Interview with Mike Seeger
Interview with Mike Seeger: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Mike Seeger Live at Oberlin Folk Festival May 2003: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
This week I’ll be drawing from my “archives” for an interview with Mike Seeger, multi-instrumentalist, field-recordist, record producer and 1/3 of the New Lost City Ramblers. This interview is from a tape of one of my old radio shows from college. It was conducted in May 0f 2003 at WOBC, the radio station of Oberlin College in Ohio. This was my first real radio interview! I had booked Mike to come and play at the Oberlin Folk Festival and while in town he appeared on the weekly radio show I hosted with my friend Jacob Groopman. We talk about his parents Ruth Crawford and Charles Seeger, Elizabeth Cotton, Dock Boggs, Josh Thomas, Henry Thomas, Alan Lomax, the current state of folk music and more, and Mike plays some gourd banjo and jaw harp live on the air.
Included above are the interview with Mike, and a recording of his appearance at the Oberlin College Folk Festival, May 2003.
Special thanks to Tom Reid of Oberlin College for providing the live recording of Mike Seeger at the Oberlin Folk Festival.
Links:
Awesome movie “Homemade Music” featuring Mike Seeger on Folkstreams.net
Film of Mike Seeger performing “Walking Boss”
Film of Mike Seeger performing “Breaking Up Ice in the Allegheny”
New Lost City Ramblers discography
Homemade American Music – “A history of rural southeastern traditional American music, as told and played by Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard. Mike and Alice recount their own involvment with this music, and briefly trace its history as we meet their mentors: the late Tommy Jarrell, Lily May Ledford, Roscoe Holcomb and Elizabeth Cotten.” – Watch it online for free at FolkStreams.net
Talking Feet – A documentary produced by Mike Seeger on Southern buck and flat foot dancing. Its awesome and you can watch it online for free at FolkStreams.net!
Southern Banjo Styles – A series of DVDs where Mike Seeger teaches a very wide variety of banjo styles. This is the best video instruction available on how to really play old-time banjo.
More information on Henry Thomas
Articles on Ruth Crawford, and Charles Seeger Mike Seeger’s mother and father.
Article on Thomas Hart Benton who turned Mike’s parents on to Dock Boggs.
More Photos:
New Lost City Ramblers at Alan Lomax Memorial Conference, 2003
Mike Seeger playing music with me and some friends at our house in college, Oberlin, OH, May 2003. (I’m 2nd from the left)
January 25th, 2008 at 10:06 am
from tokyo,japan
today i hear at my house near sumida-river.
thanks for your mike seeger interview-your first real radio interviw.
kiyohide kunizaki
tokyo folklore center from 1970
January 27th, 2008 at 3:41 am
Excellent interview! Great to hear him play the gourd banjo and drop some great anecdotes.
Perhaps you guys should try and get an interview with Michael Hurley. He’s a tough nut to crack but once he gets going it can make for some fun stories and surely some Tom T. Hall covers.