Mike Seeger is scheduled to receive the 2009 Bess Lomax Hawes Award from the National Endowment for the Arts on September 22. The presentation will take place in the US Capitol, Senate Caucus Building.

Mike passed away on August 7 of this year, and the award will be accepted by his wife, Alexia Smith. This award is presented annually in recognition of “an individual who has made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage.” Fitting, that.

There will also be a free concert on September 24 in Bethesda, MD where the 2009 NEA National Heritage Fellowship recipients will perform. Ms. Smith will be interviewed about Mike, his music, and his work during the show.

Continuing with our Mike Seeger theme today, here is news of a multi-disc retrospective on the recording career of The New Lost City Ramblers.

50 Years: Where Do You Come From? Where Do You Go? was released August 25 by Smithsonian Folkways. The 3 CD box set contains a total of 81 tracks (6 previously unreleased) and an 88 page booklet with notes on each track. Extensive biographical details are provided for each of the three eras of the band, as described in the booklet: 1958-1962, 1963-1973, and The New Lost City Ramblers at 50.

The CDs include the band’s choices from their long recording career (1958-1973), plus field recordings of some of the musicians who had a strong influence on their sound.

Audio samples from all of the tracks can be found on the Smithsonian Folkways web site, where you can also purchase individual tracks for download. There are three free tracks there as well, which can be downloaded as either .MP3 or.FLAC files.

Apropos of Richard’s fine tribute to Mike Seeger, here is some related news.

The Arhoolie Foundation has recently released a DVD of the Yasha Aginsky film, Always Been A Rambler, an hour-long documentary on the New Lost City Ramblers, of which Mike was a founding member.

The film tells the story of this seminal folk group using archival footage of the band from their early days in the 1950s through to rehearsals, performances and interviews with the members (Mike Seeger, John Cohen, Tracy Schwarz and Tom Paley) nearly fifty years later.

Other prominent artists featured in the film include Clarence Ashley, Maybelle and Sara Carter, Elizabeth Cotton, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, Foghorn Duo, Rayna Gellert, David Grisman, Roscoe Holcomb, Pete Seeger, and Ricky Skaggs.

Here is the trailer…

The DVD can be purchased from Arhoolie online, and is widely available from popular online resellers.

Details about theatrical showings of the film can be found on the director’s web site.

Mike Seeger: August 15, 1933  – August 7, 2009

Musician, multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, collector, teacher, advocate, record engineer and producer, field-recordist, archivist, folklorist, historian and cultural scholar. Adjectives abound; individually or collectively they cannot begin to describe the influence Mike Seeger has had on traditional American music, bringing it to the attention of people all over the world.

Mike Seeger passed away on August 7, at his home in Lexington, Virginia, from cancer. He had been fighting non-Hodgkins lymphoma for a several years and very recently he was diagnosed as having multiple myeloma leukemia, a very aggressive form of cancer. He was 75.

A distinctive singer, Seeger was born in New York City into a prominent musical family. His father, Charles, was an ethnomusicologist and his mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a music scholar, teacher and classical composer. His older half-brother Pete and sister Peggy are renowned musicians and social activists.

He was also influenced by the African-American singer/guitarist Elizabeth Cotton, who lived in the Seeger home for five years, Woody Guthrie, Jean Ritchie and Charlie Poole, among others

Seeger began playing the autoharp at the age of 12. Soon, he also learned playing the banjo, guitar, fiddle, dulcimer, mouth harp, mandolin and Dobro ®. He quickly came to love traditional music and began playing in earnest in his late teens.

At about the age of 20, Seeger began collecting songs by traditional musicians on a tape recorder. 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 recorded hundreds of musicians in their homes and at local performing venues, capturing The Stanley Brothers, Mac Wiseman, Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs in their prime. He also encountered such old-time musicians as Kilby Snow, Sam and Kirk McGee, Dock Boggs, Tom Ashley and Cousin Emmy and did much to promote their music. Seeger also documented traditional southern dancing styles.

In 1958, he co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen and Tom Paley, a string band that captured the essence of old music and spent decades performing traditional music in the traditional way. The trio was a crucial force in the revival of interest in traditional southern music, thus preserving it for many generations.

The New Lost City Ramblers recorded about 25 albums, leaving a wonderful, rich legacy. (more…)