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Mike Seeger

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MS– In my very young days I learned a lot from Pete (Seeger) as he was a great banjo player back then and he still is a good banjo player.

Peggy (Seeger) and I were brother and sister and very close being reared together we were also very competitive. We learned from one another.

 

JB– Would you say you were a very keen student of music growing up?

MS-I was kind of unconscious as lots of young people are I was pretty much on auto pilot . I was always preoccupied with music until I began doing some bicycle racing in my teens, I did that for about three four or five years and then when I was no longer a junior I didn’t feel like going that way and I just took up the guitar, my mother goaded me into it.

JB-So there was never any chance you would do anything else but music.

MS– Oh yeas there was there really was. I took some training to be a recording technician and a radio technician which is what I was really going to do and then the New Lost City Ramblers got started when I was about 25. After a few years there it appeared that I could make a living from music and that’s what I’ve done since about 1960 mostly as a soloist.

 

JB-So the guitar was the first instrument you mastered?

MS-Well I don’t consider I’ve mastered it but I first started playing the autoharp and learning how to play the autoharp is mostly about learning how to tune because of the thirty six strings or so. The first serious instrument although you can be serious about the autoharp but I was mainly serious about guitar then the mandolin, banjo, fiddle and harmonica.

JB– What was the first song you learnt to play?

MS– I don’t remember but it was probably a Carter Family song. I took guitar lessons for about six months. First from Charlie Byrd the jazz guitar player, I was fortunate as he was teaching beginning guitar students in our town and then I took some from a classical guitar teacher when it appeared I couldn’t read music, he said you play it like it’s written or your out of here so I left and from there I was self taught in the tradition of watching and learning and stealing from other musicians.

 

JB– Because of your parents work in field recordings was it always inevitable that you would go that way as well?

MS– No it definitely wasn’t. I started listening to those traditional recordings as soon as my parents would let me which was around the time I was seven or so and thy let me listen to field recording that had been made by my father and other people in the south and that’s how I absorbed the music that way by listening to those recordings and my parents. I was singing Barb’ry Allen by the time I was four or five, singing first and then the playing followed.

 

JB-So when did you actually begin yourself in the area of field recordings?

MS– Well my dad brought a tape recorder home from work on Thanksgiving in 1952 and Miss Cotten, Elizabeth Cotton had finished her twelve or thirteen hour day at our house