Cambridge, MA.... Peggy Seeger, composer, musician, singer and activist, will perform a free concert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Wong Auditorium (Tang Center, 2 Amherst St). The artist, called the “quintessential very hip grandma” by Marilyn Blumer of the Anchorage Daily News, will be in residence at MIT Sept 23-26.

Born in New York City, Seeger comes from a musical family. Her father Charles Louis Seeger was a pioneer of ethnomusicology at the University of California (Los Angeles), where he invented and developed the melograph, an electronic means of notating music. Her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music. Her half-brother, Pete, is considered the father of the American folk-revival.

Accomplished on guitar, banjo, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and concertina, Peggy Seeger started singing folksongs professionally after majoring in music at college. A British subject since 1959, she first went to the U.K. in 1956, as an actress in the television film, “Dark Side Of The Moon.” She joined the Ramblers, a group that included Ewan MacColl (who became her life partner), Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins. In 1957, with MacColl and Charles Parker, she worked on a series of documentaries for the BBC, which are now known as “The Radio Ballads.” After MacColl died in 1989, Seeger again launched a solo career, touring both the U.S. and Australia. She returned to the States in 1994 and took up residence in Asheville, N.C.

The best-known of Seeger's songs are “Gonna Be an Engineer,” which became one of the anthems of the women's' movement and “The Ballad of Springhill,” about the 1958 Nova Scotian mining disaster. She has made 19 solo albums, the most recent of which is “Love Will Linger On.”

The concert is sponsored by the MIT Program in Women’s Studies and the Music and Theater Arts Section. For more information, call 617/253-8844.

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