Mike Seeger's path into music and folklore seemed all but predetermined by his birth into a foundational American folk family. Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, his parents, worked alongside John and Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. Half-brother Pete Seeger sang with both the Almanac Singers and the Weavers, while sister Peggy Seeger earned esteem in traditional circles. Little astonishment followed, therefore, when Seeger, at age 25, united with Tom Paley and John Cohen to launch the New Lost City Ramblers.
A traditional musician born in New York City to middle-class parents carries a certain irony. On August 15, 1933, Seeger took up the autoharp at age 12. The banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, mouth harp, mandolin, and dobro soon followed. His parents carried field recordings home from the Library of Congress. "They started letting me play field recordings when I was six or seven," Seeger told Dirty Linen. "These were aluminum records that you played with cactus needles." Five years of living with African-American singer/guitarist Elizabeth Cotton inside the Seeger home supplied further influence.
During the early 1950s Seeger began making his own field recordings and joined sister Peggy at square dances around Washington, D.C. As a conscientious objector he performed hospital duties, and in that period he formed a band with Hazel Dickens and Bob Baker. In 1958 he helped create the New Lost City Ramblers, a group devoted to string-band repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s. Although the ensemble never matched the visibility of revival acts such as the Kingston Trio, its insistence on faithful reproduction of traditional material proved consequential. "The Ramblers' influence on generations of young musicians who have followed in their footsteps," wrote Randy Pitts in Music Hound Folk, "is incalculable."
Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley in 1962, freeing Seeger to pursue numerous solo endeavors. He recorded Mike Seeger for Vanguard in 1964 and Tipple, Loom & Rail: Songs of the Industrialization of the South for Folkways in 1965. Late in the decade Seeger joined Dickens, Alice Gerrard, and Lamar Grier in the Strange Creek Singers; Arhoolie issued Strange Creek Singers: Get Acquainted Waltz in 1975 and reissued it in 1997. He also participated in the Newport Folk Festival and, in 1970, became director of the Smithsonian Folklife Company. That same year he married Gerrard, though the union later ended in divorce.
From the 1970s onward Seeger maintained a steady flow of Rounder albums while assembling further scholarly collections, among them Southern Banjo Sounds (1998) and True Vine (2003), both released on Smithsonian Folkways. Three Grammy nominations, a 1984 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rex Foundation's Ralph Gleason Award in 1995, and an Award of Merit from the International Bluegrass Music Association the same year marked his achievements. "I feel there's just as much fun in old-time music as there's ever been," Seeger told Dirty Linen in 1997. "People ask me, don't you get tired of it? And some people do, but I think I could have three more lifetimes and not get tired of it." Smithsonian Folkways brought out his 2007 album Early Southern Guitar Sounds.
