"Peggy Seeger has lived her life at the sharp end of folk music. Jean Freedman tells the story of this free-spirited artist and agitator."--Billy Bragg


"Freedman, a professional folklorist, is the perfect biographer for the incomparable Peggy Seeger. She skillfully weaves together insights from the many interviews she conducted with family, friends, and Peggy herself, with her own expert observations about the musical gifts and accomplishments of the folk music icon. Those of us for whom Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl were living legends will especially savor this book, but everyone will be fascinated and moved by the life of a uniquely talented musician who bridged so many divides: classical and folk music, the British and American folk scenes, and her roots in one of America’s great musical families to the several lives she created in the UK and the US."--Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand and You're Wearing THAT?


"Jean Freedman's biography stands front and center in the tradition of the Seeger family's long history of active engagement in music and musical life. Peggy Seeger's father Charles wrote about 'tradition and innovation' in modern music. Her mother, the composer Ruth Crawford, made her project to 'strike a just balance' in her folk song arrangements to reach across lines of race and class. And their daughter’s transformation and reinvention of the family legacy to fuel her own prodigious gifts represent yet another stage of evolution in this remarkable family. Spanning crucial decades of change in the Anglo-American folk music revivals and renewals of creativity, Peggy Seeger's passionate involvement in music, family, and politics has been well served in Jean Freedman's excellent survey of the artist, the activist, and the woman."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music