of Springhill because nobody knows I made it up and there’s already two new verses added to it.”

Seeger played two songs which had political propaganda in both. The first was an anti-Bush song with the chorus of Impeach! Impeach! That's what we need to do. Impeach! Impeach! And take Dick Cheney too." In the middle of her song her fifth string on the banjo broke and she continued playing as if nothing happened.

Her last song was a piano ballad called “Oh how I long for peace”. “The left wing to me is very confrontational and male,” said Seeger bringing in her political and feministic views to close.

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