INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

 

These pages are changed monthly. Each month we go into the Retrospectives archives to bring you a full interview transcript of one of our many past interview specials.

 

 

 

This month…………………….

Interview

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                     First aired-April 15th 2003

JB-Anyone with a great love of Americian Folk music would have loved to have grown up in a household such as the one you did. Was music as big a part of the household as we would envisage it was?

MS-Yes we sang practically daily. We sang the old time songs, pretty much the same kind of songs that Peggy (Seeger) and I put on that recording American Folk Songs for Children, we were reared on those songs and with the ballads and with a little bit of classical music from my parents who played piano.

 

JB-I believe your parents intial interests in music were not specifically folk music.

MS-No, they were reared with composed music and then they both became modernist composers. My dad had pretty much given that up by the time I was born and my mother had just completed most of her modernist works by then particularly by the time I was born.

 

JB– Tell us about some fo the work your parents were doing particularly in the area of field recordings and what do you see as their major acheivments there.

MS-Well my father only did a little bit of field recording. I think the most significant thing he did was record three black musicians in South Carolina. He also recorded a folk festival in West Virginia where I learned a tune called Coloured Aristocracy a fiddle tune which has gone all around the world. Most of what they did was in presenting in books to music organisations advocating the continuation of folk music, although I prefer to call it old time music or traditional music, all of these terms have been coopted since and have changed in meaning.

 

JB– As well as your parents both your brother and your sister have made remarable contributions to music did you learn a lot from them in your younger days?