Ewan MacColl

[Mike Anderson]

For those of you who are really familiar with his life and work, I have a question: would you say that Ewan MacColl's early albums of Scottish songs with Peggy Seeger were a major influence on other players, perhaps even into the 70s and 80s? Or was it more a situation of an artist getting a body of work that was already well-known throughout Scotland recorded first?

I know many pop artists have covered his songs, but I am more interested in trad folk artists potentially being influenced to e.g. include Child ballads, or the Jacobite and Robert Burns songs.

Very interested in any input on this, thanks.

[AN Brown]

He was certainly a significant part of the folk revival. That said, the Robert Burns material was already well known and formed part of the education of most Scottish school children. Certainly, my mother sang those songs at school in Dumfries in the 1930s. Some of the Jacobite material was reasonably well known as well.

[Martin Jonas]

Not so sure about either the Burns or the Jacobite material (which was already widely sung anyway, at least in Scotland), but his albums of ballads with first Bert Lloyd and then Peggy Seeger were massively influentual, as were the Radio Ballads. What is often not appreciated is that despite the "traditional" credits, many of the Child ballad recordings were almost as heavily rewritten as the original songs for which he took writing credit. The versions of "traditional" folk songs and ballads that were recorded by the later folk revival were as often as not the Lloyd/MacColl rewrites rather than tunes collected from field recordings or archives. MacColl wasn't a very tolerant person and had a rather weird obsession with singers only being allowed to perform material from their own roots, which rubbed many up the wrong way especially as he claimed English, Scottish and Irish roots and was married to an American and therefore considered himself exempt from his own rules. His obsessiveness on the questions of "roots" caused him to claim tunes as "traditional" that he had plainly written himself. An example is the folk ballad "Eppie Morrie", which appears in the Child collection, but for which there is exactly one source for a "traditional" tune -- by some miracle that source was MacColl's grandmother, "collected" by Ewan himself. It happens that this tune is wonderful, and MacColl should get credit for it, but he couldn't bring himself to admitting authorship. Similarly with Bert Lloyd: a good half of the songs from the first few Martin Carthy albums had tunes that for all practical purposes were written by Lloyd, all of them credited to "traditional", as it wouldn't do for a folklorist to go around making up his own tunes. So, yes, MacColl may not have been a very likeable character, but he was massively influentual in the UK folk scene.

He also recorded enormous amounts of material: I have dozens of old vinyl records of his sitting somewhere that I haven't played for a good 15 years and that never made it on CD and likely never will. All of them have gems just waiting to be unearthed. It's a pity that so many of the early Topic records have Alf Edwards' English concertina as the only instrumental accompaniment -- that sound hasn't aged very well and the unaccompanied songs are generally the better ones.

As CD compilations go for those wanting to check him out, I think the best (by some distance) is "Black And White" on Cooking Vinyl, which was put together by his family shortly after his death. Definitely worth checking out (even without much mandolin content).

Martin

[Mike Anderson]

he claimed English, Scottish and Irish roots and was married to an American

Well, we have that much in common!

Thanks very much AN Brown and Martin for your observations. Martin, lots there that I didn't know about. I'd have to agree about an excess of concertina; makes sense perhaps for sea shanties, but not everything. I'm fascinated to hear about your vinyl collection - if you're interested in getting anything digitized, that's something I've done many times.

Thanks again for your feedback!

[Martin Jonas]

Looking at the online MacColl discography (Link), I see that more of his albums are on CD now than I realised -- an amazing 76 CDs! That includes all of his Folkways albums (which never went out of print, as with all other Folkways recordings), all of the "Long Harvest" and "Blood & Roses" ballad collections (reissued by and available to buy from Peggy Seeger's website) and a fair number of his Topic albums. Still quite a bit unavailable, including (perhaps unsurprisingly) his 1962 album "The Merry Muses of Caledonia", an amazingly bawdy album of Burns songs with an (involuntarily hilarious) academic booklet and the statement on the cover that this album is for the serious folklorist only and sold at a deliberately high price to discourage prurient interest (bit of flawed logic there).

Martin

[Mike Anderson]

Looking at the online MacColl discography (Link), I see that more of his albums are on CD now than I realised -- an amazing 76 CDs! That includes all of his Folkways albums (which never went out of print, as with all other Folkways recordings), all of the "Long Harvest" and "Blood & Roses" ballad collections (reissued by and available to buy from Peggy Seeger's website) and a fair number of his Topic albums. Still quite a bit unavailable, including (perhaps unsurprisingly) his 1962 album "The Merry Muses of Caledonia", an amazingly bawdy album of Burns songs with an (involuntarily hilarious) academic booklet and the statement on the cover that this album is for the serious folklorist only and sold at a deliberately high price to discourage prurient interest (bit of flawed logic there).

Martin

The man was amazingly prolific. Funny about the "Merry Muses..." as I have a collection on Linn records called "The Complete Songs of Robert Burns" - and I don't think many of them are on it.