Mike Seeger: Musician, Educator, Entertainer, Preservationist

When Mike Seeger passed away at his home in Lexington on Aug. 7, America lost more than a great singer and entertainer. The country lost one of its great cultural treasures.

There was no doubt that Mike was an accomplished musician, seemingly able to pick up any stringed instrument and play it better than anyone else.

Then there was that voice that not only reminded his audience of another time and place, but seemed actually to transport them back to that other time and place. Mike Seeger did not just sing old-time American music, he was its very embodiment.

But he was not just an entertainer. As anyone who ever saw him in concert can attest, he was an educator as well. Not only did he sing and play the great old songs -- along the way he unobtrusively taught his listeners about the music and even about the assorted and often obscure instruments he picked up to play in the course of a performance. He loved his music enough to know its origins and evolution better than anyone.

His audiences would leave, not just with toes tapping, but with heads spinning.

Yet he was more than an educator, too. He was a collector and a preserver of a tradition of old-time and folk music that would have been threatened with extinction had he not done all he could to save it.

One need listen only to his two most-recent recordings to get a sense of his cultural accomplishments and contributions.

In 2006, he released a collection of the old-time musicians whom he had captured on his field recordings through Appalachia in the 1950s and early 1960s, "Masters of Old-Time Country Autoharp" (Smithsonian Folkways). In 2007 he put out a collection of his own performances, "Early Southern Guitar Sounds" (Smithsonian Folkways) in which he demonstrated the sounds of the tradition that emerged when the guitar entered the lineup of instruments in the hills and hollers of the high country. Each repays repeated listenings.

I came to know Mike Seeger when I was at the University of London's Institute of United States Studies. The institute had established a very popular program on American music that had ranged from Scott Joplin to John Cage to Aaron Copeland. In 2002, the program decided to focus on the 75th anniversary of the famed Bristol recording sessions of Ralph Peer and the discovery of the original Carter Family.

An event was planned that would eventually include a conference and a concert. A cold call to Mike Seeger brought him enthusiastically to our aid. By his good efforts we secured such great performers as Bill Clifton, Janette Carter, and Tom Grey.

Beyond the concert itself, the participants appeared on BBC radio and performed an impromptu concert at Winfield House, the London residence of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James's -- at that time William Farrish, himself a fan of old-time American music.

The quartet filled the mansion with the warm sounds of an array of great Carter Family classics, in which the ambassador's English guests enthusiastically joined in. No doubt "Keep on the Sunny Side" echoes still in the memories of those lucky enough to have been there that evening to hear Mike and his colleagues salute the first family of country music.

Due to Mike's guidance, the program was such a success that the cultural office at the United States Embassy provided funding to host a follow-up concert the next year. What else could it have been but a reunion concert of the New Lost City Ramblers, featuring Mike and his longtime partners, Tracy Schwarz and John Cohen?

As it turned out, the reunion also included one of the original Ramblers, Tom Paley, himself now a Londoner, who had left the group in 1962. Once again, the evening was a rousing success in terms of American cultural diplomacy -- and all due to the efforts of the inimitable Mike Seeger.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to sit down with Mike in Lexington and talk about the influence on him of the original Carter Family. As we sat in his home studio surrounded by a collection of his instruments, our conversation roamed rather farther afield than their influence or even his friendship and performances with the great Mother Maybelle Carter.

At the end of the day, I came away not only with an enhanced appreciation for his musical skills, his cultural scholarship, and his efforts at preserving a great musical tradition, but for the simple decency and generosity of the man. The world of American music is a lesser place without him.

Gary L. McDowell is a professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in the University of Richmond, where he holds the Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Chair in Leadership Studies, Political Science, and Law. From 1992 to 2003 he was the director of the Institute of United States Studies in the University of London. Contact him at .