Music from the True Vine

September 1, 2011

This is a brief but illuminating biography of the member of the Seeger family still known primarily as one of the founders of the New Lost City Ramblers. Malone (Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class), who was personally acquainted with Mike Seeger (1933-2009), draws on interviews and other primary sources. The chapter on the Ramblers is the core of the book, and this biography is a good counterpart to Ray Allen's recent Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. Still, Malone is careful to explore Seeger's other roles as both a musician and a folk music collector. Malone paints Seeger's contribution to the folk music revival as one of genuine respect for and commemoration of the music he was preserving and lets the importance of Seeger's work speak for itself. VERDICT For music historians, ethnomusicologists, and American folk music fans.--Genevieve Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma, WA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2011
Though his 14-years-older half brother, Pete, is much more widely known, Mike Seeger (19332009) was, by Pete's admission, the better musician and far more musically influential. While he avoided Seeger politics (basically Marxist), Mike perfectly fulfilled the other family legacy, folk music, by collecting, performing, popularizing, preserving, and encouraging the continuing vitality of the homemade, community-oriented music of working people. After childhood and adolescence complicated by what may have been dyslexia, he took to ear-learning music and never looked back. Bluegrass became his ticket to a performance career and then back to the rural and Appalachian mountain music that stylistically birthed bluegrass. He discovered or rediscovered major old-time musicians, most notably banjoist-singer Dock Boggs anda particular point of pride with himthe African American singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cotten, his family's beloved housekeeper. Through the New Lost City Ramblers, the trio he created with John Cohen and Tom Paley, he relayed old-time music to 1960s rockers and subsequent cadres of musicians, in Europe and Japan as well as America. Malone, the dean of country-music historians (Country Music, U.S.A., 3d rev. ed., 2010), traces Seeger's life and achievements with affection and in remarkable detail, not glossing over his personal problems but, first and foremost, celebrating his revitalizing effect on distinctively American popular music.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)