Background
Seeger was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to American parents Elsie Simmons (née Adams) and Charles Louis Seeger.
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Charles Seeger
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Education
Seeger graduated from Harvard University in 1908, then studied in Cologne, Germany and conducted with the Cologne Opera.
Career
He was the father of the American folk singers Pete Seeger (1919–2014), Peggy Seeger, and Mike Seeger (1933-2009). Charles Seeger then took a position at Juilliard before teaching at the Institute of Musical Art in New York from 1921 to 1933 and the New School for Social Research from 1931 to 1935. Seeger envisioned the short-lived ALM as a publisher of music-related resources, but the it ceased to exist by 1936.
In 1936, he was in Washington, District of Columbia, working as a technical advisor to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration).
From 1957 to 1961, he taught at the University of California Los Los Angeles From 1961 to 1971 he was a research professor at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at University of California, Los Los Angeles In 1949-1950 he was Visiting Professor of the Theory of Music in the School of Music at Yale University.
They had three sons, Charles III (1912–2002), who was an astronomer, John (1914–2010), an educator, and Pete (1919–2014), a folk singer.
Membership
Along with composer Henry Cowell, ethnomusicologist George Herzog, Helen Heffron Roberts and Dorothy Lawton of the New York Public Library, Seeger was a founding member of the American Society for Comparative Musicology in 1933, the parent organization of the American Library of Musicology (ALM).
