1 - Buffalo Holler

Peggy Seeger is warming up at the keyboard in her living room on the outskirts of Oxford. She is 91, and in this week of The Essay she lets Kate Molleson in on how she writes.

Her mother was the modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, who spent the 1940s transcribing field recordings of traditional American folk songs, and her half-brother was the musician and activist Pete Seeger. Peggy has been one of the central figures of the folk revival on both sides of the Atlantic for seventy years, playing banjo, guitar, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp, English concertina and piano. Since coming to Britain in the 1950s she has recorded the great traditional ballads, made the groundbreaking radio ballads for the BBC with Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, and written several hundred songs of her own about coal disasters, housework, ageing and love. One of them, I'm Gonna Be an Engineer, became an anthem of the women's movement, and in 2021 her album First Farewell was named folk album of the year by both Mojo and Songlines.

Each episode takes one or two of those songs, which Peggy sings at the piano, and asks where they came from and how they were put together. In this first episode, we hear Buffalo Holler, her song about the 1972 coalfield flood in West Virginia.

In 1972 a slag dam gave way above Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, and a wall of water came down a ten-mile hollow and through the mining towns along it. 125 people died, 4,000 were left homeless, and the company that owned the dam called it an act of God. A man who admired the radio ballads sent Peggy Seeger a tape of Minnie Chapman Cook, who had survived the flood, and asked her to make a song of it. Peggy tells Kate Molleson how she arranged Minnie's words until they began to sound like the old ballads she knew. That leads to an older argument about who folk songs belong to and whether a middle-class singer has any business singing them. She also remembers hearing her mother transcribe Ozella Jones singing I Been a Bad, Bad Girl in a Florida penitentiary, on the day Peggy herself was in disgrace for scratching her brother's name into the new grand piano. When she finished Buffalo Holler, Peggy sent it to Minnie to ask whether she had got it right. Years later she went to the hollow to find her.

Presenter: Kate Molleson
Producer: Victoria Ferran
Sound engineer: Mike Woolley

With thanks to Sara Jane Hall

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3