Think about it: a love song for his new love to sing to him, the writer. Flack’s was one of myriad versions, most of which were met with laughter and/or derision by MacColl, who wrote the song for his new love to sing when she was in residence at Chicago’s famed Gate of Horn in 1957, before tours of the Soviet Union and China resulted in the loss of her American passport. The pace of their life together was relentless and tough, lacking in money until one day the mail brought a cheque for $75,000, thanks to Roberta Flack’s hit recording of the song that gives Seeger’s memoir its title. The names of Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger would henceforth be joined by an ampersand on thousands of record sleeves and concert bills. That child was Kirsty, whose life would be cut tragically short by a jet skier. It was left to MacColl’s feisty Scottish mother to inform the pregnant Peggy that Ewan was also expecting a child by his wife.

Very soon he was doing just that, though he made no secret of the fact that he was already married, for the second time (his first was to Joan Littlewood, the celebrated theatre director). That first night he drove home but didn’t touch her, merely told her he wanted to “make love” to her. It didn’t work out but sitting in on the audition was MacColl, who offered Seeger a ticket for The Threepenny Opera, in which he was playing the street singer. Peggy Seeger, now 82, has spent most of her life in Britain, arriving in 1956 via the Netherlands, a Radcliffe dropout invited to London by Alan Lomax to play banjo in a group he’d hoped would be Britain’s answer to the Weavers. There were other Seegers: Charles, the patriarch, a musicologist Ruth, his second wife, a modernist composer who also worked with folk music and Mike, Peggy’s brother… Each of them another story. To him “the folk revival” in its broadest sense owes much, not least because he spent the years of Senator McCarthy’s “red scare” banished from the airwaves and so teaching folk music to middle-class kids in American summer camps.

Pete Seeger, Peggy’s half-brother and the legendary composer of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, was more tolerant.

Peggy seeger the first time ever