Music of the Southern Appalachian Mountains

Mike Seeger - Brief Biography

Mike Seeger was born in 1933 and reared in Maryland, near Washington, DC. His parents, composers and musicologists Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, raised Mike and his three sisters, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny, with traditional folk music and introduced brother Pete to it as well. As a child, Mike listened to early field recordings of traditional folk music, and family singing was daily musical fare.

At age 18, Mike started teaching himself to play string instruments, and at about age 20 began collecting songs and tunes on a tape recorder from nearby traditional musicians. By the time he was 23 he had produced his first Folkways documentary recording. Over the years, he has absorbed traditional styles of music through direct association with master traditional musicians such as Elizabeth Cotten, Maybelle Carter, Dock Boggs, and many others. He is a founding member of the vanguard old time string band the New Lost City Ramblers, which was formed in 1958.

As a full-time musician and collector since 1960, Mike has toured throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan either solo, with the New Lost City Ramblers, with traditional artists such as Tommy Jarrell and Roscoe Holcomb, or as director of traditional music festivals. He sings a wide variety of traditional rural songs and plays a number of styles on banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, autoharp, lap dulcimer, trump (jew's harp), harmonica, and quills (pan pipes). In the music he makes, he strives for both variety and depth of feeling while maintaining his own identity by creating within the boundaries of true traditional music.

Mike has produced 30 documentary recordings of traditional music and another 38 of his own music. He has also produced several instructional audio and video tapes for instrumentalists and a documentary videocassette/book, "Talking Feet," on Southern traditional step dance.

Mike has received six Grammy nominations: two with the New Lost City Ramblers, one with John Hartford and David Grisman, and three on his own. He has served as an advisor or consultant for government agencies, a record company, and many folk festivals. He has won a couple of banjo contests: Galax, Virginia (1958) and Athens, Alabama (1974). He is recipient of four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Smithsonian Research Fellowship grant, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and an award from the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation. In 2003, The Society for American Music presented Mike with its Honorary Membership Award, citing his “lifetime of work as a master performer and tireless champion of Southern rural music.”

He makes his home in Rockbridge County, Virginia.