We are pleased to share the following guest blog post from Case Western Reserve University doctoral student Mary Galvin. Mary’s research interests include women and performance in popular music, French Baroque vocal music, and film adaptations of American musical theater. Mary joined us for a 2025 summer fellowship at the Music Division, working with the processing team assigned to the Beverly Emmons Papers.
Before I started my summer fellowship with the Music Division, I struggled with using archival materials in my work. In other popular music archives, I have enjoyed reading letters, flipping through fanzines, and researching venues listed on show posters, but I sometimes found it difficult to place the music within the sea of paper. As a rising scholar who craves a good story and enjoys engaging in storytelling through scholarship, I entered my fellowship with one goal: I wanted to be enveloped in a musical story.
In preparing for my work at the Library of Congress, I knew I wanted to explore the Seeger Family Collection and look at Peggy Seeger’s contribution to the sound of second-wave feminism. The story I ended up encountering was much different. After Ewan MacColl’s death in 1989, Seeger found herself in a bittersweet period of change and increased musical output. Between 1989 and 2000, Seeger released four albums, oversaw the publication of her and MacColl’s songbooks, moved to the United States, and began closely collaborating with her sons Neill and Calum in the studio. Through her archived materials, I became overwhelmed and engrossed with the beauty of Seeger’s approach to widowhood and found a lot of inspiration in her ability to start again.
All her grief, aggravated by the slow and steady ache of reinventing oneself, resulted in a completely new sound for Seeger. She united her classical music training and the Anglo-American folk revival sound that she had been known for since the 1950s, developing thick, gossamer landscapes that were a stark comparison to her urgent and simple feminist folk tunes. Much to my excitement, her work from the 1990s and early 2000s is thoroughly archived in the Seeger Family Collection. My search through the collection provided me with a few new objects of interest that reveal Seeger’s intention, process, and state of mind, both inside and outside of the studio.
When I came across the master list for “Love Will Linger On,” I knew I had uncovered something that would be as valuable to me as a composer’s manuscript orchestral score. The master lists from the 1990s are smattered with pen, pencil, and marker ink, writing is messily redacted, and there are multiple sets of handwriting, all reflecting the communal decision-making that is required when producing an album. From these lists, I could gather the initial plan for the album and attempt to track the process that led to the released version of each track. The layout of the lists aided my understanding of the building blocks of texture, timbre, and tempo in Seeger’s new sound.
Annotated lyric sheets provided even more insight into what musical aspects Seeger found notable while producing new tracks. On some sheets, there are neatly drawn staves of music outlining the bassline or the tune; on others, short comments on the general sound Seeger wanted. Seeger was engaged in a balancing act of genre, approach, and roles within the studio, producing as she was composing. The lyric sheet for the title track “Love Will Linger On” encapsulates the sense of constant renewal that I found in many of the documents from the 1990s.
The material I found in the Seeger Family Collection further ignited my interest in popular music collections. From studying a very small portion of a collection, I found a story that excited and inspired me, one that confirmed that I am on the right track for scholarly growth. Through popular music collections, scholars like me can find unique materials that concretize the personal and transformative experience that is making popular music.