Peggy Seeger – Period Pieces: Women’s Songs for Men And Women
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Posted On November 1, 1998
“Men, watch out! There’s dangerous women everywhere!/Boy, beware! There’s violent females everywhere!/You read about rippers and rape in the news/Then you hear the clatter of high-heeled shoes.” So goes Peggy Seeger’s “B-Side”. If your gig van is plied with “No Fat Chicks” decals, the word feminist gives you hives, or folkie green political activism embarrasses you, this album is not for you.
For others, Period Pieces: Women’s Songs For Men And Women is a boon, an essential foremother to knockout records ranging from Michelle Shocked’s Short, Sharp, Shocked to Amy Rigby’s Diary Of A Mod Housewife.
Peggy Seeger is yes, from that American Seeger clan: Mike and Pete are half-brothers. And for 30 or so years, she was wed in love, art and politics to fellow singer-songwriter, traditional folk musician and British playwright Ewan MacColl (who died in 1989). As a young woman of the American ’50s, and subsequently a happily married American expat mother and musician living in Britain, Peggy began to explore feminism and gender politics through song. Period Pieces is a rich tome of an album, reaching back to update some of those early songs as well as those that came to follow as she grew from maid to matron to crone.
In 1970, for the annual Festival of Fools she and MacColl produced, Seeger “dashed off ” a tune about unequal pay for equal work. The song, “I’m Gonna Be An Engineer”, became her best-known tune, and it kicks off this collection. Here, Seeger’s just-right-for-ballad-singing reedy voice (more Jean Ritchie than Judy Collins) is conjoined with those of several other women who add harmony and backing vocals. The styling ranges from ballad, blues, musical theatre duet, vaudevillian boycott can-can, and rallying call to arms.
From these songs of yesteryear, it is clear that women’s issues have changed perspective and broadened in some respects, but the core is the same: nutritious meals and made beds, marriage and rape, motherhood and reproductive freedom, community and sisterhood.
