| Ewan MacColl | |
|---|---|
| Born | James Henry Miller 25 January 1915 Broughton, Salford |
| Died | 22 October 1989 (aged 74) Beckenham |
| Occupation | Playwright, folksinger |
| Years active | 1930–1989 |
| Spouse | Joan Littlewood 1934–1950 Jean Newlove Peggy Seeger |
Ewan MacColl (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989) was an English folk singer, songwriter, socialist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer. He was married to theatre director Joan Littlewood, and later to American folksinger Peggy Seeger. He collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre and with Seeger in folk music. He was the father of singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl.
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MacColl was born as James Henry Miller in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire to Scottish parents, William Miller and Betsy Miller née Hendry. Both of his parents were socialists and William Miller was an iron-moulder and militant trade unionist who had moved to Salford with his wife to look for work after being blacklisted in almost every foundry in Scotland.[1] They lived amongst a group of émigré Scots and Jimmy, their only surviving child of four, 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.[1] He left school in 1930 during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a life-long programme of self education whilst keeping warm in the Manchester Public Library.[1]
During this period he found intermittent work in a number of jobs and also made money as a street singer.[1] He joined the Young Communist League and the 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 after the pivotal mass trespass of Kinder Scout. He was responsible for publicity in the planning of the trespass.
In 1932 the British counterintelligence service, MI5, began a file on MacColl, after the local police told them that the singer was "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention".[2] For a time the Special Branch kept a watch on the Manchester home that he shared with his 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.
In 1931, with other unemployed members of the Clarion Players he formed an agit-prop theatre group, the "Red Megaphones." During 1934 they changed the name to Theatre of Action and not long after were introduced to a young actress recently moved up from London. This was Joan Littlewood who became Miller's wife and work partner.
In 1936, after a failed attempt to relocate to London, the couple returned to Manchester, and formed Theatre Union. In 1940 a performance of The Last Edition - a 'living newspaper' - was halted by the police and Miller and Littlewood were bound over for two years for 'breach of the peace'. The necessities of wartime brought an end to Theatre Union.
MacColl enlisted in the British Army during July 1940, but deserted in December. Why he did so, and why he was not prosecuted after the war, remain a mystery.[2]
In 1946 members of Theatre Union and others formed Theatre Workshop and spent the next few years touring, mostly in the north of England. Jimmie Miller had by then changed his name to Ewan MacColl (influenced by the Lallans movement in Scotland).[1] In 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 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.
During this period MacColl's enthusiasm for folk music grew. Inspired by the example of Alan Lomax, who had arrived in Britain and Ireland in 1950, and had done extensive fieldwork there, MacColl also began to collect and perform traditional ballads. His long involvement with Topic Records started in 1950 with his release of a single, "The Asphalter's Song", on that label. When, in 1953 Theatre Workshop decided relocate to Stratford, London, MacColl, who had opposed that move, left the company and changed the focus of his career from acting and playwriting to singing and composing folk and topical songs.
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 more or less the complete Child Ballads. MacColl also produced a number of LPs with Irish singer songwriter Dominic Behan, brother of the playwright, Brendan Behan.
In 1956, MacColl caused a scandal when he fell in love with twenty-one-year-old Peggy Seeger, who had come to England 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, the dancer Jean Newlove (b. 1923), the mother of two of his children, Hamish (b. 1950) and Kirsty (1959–2000).
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 Peggy 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 which MacColl had been barred because of his Communist past). This song became a #1 hit in 1972 when covered by Roberta Flack and won MacColl a Grammy Award for Song of the Year, while Flack received a Grammy Award for Record of the Year.[3]
In 1959, MacColl began releasing LP albums on Folkways Records, including several collaborative albums with Peggy Seeger.
MacColl's song, "Dirty Old Town", inspired by his home town of Salford, in Lancashire was written to bridge an awkward scene change in his play, "Landscape with Chimneys" (1949). It went on to become a folk-revival staple and was covered by The Spinners (1964), Donovan (1964), Roger Whittaker (1968), The Dubliners (1968), Rod Stewart (1969), the Pogues (1985), The Mountain Goats (2002), Simple Minds (2003), Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (2003), and Frank Black (2006).
MacColl was one of the main composers of English protest songs during the folk revival of the 50s and 60s. In the early fifties he penned "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh" (well-known even today in Vietnam) and (less presentably) "The Ballad of Stalin" for the British Communist Party.
Joe Stalin was a mighty man and a mighty man was he
He led the Soviet people on the road to victory.
MacColl soon became ashamed of this and it was never reissued. It was not copyrighted until 1992, after his death, when Peggy Seeger included it, rather apologetically, in her Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook.[4]
MacColl sang and composed numerous protest and topical songs for the nuclear disarmament movement, for example "Against the Atom Bomb".[5] He also wrote "The Ballad of Tim Evans" (also known as "Go Down You Murderer") a song protesting against capital punishment, based on famous murder case in which an innocent man, Timothy Evans, was condemned and executed, before the real culprit was discovered.
MacColl had been a radio actor since 1933. By the late thirties he was scripting as well. In 1957 producer Charles Parker asked MacColl to collaborate in the creation of a feature programme about the heroic death of train driver John Axon. Normal procedure would have been to use the recorded field interviews only as source for writing the script. MacColl produced a script that incorporated the actual voices and so created a new form that they called the radio ballad.
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. MacColl wrote the scripts and the songs, as well as, with the others, collecting the field recordings which were the heart of the productions.
Seeger and MacColl recorded several albums of searing political commentary songs. MacColl himself wrote over 300 songs, some of which have been recorded by artists (in addition to those mentioned above) such as Planxty, The Dubliners, Dick Gaughan, The Clancy Brothers, Elvis Presley, Weddings Parties Anything, and Johnny Cash. In 2001, The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook was published, which includes the words and music to 200 of his songs. Dick Gaughan, Dave Burland and Tony Capstick collaborated in The Songs of Ewan MacColl (1978; 1985).
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. Kirsty MacColl died in a boating accident in Mexico in 2000. His grandson, Jamie MacColl, has also developed a musical career of his own with the band Bombay Bicycle Club.[6]
After many years of poor health (years in which MacColl nonetheless wrote, recorded and performed frequently) he died in October, 1989: the lifetime archive of his work with Peggy Seeger and others was passed on to Ruskin College at Oxford.
Solo albums
Collaboration - A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, accompanied by Steve Benbow
Collaborations - Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd
Collaboration - A.L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Louis Killen, Ian Campbell, Cyril Tawney, Sam Larner and Harry H. Corbett
Collaboration - A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl
Collaboration - Bob and Ron Copper, Ewan MacColl, Isla Cameron, Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy
Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger
(* Not actually sung by MacColl and Seeger: this is an anthology of songs and tunes recorded by them)
Ewan MacColl/The Radio Ballads (1958–1964)(*)
(* Mixture of documentary, drama and song: broadcast on BBC radio)
Singles
My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking.[7]
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 Khruschev 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 fashion's 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)
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