The cicadas returned today. I can no longer pretend it is the beginning of summer.

I�ve been walking through my day with my head full of �Oh, Mary don�t you weep.� The reason for this � not that I really need a reason for such a great song to be stuck in my head � is because in a moment of weakness I agreed to play fiddle and sing at an open mike with a guitarist friend in a week or a month or possibly both.

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I was born in the late �60s and raised on folk and protest songs. I became first a classical musician and later an ethnomusicologist. Through all of this, the Seeger family has been by my side. The earliest recording of my voice raised in song was made on a cassette when I was 3. On it I sing �The Cruel War is Raging,� learned from a Peter, Paul and Mary album, and �We Shall Overcome,� which I picked up from my beloved Pete Seeger record. In college, as I studied classical compositions by female composers, I discovered Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pete�s stepmother. Crawford Seeger was a well-respected modernist composer. She also collaborated with poet Carl Sandburg on his American Songbag, still one of the best collections of American folksong arrangements around.

Last year, in honor of the 50th annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, ethnomusicologist Tony Seeger, spoke about his grandfather Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford�s husband and father of Pete, Mike (one of the founders of the New Lost City Ramblers) and Peggy (also a folksinger). Charles Seeger was one of the four founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology, a society devoted to the study of indigenous musics around the world.

Suffice it to say that the Seeger family is intimately involved with the history of American folk music as I know it, as we all know it. Which is why I was particularly interested when Bruce Springsteen�s latest release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions came out. I have had to set aside some of my longstanding aversion to Springsteen, which stems primarily from my �Born to Run� era youth when I thought he got far too much hype. His voice also grates on me. But there�s no question he�s got Americana down. It seemed to me that he was quite possibly the right man for this particular job.

So far I�ve only heard two tracks off the CD, the aforementioned �Oh, Mary� and �Pay me my money down,� which I actually learned off of one of AJ�s Dan Zanes CDs. Both songs get me in the gut the way a good folk song should. The performances are infectious. And �Mary� has a rocking fiddle part that sounds like some wacky blend of klezmer, Old Timey, and New Orleans jazz. I�m looking forward to giving it a go. I am, however, pushing for us to postpone our performance of these tracks until next month to see if we can scare up a bigger band.

But back to the Seeger Sessions. I find the timing of this release interesting, coming as it does at a point when there seems to be a liberal seething against the establishment, another war to protest. Many of the songs will, undoubtedly, hit home. They are important songs. I hope a new generation will learn them, as I did.

The best way, of course, is by singing along. I recently confessed to sidewaysrain that my family was just as nerdy as hers. We sang in the car all the time. We still do, much to my husband�s mock horror. Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter Paul & Mary, the Kingston Trio, Tom Lehrer � these were the staples of our cross-country car trips. There were no DVDs, CDs and seldom any radio. The cassettes popped in and out of the dashboard for hours as we sang along, the windows rolled down even on the highway.

I was reminded of all this again last week when I caught Terry Gross� interview with Robert Sullivan on Fresh Air. Sullivan has written a number of really interesting books, including one that�s a natural history of the Meadowlands. His book A Whale Hunt was excerpted in the Atlantic. His latest has one of the longest titles on a book published since the 19th century: Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, my wife, my mother-in-law, two kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant.

Sullivan and his two kids both appeared on the program singing Old Timey music with their instruments, as they said they did on their family car trips. All I can say is that their musical expertise far exceeds ours. 10-year-old Louise has a voice to die for and a sense of style worthy of the Carter family. You can catch her with the rest of the Sullivans at the NPR website. If you want to hear more, the Sullivans also perform with Dan Zanes on �I don�t want your millions mister,� a Depression era song on his latest album for kids (a gift to AJ from RS), Catch that Train!.

I last remember singing �I don�t want your millions mister� on the porch of a trailer with my friend M. and our coworkers at a summer camp in south Jersey. It was a hot summer night, the stars were out, the campers were sleeping. M. was strumming his guitar and singing. We all sang our chorus, drowsy with heat and beer, to the black sky:

I don�t want your millions mister,
I don�t want want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, mister.
Give me back my job again.

The cicadas were out then too. Folk music seems made for summer nights and guitars and groups of friends and beer. Go buy yourself a CD, invite some friends over, crank up the volume. And sing.

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