Folk Legend Peggy Seeger Visits Rider University



Editor's Note: The following is a news release issued by .

American folk singer Peggy Seeger, a member of the genre’s first family, visited Rider as an artist-in-residence on March 30 through a partnership between the university and the Princeton Folk Music Society.

Peggy Seeger’s best-known compositions are “Gonna Be an Engineer” and “The Ballad of Springhill,” but she has also earned a place in the lore of American music as the inspiration for the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” written in 1957 by British folk singer Ewan McColl.

The song, written for Seeger to use in a theatrical performance, would subsequently be covered by numerous folk artists before it became a number-one hit for Roberta Flack in 1972. That version earned McColl a Grammy award for Song of the Year. Longtime professional collaborators and partners, McColl and Seeger were  married from 1977 until his death in 1989.

Like many folk singers, Seeger has also lived a life of activism, though she says her message is typically best  executed through song.

“My battlefield is the concert stage, the lecture hall,” Seeger explained. “My job, like so many songwriters, is to place – in a memorable and enticing form – a message that, were it in non-hummable form, might not be so easily remembered.”

The Princeton Folk Music Society has encouraged the growth of folk music in central New Jersey for 40 years. The organization sponsors a monthly house sing for members on the first Friday of each month and a monthly concert by visiting folk singers and songwriters, usually on the third Friday of each month.