(To be fair, her half-bother, Pete Seeger, included it in his repertoire.) But it’s a neat illustration of a living tradition of folk music. Without missing a beat, Seeger starts singing ‘Which Side Are You On?’, the Florence Reece song from which Portelli took his title.

At one point, I mention the oral historian Alessandro Portelli’s classic account of life among the Appalachian mining communities, They Say in Harland County. Songs link communities they express joy, anguish, conflict. Seeger is one of those rare musicians who understands, intimately, about how music, and especially song, is a living thing that has social force. ‘The song is a gift to take away,’ she says. Instead, I tell her about my experience of watching Norma Waterson, another great folk matriarch, sing, and how in the delivery of her song she hands it over – her hands gesturing, repeatedly, in an act of giving – to her listeners. This is what Seeger does so well: she observes the humanity in the subject she writes about and does it with tenderness.īut this isn’t the most interesting answer. ‘Lullabies for a stranger’s children, who sings for my own little girls?’ ask the discomforting lyrics.

One searing song, ‘Lullabies for Strangers’, addresses the au pairs, nannies, child-minders, who must leave their own children to look after other people’s. This time: modern slavery, loneliness in the age of a hyper-linked world, male suicide. Seeger has recently released a new recording, First Farewell – her 24th solo album – which, like so much of her music, doesn’t shy away from difficult issues. The immediate answer might be the most obvious one. Seeger’s blue eyes sparkle throughout and then, suddenly, she throws a question: ‘So, why have you come after me?’ We’ve been speaking for nearly an hour about her life, her music and, closely aligned, its political activism and how, at 85, the body doesn’t make it so easy to get out on demonstrations and picket lines, though her spirit is still very much willing. Peggy Seeger, folk royalty and a legend among musical legends, is sitting in her Oxfordshire home beaming at her computer’s camera for this Zoom session.

Peggy seeger the first time ever