Mike Seeger, who, as a solo performer, collector of songs, and member of the New Lost City Ramblers, helped to revive and widen interest in southern traditional music, died at his Lexington, Virginia home on August 7, just a week shy of his 76th birthday. He had recently stopped cancer treatment and returned home to spend his final days with his wife and family there under hospice care.

A son of folklorist Charles Seeger and music teacher and composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, brother of Peggy and half-brother of Pete, Mike Seeger grew up surrounded by music. The field recordings of rural southern folk music that his father collected, and his parents’ singing of such songs around the house, would prove inspirational to him. A multi-instrumentalist, he learned to play the autoharp as a youngster and later picked up the guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, dobro, dulcimer and harmonica.

In 1958, Seeger captured first place in the banjo category at the Galax Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention in Virginia. That year, he also joined John Cohen and Tom Paley to form the New Lost City Ramblers, which played sold-out concerts at New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall and recorded its eponymous debut album for Moe Asch’s Folkways Records that fall. The influential vocal and instrumental urban folk group helped to popularize and spark renewed interest in traditional string band music and played a major role in the 1960s folk revival as it evolved to include bluegrass and unaccompanied ballads in its repertoire.

During their heyday, the New Lost City Ramblers recorded some 15 albums and played colleges, coffeehouses and notable clubs across the country, as well as the very first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. The New Lost City Ramblers not only based much of their music on the old-time cultural stylings of the 1920s and 1930s, but they also helped introduce traditional performers from the rural south to urban audiences and influenced a number of other musicians – including the Byrds, Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan.

Through the years, Mike Seeger appeared on dozens of recordings. In the late 1960s, he formed The Strange Creek Singers. Its members also included Tracy Schwartz (who had replaced Tom Paley in the New Lost City Ramblers in 1962), Alice Gerrard, Hazel Dickens and Lamar Grier. Seeger also started performing more frequently as a solo artist at this time. He made field recordings featuring rural southern musicians, produced educational videos on various instruments and styles, and recorded albums with his sister, Peggy. During his lifetime, Seeger received four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and six Grammy Award nominations. In May, as previously reported on AcousticMusicScene.com, the NEA named Seeger as the recipient of its 2009 Bess Lomax Hawes Award in recognition of his significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of our cultural heritage.