Search - Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger :: Fly Down Little Bird

Fly Down Little Bird, recorded shortly before the influential "old-time" Southern music practitioner and folklorist Mike Seeger's untimely 2009 death from cancer, celebrates the authentic sound and spirit of the traditional American folk songs that first inspired Mike and his younger sister Peggy's equally significant musical career. It is suffused with love, of the music and each other, a poignant summation of a deep-rooted musical and family relationship. Mike and Peggy were raised in a Depression-era household steeped in traditional acoustic folk songs then unfamiliar to all but a few Americans. With their mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, serving as transcriber of song collectors John and Alan Lomax's "field recordings" from the East Coast's mountains and hollows, her children absorbed the real music of our country. (Their much older half-brother, Pete Seeger, also visited occasionally, adding his music to the household.) The fourteen songs on Fly Down Little Bird were, as Peggy says, "learned in childhood, recorded in adulthood." Sharing lead and harmony vocals, Mike (banjos, harmonica, fiddle, guitar, harmonica, mandolin) and Peggy (banjo, guitar, piano, lap dulcimer) transport listeners into a world of spare arrangements, plainspoken and frequently pointed lyrics, and acoustic instruments. It's a world they have helped to maintain as performers and documentarians as well as inspirations to young musicians over the last half-century. Fly Down Little Bird, the third duo album by Mike and Peggy, contains still-valid social commentary on the greedy ways of the world, including "The Farmer is the Man," the cheerfully amoral "The Dodger Song," and the racially aware "Big Bee Suck the Pumpkin Stem" ("Black man hoe the cotton patch/And the white man tote the money"). There are mischievous, if somewhat frustrated, reflections on love (including "Old Bangum," "Cindy," and "Jennie Jenkins") and the pangs of loneliness ("My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains," "Poor Little Turtle Dove," "Little Birdie"), plus the playful nonsense song, "Fod!" and the instrumental "Red River Jig."