As an ignorant old sod and a newbie here, I was very pleased that this thread from 2012 had been revived. I had heard of MacColl, but I think I thought he and Ed McCurdy were the same person. Not only did I read this thread through, but I looked at a number of other lengthy MacColl threads, and I feel I have a sense of him as an undeniable force and a greater awareness of what I have yet to learn. I'm grateful to both Jim Carroll and those who differed with him for a fascinating portrait of a complex, gifted, and dedicated contributor who wasn't always easy to get along with. (Not unlike the other figure in this thread.)

However, after a few minutes into these threads, the answer to the question it posed was staggeringly obvious: Dylan seemed put on earth expressly to push every one of MacColl"s buttons: one was a Stalinist, the other an individualist anarchist (or capitalist swine if you prefer); one spent an enormous amount of energy raising and enforcing standards, the other in disrupting them. Their attitudes towards tradition were antithetical, to the extent that some of MacColl's followers don't admit any legitimacy in Dylan's use of tradition at all. And of course, in breaking the rules and setting standards at defiance, Dylan was successful beyond ANYONE's dreams during the Great Folk Music Scare. MacColl must have felt at times, "There is no Materialist Dialectic."

So, when we get yet another post informing us that Ewan MacColl was born Jimmy Miller, It seems to me we're well into the rinse-and-repeat cycle. I'd love to see a thread on MacColl's theater work. I wouldn't mind if it replaced this one.

Maybe it's not my place to suggest it, but I sincerely believe there are better ways to see MacColl clearly than by refraction through the prism of his dislike for Dylan.