On November 18, 1953, the day Ruth Crawford Seeger succumbed to cancer, her two oldest children sang at a Washington book fair to promote their mother's newly published volume, American Folk Songs for Christmas. Twentyyear old Mike and eighteen-year old Peggy strummed guitars, picked banjos, and caroled songs of rejoicing shepherds and crooning angel bands only hours before their mother was spirited away. The Washington Post, in an announcement of the upcoming book fair, reported that Mike felt a “special thrill” to be performing songs from his mother's new book. Dio (Mike's childhood name for his mother) would undoubtedly have felt quite a thrill herself had she been well enough to realize that her children were now playing the very folk songs that had fascinated her for nearly two decades.

In her final years, Dio had good reason to suspect that her oldest daughter, Peggy, might pursue a career as a serious musician. She was a quick learner at the piano, a strong singer, and had just entered Radcliffe College where she hoped to make music part of her studies. But Mike was another story. Although he demonstrated a keen interest in the southern folk music that permeated the Seeger household and had a good ear for singing, he refused piano lessons and quit classical guitar instruction when his teacher reprimanded him for taking liberties with the written notation. Worse yet, he had dropped out of George Washington University in 1952 and was living at home, teaching himself to play the five-string banjo and frequenting local square dances—hardly the career path she and Charles, themselves the products of rigorous conservatory and academic training, had planned for their oldest child and only son. But neither she nor Charles could have imagined on that dismal fall day in 1953 that within a decade Mike would be recognized as one of the central figures in the urban folk music revival that would soon sweep the country.

Mike Seeger's remarkable career embodies many of the fascinating paradoxes associated with the revival of folk music in twentieth-century urban America.