MIKE SEEGER
MUSIC FROM TRUE VINE

GUEST ARTIST CONCERT SERIES
KATZIN CONCERT HALL
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2007 • 7:30 PM

MUSIC
---fterbergerCollege
of Fine Arts

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Program will be announced from stage
Mike Seeger has devoted his life to singing and playing Music from True Vine --

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Out of respect for the performers and those audience members around you, please
turn all beepers, cell phones and watches to their silent mode. Thank you.

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 began 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 in the late 1950's,
Mike 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 (who still reunite for the occasional special
concert), Mike has gone on to record almost forty albums, both solo and with
others. Mike and the other Ramblers are recipients of a Lifetime Achievement
Award from Folk Alliance.
Mike Seeger has been honored with six Grammy nominations, most recently
for Retrograss, a whimsical collaboration with David Grisman and John Hartford.
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."

Performance Events Staff Manager
Paul W. Estes
Senior Event Mangers:
Iftekhar Anwar, Laura Boone, Edwin Brown, Brady Cullum,
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Xian Meng, Kevan Nymeyer
Apprentice Event Managers:
Lee E. Humphrey, Megan Leigh Smith

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02006 ASU Herberger College of Fine Arts 0706