Folk legend shows students how to engage an audience in social issues.

By Danielle Dreilinger
Berklee.edu Correspondent
November 26, 2007

How can a songwriter promote change without being preachy?

That was the core conundrum the audience posed to folk singer/songwriter Peggy Seeger. Her actions would have answered the question even if she hadn't explained herself: instead of lecturing, she performed.

	Peggy Seeger teaches political songwriting minus polemics.
	Photo by Rob Hochschild
	"You use the word 'we' a lot. You don't say 'you.'" —Peggy Seeger

Seeger, now 72, teaches songwriting at Northeastern University. She moved to Boston last year after a spell in North Carolina and several decades in England with her late partner, songwriter Ewan MacColl. Part of the famous folk family, she's the half-sister of Pete and the daughter of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

She started with perhaps her best-known song, "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer" (1970), a tart story of a woman's attempts to fight against sexist expectations. It became popular in the feminist movement despite its musical complexity.

"I would never have expected them to pick up and run with this," Seeger said, but it shows the power of "writing the right song for the right time."

(It also had the virtue of adaptability—she later rewrote it for women lawyers.)

Seeger's protest songs are nothing if not unconventional, often favoring subtlety over exhortations. When she wrote a ballad about back-alley abortion ("The Judge's Chair") for the National Abortion Rights Action League, she hewed to her own inspiration rather than outside directives. The reaction was . . . mixed.

Seeger said, "They didn't like [it] at all. It's not what they wanted. On the other hand, it stops people in their tracks. And it stops me in my tracks when I sing it. What they wanted was an anthem that everybody could join in and sing on."

What do you play after a couple of heavy songs like those? Seeger explained she didn't want to tire her audience or make their eyes glaze over. So she pulled out her banjo for a light song about corporations with a singalong chorus. "It's a matter of letting down slowly," she said.

That started a series of humorous songs. For "Goodbye to Georgie," Seeger had guitar principal Keppie Coutts count down Bush's time left in office using a gadget called a Backwards Bush, coaching her to read like a carnival barker. (Seeger is selling the devices and hoped, she joked, to get her music on the creator's website.)

Despite the ideological content, Seeger thought the song was accessible to everyone. "Such songs are not necessarily for a committed audience. I would say 'You don't have to join in on this if you don't want to.'"

In general, she said, "You use the word 'we' a lot. You don't say 'you.'"

Coutts, who won a Berklee Counseling and Advising Center songwriting contest for songs about substance abuse, had a suggestion of her own. To avoid alienating listeners, she said, "for me at least a really good method has been to just find a story, find an individual, place yourself somewhere in that story but never demand of someone that they react the same way you react." An experience with a friend sparked her melancholy winning song "Last Call." As part of her prize, she got to record it professionally with professors Kevin Barry and Dave Weigert as her sidemen.

Like Coutts, Seeger said she likes to go fact-finding when developing a new song. In fact, she burrows in like an anthropologist to get stories. "When you're trying to tackle a subject and you don't know anything about it, one of the best things to do is to go to the person who does know something about it. You just go hold up a microphone in front of them. You're asking, 'What is it like to be you?'"

For instance, she composed "Missing" after a five-hour conversation with a Chilean woman whose daughter had been "disappeared" (abducted) under Pinochet. Despite the language barrier, Seeger managed to get the story. "It was hair-raising. We all ended up crying," she said. Coutts accompanied Seeger for the song, which set the mother's emotions to a liquid, largely improvised melody over a Sicilian chord progression. ("You can't put it in an English idiom. It doesn't sound right," she explained.)

Guitar principal Keppie Coutts accompanies Seeger on "Missing." Photo by Rob Hochschild

She went through the same progress for "Buffalo Holler," interviewing an elderly woman whose home in a mining town was destroyed when a neglected dam burst.

Seeger said, "You always use the words of the people you interview. You don't just interview them for information. You use the words. And you often use the breathing patterns, you often use their tone of voice."

Indeed, the lyrics rang with authenticity: "Even the Eye-talians came because the mines were here." She did tack on what she considered a slightly moralizing final verse. "But I passed it by her," Seeger said. "She liked the song. You take it back to them."

As student songwriters filed out, they might have glimpsed Seeger's convictions for a final time in the form of a bumper sticker on her guitar case: "Music Really Does Make the World a Better Place." Whether direct or elusive, Seeger's songs did their best to prove it true.

Danielle Dreilinger is a writer/editor in Berklee's Office of Communications.