Ewan MacColl - Music

Music

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.

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), Frank Black (2006), and Bettye LaVette (2012).

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.

MacColl sang and composed numerous protest and topical songs for the nuclear disarmament movement, for example "Against the Atom Bomb". He also wrote "The Ballad of Tim Evans" (also known as "Go Down You Murderer") a song protesting against capital punishment, based on a famous murder case in which an innocent man, Timothy Evans, was condemned and executed, before the real culprit was discovered.