User:Thnidu/Sandbox/Ewan McColl

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 to move 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 some 70 of the 305 Child Ballads. MacColl produced a number of LPs with Irish singer songwriter Dominic Behan, a brother of Irish playwright Brendan Behan.

In 1956, MacColl caused a scandal when he fell in love with 21-year-old Peggy Seeger (half-sister of Pete Seeger), who had come to Britain 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 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). Seeger said that MacColl used to send her tapes to listen to whilst they were apart and that the song was on one of them.

This song became a No. 1 hit in 1972 when recorded 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. His 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 recorded by the Spinners (1964), Donovan (1964), Roger Whittaker (1968), the Dubliners (1968), Rod Stewart (1969), the Clancy Brothers (1970), the Pogues (1985), the Mountain Goats (2002), Simple Minds (2003), Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (2003), Frank Black (2006) and Bettye LaVette (2012).

Ewan has a short biography of his work in the accompanying book of the Topic Records 70 year anniversary boxed set Three Score and Ten. Five of his recordings, three of them solo, appear in the boxed set:
 * on CD #4:
 * track 2, "Come All Ye Fisher Lads", with the Fisher Family, from their album The Fisher Family.
 * on CD #5:
 * track 4, "Go Down You Murderers", from Chorus from the Gallows
 * on CD #6:
 * track 9, "To the Begging I Will Go", from Manchester Angel
 * track 14, "Sixteen Tons", with Brian Daly, from the single Sixteen Tons/The Swan Necked Valve
 * track 18, Dirty Old Town, from the single Dirty Old Town/Sheffield Apprentice.

Political songs
MacColl was one of the main composers of British protest songs during the folk revival of the 1950s/'60s. In the early '50s he penned "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh" (well known even today in Vietnam) and "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.

When asked about the song in a 1985 interview, he said that it was "a very good song" and that "it dealt with some of the positive things that Stalin did". In 1992, after his death, Peggy Seeger included it as an annex in her Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, saying that she had originally planned to exclude the song on the grounds that Ewan would not have wanted it included, but decided to include it as an example of his work in his early career.

MacColl sang and composed numerous protest and topical songs for the nuclear disarmament movement, for example "Against the Atom Bomb", The Vandals, Nightmare, and Nuclear Means Jobs.

MacColl dedicated an entire album to the lifestyle of Gypsies in his 1964 album The Travelling People. Many of the songs spoke against the prejudice against Roma Gypsies, although some would also contain derogatory remarks about "tinkers", which is a word for Irish Travellers.

He wrote "The Ballad of Tim Evans" (also known as "Go Down You Murderer") a song protesting capital punishment, based on an infamous murder case in which an innocent man, Timothy Evans, was condemned and executed, before the real culprit was discovered.

MacColl was very active during the miners' strike of 1984–85 in distributing free cassettes of songs supportive of the National Union of Mineworkers, entitled Daddy, what did you do in the strike?  The title song was unusually aggressive in its language towards the strikebreakers. This collection was only released on cassette and remaining copies are rare, but some of the less aggressive songs have featured on other compilations. At MacColl's 70th birthday party, he was presented by Arthur Scargill with a miner's lamp to show appreciation for his support.

In his last interview in August 1988, MacColl stated that he still believed in a socialist revolution and that the communist parties of the west had become too moderate. He stated that he had been a member of the Communist Party but left because he felt that the Soviet Union was "not communist or socialist enough".