Mike Seeger with Dock Boggs, July 1963. Photo by: John Bryne Cooke Mike Seeger photo by Alan Berger Mike Seeger photo by John Cohen Constance Seeger, Charles Seeger (Mike's father) Mike Seeger & Roscoe Holcomb photo: David Gahr

Mike Seeger has devoted his life to singing and playing Music from True Vine -- the home music made by American southerners before the media age. Music from True Vine grows out of hundreds of years of British traditions that blended in our country with equally ancient African traditions to produce songs and sounds that are unique to the United States. For the peoples of the rural South, their great variety of music, song and story provided their Shakespeare, their dance music, their news, and the fabric of their daily lives. This music in time became the roots of today's country, bluegrass and popular music, and remains as ever, enduring and refreshing listening.

Fidelity to traditional sounds has set Mike Seeger apart from other performers since he began touring the United States and abroad in 1960. Mike's music conveys all the depth of feeling, the sheer energy and the infinite variety and texture of true rural music. Like earlier musicians, Mike seeks out his own vision of the music by creating within its traditions, making his music uniquely his own. As he sings the old songs, he plays in a wide variety of old-time styles, accompanying himself on an array of instruments, including banjo, fiddle, guitar, trump (jaw harp), mouth harp (harmonica), quills, lap dulcimer, mandolin and autoharp.

The Seegers sang with their children most Saturday nights. At age five Mike learned the old ballad "Barbara Allen" from his musicologist/composer parents. Soon he was listening to and learning from their collection of early documentary recordings. He begain playing instruments in his late teens, learning first from nearby musicians such as his close friend Elizabeth Cotten, and later seeking out other master stylists like guitarist Maybelle Carter, banjoists Dock Boggs and Cousin Emmy, and autoharpist Kilby Snow. Eventually Mike's love for traditional music led him to produce documentaries -- more than twenty-five field recordings and videos -- and to organize many tours and concerts featuring traditional musicians and dancers.

As a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, Make played an integral role in helping to revive interest in a variety of traditional musics, now played by thousands of young musicians across the country. Since his first recordings with the Ramblers in the late nineteen fifties, Mike has gone on to record almost forty albums, both solo and with others.
Mike Seeger has been honored with three Grammy nominations, most recently in 1991 for SOLO: OLDTIME COUNTRY MUSIC and in 1994 for THIRD ANNUAL FAREWELL REUNION. In 1995 Mike received the Rex Foundation's Ralph J. Gleason Lifetime Achievement Award, established by the Grateful Dead to recognize "those who exemplify the qualities of talent, vision, innovation that Ralph so tirelessly supported." In the word of the award citation, Mike Seeger "...remains one of our great musical and cultural resources. To see him perform is to experience the richness of our traditions."

(source: http://www.folkloreproductions.com/Html/seebio.html)

Mike Seeger with Maybelle Carter
photo: David Gahr

Mike Seeger with His Two Sons
photo: David Gahr