RIP: Mike Seeger

From NPR:

Mike Seeger, whose love for traditional songs and tunes inspired many other musicians — including Bob Dylan — to look for the rural roots of American music, died of cancer Friday night at his home in Lexington, Va. He was 75.

Seeger was a highly respected performer and collector of traditional music and a major force in giving rural Southern musicians a wider audience. He became a spark plug for the revival of interest in American music traditions in the second half of the 20th century.

He was born into a prominent musical family. His half-brother Pete and sister Peggy are renowned musicians and social activists. His father, Charles, was a folklorist. His mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a music scholar, teacher and classical composer.

Mike Seeger quickly came to love traditional music, and began playing in earnest in his late teens. He developed major talent on banjo, guitar, fiddle, autoharp dulcimer, harmonica and several other instruments large and small. He sought out, learned from and recorded traditional musicians, starting in the Washington, D.C., area where he was raised, and ultimately traveling all over the South to find artists long forgotten or undiscovered.

He co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen and Tom Paley in the late 1950s. This trailblazing three-person string band combined the urban roots of its own members with a deep regard for music of the countryside and small towns.

Mike Seeger produced dozens of albums solo, with the New Lost City Ramblers, and with a broad array of other musicians. One album, titled Close to Home, features performances culled from his massive collection of field recordings.

As the end of his life drew near, Seeger was also working on a video documentary project focusing on current Southern banjo players.

In Bob Dylan's great Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan writes this about Seeger:

I knew I was doing things right, was on the right road, was getting all the knowledge immediately and firsthand – memorizing words and melodies and changes, but now I saw that it could take me the rest of my life to make practical use of that knowledge and Mike didn’t have to do that. He was just right there. He was too good and you can’t be ‘too good,’ not in this world, anyway. In order to be as good as that, you’d just about have to be him, and nobody else.

The complete NPR obit is here.