Heading For Home

In September 2002, 67-year-old folksinger Peggy Seeger holed up in a cottage in rural England with her two sons, Calum and Neill MacColl, and recorded 40 tracks -- enough for three CDs -- which Appleseed Recordings plans to issue on a yearly basis starting with this first installment. "For the first time in my life," she writes in her liner notes, "a studio felt like home." The ease of the sessions shows. Seeger, whose limited vocal range has sometimes been strained on her recordings, giving them an amateurish feel, here always sounds comfortable, and the arrangements allow her to make the best of her voice. She sings confidently, carefully considering the lyrics, as a variety of acoustic instruments are plucked and strummed behind her. She leads off the set with the deceptively heartwarming title song, an original, which is actually about aging and the approach of death. That serves as a good jumping-off place for the rest of the disc, which contains traditional folk songs with their subject matter dominated by accounts of murder and abandonment. The subtext of such songs as "Oma Wise" and "John Riley" is feminism as far as the singer is concerned. "The patience and fidelity of the women never ceases to astound me," she comments on the latter, a song about a man leaving home. That's a benevolent way of interpreting it, but it is typical of Seeger's generous viewpoint, which encompasses both the doom-laden aspects of folk music and its inherent sense of continuity and renewal. ~ William Ruhlmann