Ewan MacColl

[Colin]

By his own admission 'MacColl' wasn't his real name. Not by his own admission, he appears to have been born in Salford and not Scotland which would have been very inconvenient if the news had got out in his lifetime. He insisted that singers perform only songs from their country of birth in his club and since he claimed to be Scottish, he'd have lost his repertoire overnight had the news got out.

Wombat, I pulled your quote from the 'MI5 Spied on Ewan MacColl' thread
in the currently locked political forum. I feel it deserves a factual reply
to counter your rather negative and inaccurate post.
I am at a loss to understand your implication that MacColl was
essentially a fake.
He was born in Salford to Scottish parents, both of whom were very
active in the socialist movement (they were involved with the great
Scottish socialist John Maclean). Ewan's dad was an iron worker who was
eventually blacklisted from every foundry in Scotland and they were
forced to move to Lancashire to get work. This was widely known - there
was no attempt to hide these origins.
To quote Peggy Seeger:
"He grew up amongst a community of emigre Scots. From his earliest
days he was as familiar with the cut-and-thrust of political discussion as
he was with the songs and stories his parents had brought from Scotland.
His parents often entertained themselves and friends with their large
repertoire of songs".
Thus he was steeped in the folk lore, songs and music of Scotland.
no less than say, Kevin Burke the great Irish fiddler, was steeped in
the fiddle traditions of Sligo even though he was raised in London.
Is Kevin's music any less Irish because of his London accent? No.
As for Jimmie Miller changing his name to Ewan MacColl - Peggy Seeger
explains:
"It was around this time (post 2nd World War) that Jimmie Miller changed
his name. Like many of Scottish descent, he was inspired by the Lallans
poets of the 19th century who attempted to create a standard Scots
language and literature to preserve their identity in the face of English
dominance. These contemporary writers took the names of earlier writers
and Jimmie took the name Ewan MacColl, a pseudonym which eventually
usurped his given name".
I presume Jimmie named himself after the great 19th century Gaelic poet
of the same name. The name change was no secret. I was well aware
of it back in the 60's as would have been anyone who was interested in
MacColl's great body of work.
Given the life time of great work MacColl did on behalf of the rights of
others, and the great songs he added to the body of British folk song, I
think he deserves a better legacy than the one you would give him.

Colin

[s1m0n]

Indeed. His past in Salford was never a secret--the recent articles all cite "the first time ever I saw your face" as McColl's best-known song, and that's certainly his biggest 'hit' for someone else, but I'm certain that far more people know him as the author of "Dirty old Town" than as the author of a Roberta Flack vehicle.

And "Dirty old Town" is most emphatically about McColl's Salford roots.

[SteveShaw]

Indeed. His past in Salford was never a secret--the recent articles all cite "the first time ever I saw your face" as McColl's best-known song, and that's certainly his biggest 'hit' for someone else, but I'm certain that far more people know him as the author of "Dirty old Town" than as the author of a Roberta Flack vehicle.

And "Dirty old Town" is most emphatically about McColl's Salford roots.

My mum was born and brought up in Salford (I was born six miles up the road), and my grandad worked in the docks there. They're the Irish Catholic side of my family. Dirty old town it certainly was. I have no great desire to go back to find out whether it still is.

Mind you, Michael Vaughan, the Ashes-winning England captain, is a Salford lad, as is Tom Courtnay...

Steve

[jim stone]

EM's record 'British Industrial Ballads' is, IMO, one of the
great folk recordings of the last century. Of course
the great interest in working people and labor issues
was a focus of much of his best work.

You know songs about lorry drivers
and miners, fishermen, even boxers.
Some original, many already existing.

Extraordinary stuff.

[SteveShaw]

I like political songs that make their point very vividly through a story or by describing working life, or just life. I don't like vitriolic, polemical songs that preach at me. Some of his best songs come into the first category - Shoals of Herring, My Old Man, Dirty Old Town, Nobody Knew She Was There. He had a wonderfully poetic way with song lyrics. He did sing some of the other sort too, though. Dick Gaughan is just about my favourite current "political" singer, but he does sometimes fall into the same trap. I feel like standing up and calling out "I'm already converted, mate!" sometimes. And I doubt whether too many unconverted types would be at his gigs anyway. But best of all, for me, was Woody Guthrie. Now there was a man who could get his point over in a simple, direct and poetic way.

Steve

[emmline]

Wombat, I pulled your quote from the 'MI5 Spied on Ewan MacColl' thread
in the currently locked political forum. I feel it deserves a factual reply
to counter your rather negative and inaccurate post.

Watch it there Colin. Here in the Pub we don't cotton to spillovers from the livewire forum, even in it's current locked condition.
If necessary, I'll buy everyone a drink to keep things friendly-like, but the minute one of you hombres cracks a barstool over someone's head you're in the horse trough, face first.

[jim stone]

I like political songs that make their point very vividly through a story or by describing working life, or just life. I don't like vitriolic, polemical songs that preach at me. Some of his best songs come into the first category - Shoals of Herring, My Old Man, Dirty Old Town, Nobody Knew She Was There. He had a wonderfully poetic way with song lyrics. He did sing some of the other sort too, though. Dick Gaughan is just about my favourite current "political" singer, but he does sometimes fall into the same trap. I feel like standing up and calling out "I'm already converted, mate!" sometimes. And I doubt whether too many unconverted types would be at his gigs anyway. But best of all, for me, was Woody Guthrie. Now there was a man who could get his point over in a simple, direct and poetic way.

Steve

Well said, all of this. Guthrie was indeed a genius. And the
most effective 'political' songs tell a story, so one sees
a situation through somebody's eyes. Guthrie's 'Deportee'
is heartbreaking and wonderful; McColl's
'Four-loomed Weaver' (didn't write it,
just sang it--about a bitter labor strike) too.

Tom Lehrer lampooned the other sort:

We are the folk song army,
Every one of us CARES,
In the fight against poverty, war and oppression,
Not like the rest of you squares!

In the USA there is the great union song,
Which Side Are You On?
which we used to parody at Berkeley:

My father is a member
Of the bourgeoisie,
And I'm a campus radical
And he's supporting me.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

[SteveShaw]

In the USA there is the great union song,
Which Side Are You On?
which we used to parody at Berkeley:

My father is a member
Of the bourgeoisie,
And I'm a campus radical
And he's supporting me.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Cheers, Jim. I was thinking of that very song as I posted. Billy Bragg sang it in a recent concert on the telly which featured a lot of tributes to (and songs of) Woody Guthrie, and I said to my wife at the time that it didn't sit comfortably with his songs. It is very powerful but it's also very preachy.

Steve

[jim stone]

Yeah, but it isn't a middle-class educated kid preaching,
it comes from the heart of people who lived it:

In 1931, coal miners in Harlan County were on strike. Armed company deputies roamed the countryside, terrorizing the mining communities, looking for union leaders to beat, jail, or kill. But coal miners, brought up lean and hard in the Kentucky mountain country, knew how to fight back, and heads were bashed and bullets fired on both sides in Bloody Harlan.

It was this kind of class war -- the mine owners and their hired deputies on one side, and the independent, free-wheeling Kentucky coal-miners on the other -- that provided the climate for Florence Reece's "Which Side Are You On?" In it she captured the spirit of her times with blunt eloquence.

Mrs. Reece wrote from personal experience. Her husband, Sam, was one of the union leaders, and Sheriff J. H. Blair and his men came to her house in search of him when she was alone with her seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, ready to shoot Sam down if he returned.

One day during this tense period Mrs. Reece tore a sheet from a wall calendar and wrote the words to "Which Side Are You On?" The simple form of the song made it easy to adapt for use in other strikes, and many different versions have circulated.

Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Protest, New York, NY, 1973, p. 55.


Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

CHORUS:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

My dady was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son,
And I'll stick with the union
'Til every battle's won.

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?

Don't scab for the bosses,
Don't listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize.

[Wombat]

Wombat, I pulled your quote from the 'MI5 Spied on Ewan MacColl' thread
in the currently locked political forum. I feel it deserves a factual reply
to counter your rather negative and inaccurate post.

Watch it there Colin. Here in the Pub we don't cotton to spillovers from the livewire forum, even in it's current locked condition.
If necessary, I'll buy everyone a drink to keep things friendly-like, but the minute one of you hombres cracks a barstool over someone's head you're in the horse trough, face first.

Don't worry Em, what's at issue here isn't really political and the thread would have made as much sense here if, as I did, we were to focus on ironies about MacColl and not MI5. Since Colin has mistaken the point I was making, I doubt that tempers will boil over here. When I explain what I was really saying, he might still not agree with me but I'd be surprised if he were angry. I don't blame colin for getting me wrong, I was piling irony on irony obscurely in order to get a good discussion going and I was a bit annoyed that the thread was being ignored in favour of threads containing nothing but personal insults.

s1m0n posted news about MacColl that I found deeply ironic. I found it ironic because those in leftist movements in the 50s and 60s must subsequently have been frustrated at how little affect they had on society at large. It would have amused a lot of veterans of that period to know that at least the authorities took MacColl seriously. The ease with with which the rise of beat music and the swinging sixties and psychedelia killed off the idea that folk clubs were hip places for young people to be showed how superficial their appeal must have been to most customers all along. That doesn't mean that some of us weren't deeply affected.

Let me say upfront that I am a huge admirer of MacColl, as a cultural conservationist, a performer and a first-rate song writer. I also have more than a little sympathy for his politics. I do think, however, that he appears to have been a hard-liner to the point of being a control freak and that his stands on cultural purity were so rigid as to be impossible to apply consistently. I am not the only person who thinks this, not by any means. If I'm right, would this diminish his standing or importance at all? Of course it wouldn't, not one bit. We'd simply know more about MacColl, the man, and thus see MacColl, the myth, with a bit more perspective.

My point was not that, by being born in Salford, MacColl was a serious hypocrite by my standards. He wasn't. He has every right to represent himself as of Scottish heritage and to sing Scottish songs. But he might well have been a hypocrite by what first hand reports tell us were his standards, not as reported by close insiders in books but by young folk singers wanting to work in his club.

Check out the references to MacColl in Colin Harper's Dazzling Stranger, a biography of Bert Jansch. One gets the overwhelming impression that any kind of cultural cross fertilisation was frowned upon. His policy of only singing songs from your place of origin has been reported by too many people to have been a myth.

Now ask yourself this. I come from a predominantly Scottish Melbourne family and grew up steeped in Scottish law and enlightenment values. I still am. The first instrument I can remember hearing were the great highland pipes. I saw pipe bands from a local school marching once or twice a week throughout my youth. Gaelic was my grandmother's first language. Had I turned up in MacColl's club would I have been allowed to sing Scottish songs? Not if the reports of other singers is to be believed; I'd have to have sung Australian songs. Well, most Australian songs have Scottish or Irish melodies, but I'd probably have had to sing in a stereotyped 'bush' accent that I didn't use when I spoke. If the impression of rigidity I'm drawing is unfair then countless eyewitness reports of MacColl are wrong. I'm not being sarcastic in saying that you really should read them and circulate an antidote more widely than on this board.

So, just to repeat in case my position isn't crystal clear now. I don't think hard liners can ever live up to their principles, so it is no blight on MacColl if he couldn't. I have an amused affection for hard liners though, rather like that of Laurence Sterne. To misrepresent that as contempt is to insist that anything short of hero worship is disrespectful. That is not only false, it perpetuates a myth about heroes that we should by now have outgrown. That isn't tabloid character assassination; it is simply an insistence that ironies can and should be savoured. Perhaps my favourite author is David Hume, I have so many it's hard to be sure. He was embarrassed by Scotticisms. I do not find this an endearing trait. But that doesn't lessen my respect for him.

[SteveShaw]

Yeah, but it isn't a middle-class educated kid preaching,
it comes from the heart of people who lived it:

A great mining song by Woody Guthrie that makes its point with great poignancy but without haranguing the hearer is Ludlow Massacre.

Steve

[s1m0n]

McColl's fierceness about origin had, like a lot of other silly ideas, a well-founded purpose.

He was fighting for space for the native traditions of the UK, against the tide of fashion which saw american songs--from the aforementioned Woody Guthrie to Huddie Ledbetter--as more glamorous, more exciting and more folk than the genuine folk tradition of the UK.

He was concerned with people copying songs off records, southern accent and all, and singing them as if that were folk.

Was he right that this tradition was worth saving? Damn straight. Were his polemics overwraught? Yes, that too--that was his nature.

~~

The irony about wombat's hypothetical example is that being an aussie, McColl would perhaps have insisted that you sing AL Lloyd's bogus "Australian" folk songs rather than the music of your childhood.