Ewan MacColl

He also wrote many left-wing political songs, remaining a steadfast communist throughout his life and actively engaging in political activism.

MacColl was born as James Henry Miller at 4 Andrew Street, in Broughton, Salford, England, on 25 January 1915 to Scottish parents, William Miller and Betsy (née Henry), both socialists. William Miller was an iron moulder and trade unionist who had moved to Salford with his wife, a charwoman, to look for work after being blacklisted in almost every foundry in Scotland. Betsy Miller knew many traditional folk songs such as "Lord Randall" and "My Bonnie Laddie's Lang A-growing", of which her son later created written and audio recordings; he later recorded an album of traditional songs with her. James Miller was the youngest and only surviving child in the family of three sons and one daughter (one of each sex was stillborn and one son died at the age of four). They lived amongst a group of Scots and James 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. He was educated at Grecian Street School, Salford, England. He left school in 1930 after an elementary education, during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a lifelong programme of self-education whilst keeping warm in Manchester Central Library. During this period he found intermittent work in a number of jobs and also made money as a street singer. Miller joined the Young Communist League and a 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 just after mass trespass of Kinder Scout. He was responsible for publicity in the planning of the trespass. In 1932 the British intelligence service MI5 opened a file on MacColl after local police asserted that he was "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention". For a time the Special Branch kept a watch on the Manchester home that he shared with his first 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 (see: "Christmas tree" files).

He was married three times: to theatre director Joan Littlewood (1914–2002) from 1934 to 1948; to Jean Mary Newlove (1923–2017) from 1949 to 1974, with whom he had two children, a son Hamish (1950–2024), and a daughter, the singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl (1959–2000); and to American folksinger Peggy Seeger (b. 1935) from 1977 until his death in 1989, with whom he had three children, Neill, Calum, and Kitty. He collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre, and with Seeger in folk music.

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 MacColl's wife and work partner. In 1936, after a failed attempt to move to London, the couple returned to Manchester, and formed the Theatre Union. In 1940 a performance of The Last Edition – a 'living newspaper' – was halted by the police and MacColl 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. In an interview in June 1987, he said that he was expelled for "anti-fascist activity". Allan Moore and Giovanni Vacca wrote that MacColl had been subject to Special Observation whilst in the King's Regiment, owing to his political views, and that the records show that, rather than being discharged, he was declared a deserter on 18 December 1940. In her autobiography, Joan Littlewood wrote that MacColl (then still known as Jimmie Miller) was stationed at Richmond, North Yorkshire and wrote to her regularly to say how much he hated it, and that he announced his change of name when she greeted him back at Manchester railway station. Littlewood also wrote that, when they were performing a play about military desertion after the war in Ormesby (close to where he had been stationed), MacColl was briefly arrested, after being recognised locally, and moved to an army detention barracks at Northallerton before being released after a few days. In 1946, members of Theatre Union and others formed Theatre Workshop and spent the next few years touring, mostly in the north of England. In 1945, Miller changed his name to Ewan MacColl (influenced by the Lallans movement in Scotland). In the 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 the 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 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. In 1947, MacColl visited a retired lead-miner named Mark Anderson (1874–1953) in Middleton-in-Teesdale, County Durham, England, who performed to him a song called "Scarborough Fair"; MacColl recorded the lyrics and melody in a book of Teesdale folk songs, and later included it on his and Peggy Seeger's The Singing Island (1960). Martin Carthy learnt the song from MacColl's book, before teaching it to Paul Simon; Simon & Garfunkel released the song as "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" on their album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, popularising the obscure and unique folk tune. Ewan MacColl, a decade after collecting the song, released his own version accompanied by Peggy Seeger on guitar in 1957 on the LP "Matching Songs of the British Isles and America" and an a capella rendition another decade later on "The Long Harvest" (1967). 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, 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.

MacColl was one of the main composers of British protest songs during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1950s he penned "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh" 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. All through the revolution he fought at Lenin's side, And they made a combination till the day that Lenin died. 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. The B-side of the record, Sovietland (Land of Freedom) was not included in the songbook. 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. He wrote "The Ballad of Tim Evans" (also known as "Go Down You Murderer") a song protesting against 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".

MacColl had been a radio actor since 1933. By the late 1930s he was writing scripts 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, conducted a great many field interviews, and wrote songs, either together with MacColl or alone. MacColl wrote the scripts and songs, as well as, with the others, collecting the field recordings which were the heart of the productions.

My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking.

• Ewan MacColl Official Website • Ewan MacColl 1915–1989 A Political Journey (From the Working Class Movement Library site) • Ewan MacColl/Peggy Seeger discography • Ewan MacColl * • Farber, Jim "Ewan MacColl, dogmatist of British folk, gets a tribute album"; New York Times; 28 October 2015