Ewan MacColl

A British/Scottish singer/songwriter who grew up in a "Dirty Old Town"

The article below was published originally in 2016 (though I’ve added a few updates) in Scottish Life magazine. It is now a part of my book, MusicScapes of Scotland: Vignettes from Prehistory to Pandemic. If you’re interested, various options to purchase the book or ebook can be found at this link.

January 25 is well known as the birthday of Scotland's 18th century poet and songwriter, Robert Burns. Not so well known is that it is also the birthday of Britain's 20th century singer and songwriter, Ewan MacColl. Like Burns, MacColl was driven by passion and optimism. Both envisioned a future in which people could be respected for who they are, as most famously expressed in “A Man's A Man,” the final song of MacColl's 1959 recording of the songs of Robert Burns.

In honor of MacColl's centennial, three of his children selected their favorite songs and invited great contemporary singers to arrange and sing them. Released as a double CD in 2015, it was produced by Neill and Calum MacColl, and designed by Kitty MacColl. Their mother, American singer and multi-instrumentalist Peggy Seeger, was Ewan's third wife. For 30 years, she performed and recorded with him, and now, at age 90, she released her final album last month, called Teleology.

The double CD, Joy of Living, features 21 songs, with a different singer on each track. Their unique voices and original arrangements create an enjoyable variety of styles, ranging from the bright and warm opener sung by Damien Dempsey, through the eerie “Cannily Cannily” by the Unthanks, to the theatrical, half-spoken version by Jarvis Cocker of “The Battle Is Done With.” Norma Waterson sings of the callous treatment of gypsies, while Chaim Tannenbaum performs a gentle “My Old Man” about a father, presumably MacColl's, being left high and dry by the factory bosses.

Many of the songs celebrate workers: miners, truckers, fishermen, roadbuilders, and steelworkers. Others are about gypsies, probably inspired by Ewan and Peggy's adventures collecting songs from the traveling folk of Scotland and England in the 1960s and 70s.

Scottish singer Karine Polwart was one of the first artists approached by Neill and Calum MacColl for the project. She recorded “Terror Time,” about living through winter as a gypsy. Her haunting rendition includes a pure and penetrating voice with drums and drones.

Dick Gaughan, who recorded an album of MacColl songs in 1978, here presents “Jamie Foyers,” about fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Christy Moore sings another song about armed struggle, “Companeros,” honoring the Cuban revolution. These two songs are more overtly political and less personal than the others, but all are part of MacColl's dream that a system could be found to provide justice for working people.

MacColl's passion to improve living conditions of workers came from growing up in the heavily industrial town of Salford in northwestern England. His parents had moved there from Scotland to find work because his father, a third generation iron worker, had been blacklisted in Scotland due to his union activities.

MacColl recalled that each neighborhood in Salford could easily be identified by smell. When he was 15, an official inspection concluded that Salford contained the worst slums in the country, and yet the inspectors were “struck by the courage and perseverance with which the greater number of tenants kept their houses clean and respectable under the most adverse conditions.”

“In spite of the bleakness of Salford itself,” MacColl said, “there was a kind of life in us, that made us impervious to these things.” This spirit infused MacColl's music and work. Several songs on the CD hearken back to his blighted home town, including the famous “Dirty Old Town,” and “Alone,” a meandering and pensive song from the point of view of a teenage Salford girl.

The situation in Salford was not new. Horrible working conditions, child labor, and squalor there had a major impact on the young German Friederich Engels, who worked in Salford in the 1840s at his father's mill. A few years later, he teamed up with Karl Marx to write The Communist Manifesto.

MacColl's father and his friends were working class intellectuals who debated about Engels, Darwin, Marx, Thomas Paine. Amid vast slums and the Great Depression, Ewan MacColl was inspired by his father's politics. He quit school upon turning 14, joined a Communist theater group, and never abandoned his optimistic struggle to expose and improve the lives of working people.

Ewan MacColl strongly identified with Scottish culture. Both parents spoke and sang in Scots, and his neighborhood was strongly Scottish. MacColl found that he could write poetry and prose much more easily in Scots than in English. In the 1930s, he was taken with the work of poet Hugh MacDiarmid and the Lallans Makars, who sought to make the Scots language the basis of a new literary genre. MacDiarmid had changed his name from Christopher Grieve to declare his dedication to Scottish culture. Ewan MacColl, whose original name was Jimmy Miller, did the same, choosing to take on the name of an 18th century Scottish songwriter.

In the 1950s, the American folksong collector Alan Lomax encouraged MacColl to help revive British folksong in the face of pervasive popular American music. Lomax also introduced him to Peggy Seeger. Over the coming decades, working with Seeger and others, MacColl performed, collected songs, wrote new ones, developed an innovative BBC radio program, started a folk club, and created a group to teach singers how to breathe life into folk music. His work had a huge impact on the British folk revival.

Through radio work, writing and teaching, MacColl honed sophisticated theories about authenticity in folk music, as the voice of the people. To some, his high standards seemed autocratic. Yet he provided wind for the sails of the folk scene, and showcased the earthiness, passion, and skillfully written lyrics of folk song, both traditional and modern.

MacColl may have been difficult to contend with intellectually, but his family found him emotionally warm. They loved his music. Peggy regularly worked with him, and sometimes the boys joined in. One song on the album is performed by his grandson Jamie, whose electro-indie band, Bombay Bicycle Club, has a huge following of its own. MacColl's most famous song, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” was written for his wife Peggy, and is sung on the CD by Scottish singer Paul Buchanan. In 1973, it won a Grammy as Song of the Year, performed by Roberta Flack.

The MacColls often went hillwalking in Scotland and England, but at age 72, Ewan realized halfway up a mountain that he couldn't make it to the top. This led to the writing of the title song of the CD, Joy of Living, which bids farewell to those mountains, and passes along their pleasures to his children, that they should “never lose the thrill and the joy of living.”

After producing the double album, MacColl’s children went to work on another tribute to their father's work, a boxed set of four CDs compiling MacColl's own powerful singing. They selected 101 performances, half of them written by MacColl, the other half traditional. As they worked on the project, Neil and Calum discovered that Ewan MacColl sang more naturally in Scots than in English, so a majority of the traditional songs are in Scots. Robert Burns would no doubt have been well pleased.

Who can guess what kind of songs Burns might have written had he lived in the 20th century instead of in the shadow of the Jacobite uprisings and during the vibrant Scottish Enlightenment? We can sense that Ewan MacColl's songs draw upon an optimism born in the teeth of the Great Depression, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

The Joy of Living double CD is an enjoyable tour of his songwriting. The boxed set takes listeners to the source, with MacColl's own voice singing, as he once said, "an affirmation of life at its most poignant, its most beautiful, and its most rousing."