5 - Everything Changes

Peggy Seeger can still picture the house on West Kirke Street where she grew up, with its big trees, her parents sitting in the shade and her sister on a swing that went impossibly high. Everything Changes is the song she wrote about it, and she says she nearly collapses every time she sings it.

In this last episode Kate Molleson asks what happens when Peggy turns the gaze she has spent seventy years training on other people onto herself. She talks about The Invisible Woman, a song about what happens once people stop noticing you, which she found something of a relief, and which we hear from the BBC's recording in Belfast on her farewell tour, with her sons Calum and Neill on stage beside her.

She has since given her stringed instruments away to her children and is working through what she calls a Swedish death clear-out, but she is keeping her voice, which she has learned to pitch lower, because it lets her stop worrying about how she is supposed to sound and get on with being old. She is not religious, but she has her own idea of who will be calling her home.

Recorded at Peggy's house in Oxfordshire.

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

With special thanks to Sara Jane Hall

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3