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First Time Ever: A Memoir

Peggy Seeger

A superbly wrought memoir from one of folk music’s most respected and influential musicians

2 in stock

£10.99£9.99
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571336807
Date Published
06.09.2018
Delivery
All orders are sent via Royal Mail and are tracked: choose from standard or premium delivery.
Summary

A SUNDAY TIMES AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE
THE BOOKSELLER’S Most Picked Book in General Non-Fiction Round Ups of 2017

Peggy Seeger is one of folk music’s most influential artists and songwriters. Born in New York City in 1935, she enjoyed a childhood steeped in music and left-wing politics – they remain her lifeblood. After college, she travelled to Russia and China – against US advice – before arriving in London, where she met the man with whom she would raise three children and share the next thirty-three years: Ewan MacColl. Together, they helped lay the foundations of the British folk revival, through the influential Critics Group and the landmark BBC Radio Ballads series. And as Ewan’s muse, she inspired one of the twentieth century’s most popular love songs, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’.

With a clear eye and generous spirit, Peggy writes of a rollercoaster life – of birth and abortion, sex and infidelity, devotion and betrayal – in a luminous, beautifully realised account.

Critic Reviews

A gloriously open and generous autobiography.

Guardian 'Best Music Books of the Year
Critic Reviews

An epic journey . . . An extraordinary story, beautifully told.

i newspaper
Critic Reviews

Peggy Seeger’s life is the stuff of a rip-roaring blockbuster . . . This is an illuminating, witty, revelatory and unflinchingly candid account, presented in vivid vignettes and nonchalant anecdotes, often funny, sometimes shocking.

Mojo
Critic Reviews

Peggy Seeger’s substantial and absorbing memoir First Time Ever is fabulous, taking us back through British folk and reminding us of why we love her songs.

Jackie Kay, Observer Books of the Year
Critic Reviews

This amazing life reads more like a novel . . . [An] elegy for folk music.

Irish Times
Critic Reviews

A music memoir like no other.

NME
PeggySeeger

Peggy Seeger is a singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and activist songwriter, with 200 songs under her belt, one a major anthem of the women’s movement. She is a multi-instrumentalist – playing piano, guitar, 5-string banjo, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and English concertina – has recorded 23 solo albums, and has contributed to more than 100 others. In 2014, she was…

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PeggySeeger