Ewan MacColl: 1915 - 1989
A Political Journey

When the history of the 20th Century culture in this dis-United Kingdom comes to be properly written, the name of Ewan MacColl will figure largely in it; not merely for his work as a pioneer of the English and Scots folksong revivals, which some might write off as a mere footnote to that history. For the influence of MacColl is multidimensional, extending beyond music to drama, philosophy, and the whole relationship between culture and politics.

This is the man whose promise as a playwright attracted the favourable attention of George Bernard Shaw, and of Scotland's greatest contemporary poet, Hugh MacDiarmid; he also gave American soul singer Roberta Flack a pop music number one (The First Time Ever 1 Saw Your Face). His audiences have included miners, garment workers, railwaymen, firemen and all sorts of other trade unionists and workers by hand and brain. His folklore studies have placed his work in academic libraries throughout the world. His innovations in the field of radio documentary have never yet been surpassed; he is still writing and singing and working as hard as ever as he enters his seventy-first year.

To write him off as 'Ewan MacColl, the folk singer' would be as fatuous as to talk of Albert Einstein, the scientist, or Karl Marx the politician.

And yet, in one sense, it is helpful to consider his work in folksong as a microcosm of his attitude to culture in general, for it is subversive not merely of received ideas about culture as essentially something handed down from on high, (either to divert us or to elevate us with ideas above our station) but it is also subversive of many preconceptions about folk culture: suppositions about its essential simplicity, its ineffectiveness in the complex world of industrial technology, its survival as relics of a bygone age that can only be preserved as some kind of museum curiosity appreciated by aesthetes and antiquarians.

For all the importance of their work these misconceptions were shared by many of those who had worked in the field of folklore before MacColl burst upon it like a truly revolutionary force, hand-in-hand with his fellow Marxist, the English journalist and former sheep-shearer and whaler, Albert Lancaster Lloyd, to direct our attention back to the people who created these wonderful songs and who, he maintained against all beliefs to the contrary, were continuing to create them, not only in the fields of rural England (where agricultural capitalism was destroying the last vestiges of the English peasantry left by the ravages of nineteenth century industrialisation), but in the mines, weaving sheds and factories of postwar, atomic age, computerised Britain.

The very idea that there could be a working class culture, distinct from, and to a great extent responsible for, fertilising so-called 'higher' art forms, a culture working according to its own criteria, many of them more venerable and more deeply-seated in the human psyche than the comparatively ephemeral products of the Italian Renaissance or nineteenth century 'survival of the fittest' individualism, said something not only about culture but about society itself.

For if men and women with dirt under their fingernails could take time at the end of a weary day to compose a lyric as lovely as The Seeds of Love or a polemical warning of vengeance to come with the power of Blackleg Miner, then might they not have the intelligence and sensitivity themselves to run the factory, the pit, the country, the world?

And therefore if one was to understand their song, was it not necessary to see it as only one part of a seamless garment that is the entirety of working class culture, embracing speech, the sort of folk drama and ritual that inspired Shakespeare and James Joyce, and the mutual interdependence in the hazardous conditions underground that right-wing Labour and Tory politicians have tried so hard and so far so unsuccessfully to eradicate from the mining communities?

It is significant that this holistic approach to working- class culture is not something that James Miller, the son of a blacklisted iron-moulder whom he describes as 'the best singer I've ever heard', got out of some book-or even out of his own head. His own origins and cultural background epitomise the specific points he has spent his life making, and while he may be a larger-than-life figure, unique among his generation and his time for the breadth of his vision, he is also merely the first among equals, who has not been too proud to learn from those from whom he sprang, and from whom he has continued to draw his strength and inspiration. This was an attitude he acquired literally at his mother's knee, for many of the traditional songs in his enormous repertoire were learnt directly from his father, William Miller, and his mother, Betsy Hendry.

His earliest years were spent in Salford, Lancashire, which he was to immortalise years later in the song Dirty Old Town, possibly his second most popular lyric after The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. He started work at the age of 14 in the Anaconda Copper wireworks, from which he was soon sacked for refusing to work overtime without extra pay.

By then he had already been working in street theatre for over a year and he came to prominence in the experimental workers' theatre movement of the 1930s, inspired by the work being done in the Soviet Union and pre-Nazi Germany. After army service he formed Theatre Workshop with Joan Littlewood. This was the inspiration for the whole post-war movement in British theatre. During this period he wrote eight plays, which were translated into Czech, German, French, Polish and Russian, and performed throughout the world. One of his last theatrical appearances was as the ballad singer in the highly successful West End production of Brecht's Threepenny Opera in the late fifties.

It was in aid of Theatre Workshop that he began to organise a series of regular 'Ballads and Blues' concerts at their home base, Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London, in association with leading folk figures like the American Alan Lomax, Britain's A. L. Lloyd, and Ireland's Seamus Ennis, which were to become a regular weekly folk club, first under the 'Ballads and Blues' name, later as the Singers' Club. These clubs were to act as an inspiration to organisers of similar bodies throughout the world. The Singers' Club is still running.

In 1957 he was commissioned by the BBC to write the first of eight 'radio ballads', a new form linking spoken actuality recordings and specially composed songs. The radio ballad team was nominated three times for the coveted Italia Prize and in 1960 Singing the Fishing took it. MacColl had worked for many years in experimental radio drama with the team that produced such celebrated productions as Under Milk Wood.

One of the best of the radio ballads, The Big Hewer, was devoted to the heroism of Britain's miners. Earlier, he had paid an important tribute to mining song culture in his collection of industrial ballads, Shuttle and Cage (also released as an LP record) and had worked for many years in association with the National Coal Board's film unit.

Again, his work on the radio ballads had many dimensions. Firstly, it revolutionised the whole approach of writers to radio documentary. Until his first radio ballad, The Ballad of John Axon, it had been the practice to write out what the subjects of the documentary might say, tidy it up so it would be comprehensible to the world at large, and then have it read in the studio by professional actors who would assume the relevant accents.

To be fair, this was not merely the results of cultural prejudice, but was also dictated by the technological constraints of the bulky recording equipment which, up till then, hadn't been able to be used in the field with any flexibility. But by the time MacColl began working in the loco sheds with John Axon's old comrades, the invention of the comparatively small green EMI 'midget' tape recorder made this an obsolete approach, and it was Ewan's genius to be able to use it to cut through the outmoded attitudes that were denying working people their authentic voice. So every time you hear a radio programme or watch a TV show that uses actuality instead of telling us what the presenter thinks people think, you owe a debt to Ewan MacColl for that alone.

Ironically, the success of his technique earned him the ire of the BBC establishment rather than their appreciation. At one time, Ewan disappeared from broadcasting for two years after making some injudicious remarks at an industry conference. And the reaction of the Director General to news of The Big Hewer was reported to be 'Oh god, not another bloody working-class epic!'

It was interesting to note the way the in-depth exposure to working-class speech, as he listened to hours and hours of recorded tape, changed Ewan's own writing for the better. His lyrics became more hard-edged, less romanticised in their descriptions of the heroism of labour, more rooted in the true patterns contemporary speech-a concrete example of the way he maintains writers of the past had worked, drawing upon popular culture and serving an audience that was aware of itself and its own worth.

The BBC has put paid to any further development of the radio ballad form. Charles Parker, the producer with whom Ewan worked for so long, is now dead. Ewan says he is working with Peggy Seeger on the possibility of putting together an aural documentary on the miners' strike, developing those techniques still further. Funding will be a problem, since the hours of recording and editing don't come cheap, but he is confident that money can be found.

But that's a project that must await the successful outcome of the struggle, no doubt. Today this septuagenarian whizz-kid has plunged himself into the middle of the fight, creating a number of new songs, some of which are on a cassette for the strike, entitled Daddy What Did You Do In The Strike? It consists of special songs intermixed with actuality, radio ballad-style (following the suggestion of Betty Heathfield), and it's my opinion that the songs on the cassette represent some of Ewan's best work ever.

He has revised his epoch-making nuclear play, Uranium 235, to bring it up to date with the realities of atomic energy research in the thirty years since it was written. Today, we realise that the slogan of 'Atoms for Peace' is something of a red herring: plutonium for bombs is a by-product of so-called peaceful atomic energy research, and the assault upon the indigenous coal industry is as much a by-product of Anglo-American nuclear blackmail as it is of Thatcher's fears of working-class solidarity and trade union power of the mining workers.

When Ewan's old comrade-in-arms, Bert Lloyd, died, he was made the subject of a moving concert by those who had been inspired by his example. But we resolved there and then that we would not wait until it was too late for Ewan to learn how highly he is regarded by those of us who have followed in his footsteps.

This concert is the first outcome of that resolve, and it is through the perseverance and indefatigable energy of another of Ewan's old comrades, Bruce Dunnet (the original organiser of the Singers' Club), that it has become a living reality today.

We are hoping to make this a year of events in Ewan's honour: performances of his plays, reissues of his seminal works (like the wonderful Scotland Sings), a September symposium of dissertations by academics, trade unionists, thespians and others, and numerous other events organised on a local basis. The scope will be dictated by the imaginations of those who choose to pay him tribute.

Why not organise something in his honour in your trade union branch, folksong club, theatre, party branch, street, village, town, university, factory.? You will not only be honouring a great contributor to working-class culture, you will also be honouring the class which produced him and which has been his constant inspiration.

In other words, you'll be honouring yourselves.

Karl Dallas

Copyright 1984 Karl Dallas/Dallas Designs