For fuck's sake. First I've heard of this.
His Southern Banjo Sounds LP is a fantastic introduction to what the banjo is capable of. And his version of Darling Cora (/Cory) is one of the best
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_G0vVo7zBU
― Duke, Saturday, 8 August 2009 22:21 (sixteen years ago)
man. i just interviewed him in april. i knew he'd been sick and his voice wasn't real strong, but he had plenty of thoughtful stuff to say. i told him i saw him perform when i was about 4 years old, at a small club, the first concert i ever went to. i remember him noticing me sitting with my parents and joking with me from the stage. not a big deal for him, but a formative experience for me.
it's hard to fully get your arms around everything he did, as a musician and also as a producer and archivist and mentor and everything else he did. the april phone call was actually my second interview with him. the first was about nine years ago, i called him up for something i was working on about dock boggs' banjo, and he told me i could come up and see it. so i drove to lexington, virginia, and he got out the banjo and played it and even let me hold it. then he and his wife gave me a nice lunch and talked about old-time music. (he was funny about greil marcus, made some offhand comment about how marcus sometimes just read too much into things.) he was a very understated guy, and very careful about what he said and how he said it. my impression was of a great precision in his approach to conversation, and i think to music. it wasn't enough for something to be close to the right word or right note, it needed to actually be the right one.
anyway it's hard to come up with a better eulogy than what dylan wrote in chronicles about him in the early '60s folk scene:
He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula's black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once -- had chivalry in his blood. Like some figure from a restored monarchy, he had come to purify the church. You couldn't imagine him making a big deal out of anything.
...Mike was skin-stinging. He was tense, poker-faced, and radiated telepathy, wore a snowy white shirt and silver sleeve bands. He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, played in all the genres and had the idioms mastered -- Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel -- being there and seeing him up close, something hit me. It's not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them. I was so absorbed in listening to him that I wasn't even aware of myself. What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood.
r.i.p.
― flying squid attack (tipsy mothra), Sunday, 9 August 2009 05:13 (sixteen years ago)
he was funny about greil marcus, made some offhand comment about how marcus sometimes just read too much into things.
we talked about something similar ca. 1996, and i agreed with him!
― amateurist, Sunday, 9 August 2009 07:45 (sixteen years ago)
surprised to not see more about him, here or elsewhere. i'm sure more obits will show up in the next few days, but it's pretty scanty right now. which i guess just shows how underappreciated he really was. his influence in preserving and promoting american music might not be on the level of the lomaxes, but i think he's pretty close. there's a lot of songs and singers and styles that we wouldn't know or have available if it weren't for him.
― flying squid attack (tipsy mothra), Sunday, 9 August 2009 16:31 (sixteen years ago)
that's good to know. when i was working on an article about the seegers earlier this year, the absence of a good mike seeger bio bothered me. he definitely deserves one. (so does peggy, for that matter.)
― flying squid attack (tipsy mothra), Sunday, 9 August 2009 16:41 (sixteen years ago)