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James Henry Miller (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989), (1992). 9780851129396, Guinness Publishing. ISBN 9780851129396 better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a British Folk music singer-songwriter, folk song collector, Union organizer and actor. Born in England to Scottish people parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Dirty Old Town".
MacColl collected hundreds of traditional folk songs, including the version of "Scarborough Fair" later popularised by Simon & Garfunkel, and released dozens of albums with A.L. Lloyd, Peggy Seeger and others, mostly of traditional folk songs. He also wrote many left-wing political songs, remaining a steadfast Communism throughout his life and actively engaging in political activism.
James Miller was the youngest and only surviving child in the family of three sons and one daughter (one of each sex was stillborn and one son died at the age of four). They lived amongst a group of Scots and Jimmy was brought up in an atmosphere of fierce political debate interspersed with the large repertoire of songs and stories his parents had brought from Scotland. He was educated at Grecian Street School, Salford, England. He left school in 1930 after an elementary education, during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a lifelong programme of self-education whilst keeping warm in Manchester Central Library. During this period he found intermittent work in a number of jobs and also made money as a street singer.
He joined the Young Communist League and a socialist amateur theatre troupe, the Clarion Players. He began his career as a writer helping produce and contributing humorous verse and skits to some of the Communist Party's factory papers. He was an activist in the unemployed workers' campaigns and the mass trespasses of the early 1930s. One of his best-known songs, "The Manchester Rambler", was written just after mass trespass of Kinder Scout. He was responsible for publicity in the planning of the trespass.
In 1932 the British intelligence service, MI5, opened a file on MacColl, after local police asserted that he was "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention". For a time the Special Branch kept a watch on the Manchester home that he shared with his first wife, Joan Littlewood. MI5 caused some of MacColl's songs to be rejected by the BBC, and prevented the employment of Littlewood as a BBC children's programme presenter (see: "Christmas tree" files).
In 1946, members of Theatre Union and others formed Theatre Workshop and spent the next few years touring, mostly in the north of England. In 1945, Miller changed his name to Ewan MacColl (influenced by the Lallans movement in Scotland).
In the Theatre Union roles had been shared, but now, in Theatre Workshop, they were more formalised. Littlewood was the sole producer and MacColl the dramaturge, art director and resident dramatist. The techniques that had been developed in the Theatre Union now were refined, producing the distinctive form of theatre that was the hallmark of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, as the troupe was later known. They were an impoverished travelling troupe, but were making a name for themselves.
In 1947, MacColl visited a retired lead-miner named Mark Anderson (1874–1953) in Middleton-in-Teesdale, County Durham, England, who performed to him a song called "Scarborough Fair"; MacColl recorded the lyrics and melody in a book of Teesdale folk songs, and later included it on his and Peggy Seeger's The Singing Island (1960). Martin Carthy learnt the song from MacColl's book, before teaching it to Paul Simon; Simon & Garfunkel released the song as "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" on their album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, popularising the obscure and unique folk tune. Ewan MacColl, a decade after collecting the song, released his own version accompanied by Peggy Seeger on guitar in 1957 on the LP "Matching Songs of the British Isles and America" and an a capella rendition another decade later on "The Long Harvest" (1967).
Over the years MacColl recorded and produced upwards of a hundred albums, many with English folk song collector and singer A. L. Lloyd. The pair released an ambitious series of eight LP albums of some 70 of the 305 Child Ballads. MacColl produced a number of LPs with Irish singer songwriter Dominic Behan, a brother of Irish playwright Brendan Behan.
In 1956, MacColl caused a scandal when he fell in love with 21-year-old Peggy Seeger, who had come to Britain to transcribe the music for Alan Lomax's anthology Folk Songs of North America (published in 1961). At the time MacColl, who was twenty years older than Peggy, was still married to his second wife.
Many of MacColl's best-known songs were written for the theatre. For example, he wrote "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" very quickly at the request of Seeger, who needed it for use in a play she was appearing in. He taught it to her by long-distance telephone while she was on tour in the United States (from where MacColl had been barred because of his Communist past). Seeger said that MacColl used to send her tapes to listen to whilst they were apart and that the song was on one of them. This song, which was recorded by Roberta Flack for her debut album, First Take, issued by Atlantic records in June 1969, became a No. 1 hit in 1972 and won MacColl a Grammy Award for Song of the Year, while Flack received a Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
In 1959, MacColl began releasing LP albums on Folkways Records, including several collaborative albums with Peggy Seeger. His song "Dirty Old Town", inspired by his home town of Salford in Lancashire, was written for the play Landscape with Chimneys (1949) produced by Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop.In a BBC radio documentary about “Dirty Old Town”, Professor Ben Harker (author of Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl, 2007, Pluto Press) explains that although MacColl later claimed the song was written as an interlude "to cover an awkward scene change", studying the script of the play Landscape with Chimneys reveals the song occurs at the beginning and end of the play. Harker argues the song is important to the play because “it captures the movement from dreamy optimism and romance to militancy, frustration and anger. That’s the trajectory of the song and of the play.” It went on to become a folk-revival staple and was recorded by the Spinners (1964), Donovan (1964), Roger Whittaker (1968), Julie Felix (1968), the Dubliners (1968), Rod Stewart (1969), the Clancy Brothers (1970), the Pogues (1985), the Mountain Goats (2002), Simple Minds (2003), Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (2003), Frank Black (2006) and Bettye LaVette (2012).
MacColl's song "The Shoals of Herring", based on the life of Norfolk fisherman and folk singer Sam Larner was recorded by the Dubliners, the Clancy Brothers, the Corries and more. Other popular songs written and performed by MacColl include "The Manchester Rambler", "The Moving-On Song" and "The Joy of Living".
Ewan has a short biography of his work in the accompanying book of the Topic Records 70-year anniversary boxed set Three Score and Ten. Five of his recordings, three of them solo, appear in the boxed set:
Joe Stalin was a mighty man and a mighty man was he He led the Soviet people on the road to victory. All through the revolution he fought at Lenin's side, And they made a combination till the day that Lenin died.
When asked about the song in a 1985 interview, he said that it was "a very good song" and that "it dealt with some of the positive things that Stalin did". In 1992, after his death, Peggy Seeger included it as an annex in her Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, saying that she had originally planned to exclude the song on the grounds that Ewan would not have wanted it included, but decided to include it as an example of his work in his early career.See Mudcat Cafe. Seeger's note to the song reads:
Ewan wrote a number of songs like this in his early years, alongside more subtle texts like "Dirty Old Town" and "Stalinvarosh." There is no doubt that Joseph Stalin was a brilliant wartime leader and that many of his reforms ... were correct and productive. Idolisation of Stalin by the left wing the world over continued until the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (1956), when he was posthumously denounced by Khrushchev for his "personality cult" and his human rights crimes. Disillusioned and subsequently turning to China for political role models, Ewan stopped singing this song or even referring to it. He would not have included it in the main body of such a book as this unless it were for reasons similar to mine: (1) as a sample of the old politics, which viewed the earth as mere clay out of which man fashions a world for man and (2) as a sample of his early work, highly dogmatic and low on finesse. It exhibits a lack of economy, an excess of cliches and filler lines, many awkward terms and an errant chronological flow. It has many of the characteristics of political songs of its time and is virtually a political credo set into verse and put to a tune. It is just that. – The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, Appendix IV. p. 388 (quoted in Mudcat Cafe)
The B-side of the record, Sovietland (Land of Freedom) was not included in the songbook.
MacColl sang and composed numerous protest and topical songs for the nuclear disarmament movement, for example "Against the Atom Bomb", The Vandals, Nightmare, and Nuclear Means Jobs.Peggy Seeger, The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, p. 21
MacColl dedicated an entire album to the lifestyle of Gypsies in his 1964 album The Travelling People. Many of the songs spoke against antiziganism, although some also contained derogatory remarks about "", which is a word for .
He wrote "The Ballad of Tim Evans" (also known as "Go Down You Murderer") a song protesting against capital punishment, based on an infamous murder case in which an innocent man, Timothy Evans, was condemned and executed, before the real culprit was discovered.
MacColl was very active during the miners' strike of 1984–85 in distributing free cassettes of songs supportive of the National Union of Mineworkers, entitled Daddy, what did you do in the strike? The title song was unusually aggressive in its language towards the . This collection was only released on cassette and remaining copies are rare, but some of the less aggressive songs have featured on other compilations. At MacColl's 70th birthday party, he was presented by Arthur Scargill with a miner's lamp to show appreciation for his support.
In his last interview in August 1988, MacColl stated that he still believed in a socialist revolution and that the communist parties of the west had become too moderate. (2025). 9781409424307, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.. ISBN 9781409424307 He stated that he had been a member of the Communist Party but left because he felt that the Soviet Union was "not communist or socialist enough".
Between 1957 and 1964, eight of these were broadcast by the BBC, all created by the team of MacColl and Parker together with Peggy Seeger who handled musical direction, conducted a great many field interviews, and wrote songs, either together with MacColl or alone. MacColl wrote the scripts and songs, as well as, with the others, collecting the field recordings which were the heart of the productions.
As the theatre group's importance grew, members more interested in singing left. The productions ran until the winter of 1972–73. Members' differences with MacColl's vision of a full-time touring company led to the group's breakup. The offshoot group became Combine Theatre, with a club of their own mixing traditional and original folksongs and theatrical performances based on contemporary events, into the 1980s.
There is a plaque dedicated to MacColl in Russell Square in London. The inscription includes: "Presented by his communist friends 25.1.1990 ... Folk Laureate – Singer – Dramatist – Marxist ... in recognition of strength and singleness of purpose of this fighter for Peace and Socialism". In 1991 he was awarded a posthumous honorary degree by the University of Salford.
His daughter from his second marriage, Kirsty MacColl, followed him into a musical career, albeit in a different genre. She died in a boating accident in Mexico in 2000. His son with Peggy Seeger, Neill MacColl, is the long-standing guitarist for Mancunian musician David Gray. His grandson Jamie MacColl has also developed a musical career of his own with the band Bombay Bicycle Club.
(* Mixture of documentary, drama and song: broadcast on BBC radio)
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