(b Salford, Lancs, 1915; d 22 Oct 1989). English folk singer, songwriter and collector. He inherited a large repertory of traditional Scottish songs from his parents, William Miller and Betsy Hendry. During the early 1930s he wrote satirical songs. In 1934 he married Joan Littlewood, with whom he formed several theatres, the most famous of which was Theatre Workshop. He changed his name during the Lallans movement in Scotland in the 1940s. He married the dancer Jean Newlove in 1950, with whom he had Hamish and Kirsty MacColl; both became singers and musicians.
MacColl was one of the architects of the Folk Music Revival (see England, §II; Folk music, §3), which began in England in the early 1950s. In 1953 he founded (with Alan Lomax, Bert Lloyd, Seamus Ennis and others) the Ballads and Blues Club in London, later to become the Singers Club. In 1956 he met Peggy Seeger (see Seeger), with whom he embarked upon a life partnership; their three children, Neill, Calum and Kitty, are all singers and musicians. From 1957–89, they gave concerts, conducted workshops and toured in Britain and abroad as singers of traditional and contemporary songs. They recorded extensively and initiated projects such as The Long Harvest (a 10-volume series of traditional ballads) and The Paper Stage (a two-volume set of Shakespearian sung narratives). They formed their own record company, Blackthorne, and issued discs of their own renditions of traditional and topical songs.
From the 1930s MacColl worked with experimental producers in radio. In 1957, collaborating with Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker, he wrote a series of musical documentaries for BBC radio which became known as the ‘radio ballads’; these were released on CD in 1999. A combination of recorded speech, sound effects, new songs and folk instrumentation, they included the programmes ‘Singing the Fishing’, ‘The Big Hewer’ and ‘Songs of the Road’. In 1965 MacColl and Seeger founded the Critics Group, a company of revival singers whom MacColl trained in vocal and theatrical techniques. For five years the Critics staged annually The Festival of Fools, a dramatic musical revue of the year's news.
MacColl and Seeger collected extensively from traditional singers in Britain. In addition to books of his own songs and various small collections, MacColl produced with Seeger two anthologies of the music of Britain's nomadic people: Travellers' Songs of England and Scotland and Doomsday in the Afternoon.
As a songwriter, MacColl is best known as the author of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Dirty Old Town, The Shoals of Herring, Freeborn Man and The Manchester Rambler. He wrote more than 300 songs and performed songs of the industrial cities, Scots history and the English countryside.
Steam Whistle Ballads Industrial Songs Old and New, E. MacColl and P. Seeger, Topic 12T104 (1976)
P. Seeger, ed.: The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook (New York, 1998)
Ewan MacColl: The Real MacColl, perf. E. MacColl, Topic TSCD 463 (1999)
The Radio Ballads, perf. E. MacColl, P. Seeger and others, Topic TSCD 803–8 (1999)
C.A. Pegg: ‘British Traditional and Folk Musics’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, viii (1999), 133–8
Peggy Seeger homepage, www.pegseeger.com
CAROLE PEGG