"In turn, Matt, don't you overlook the fact that they were both also Scots; so denouncing his Scots accent as a bit 'Dawnald whaur's yr troosers' is nonsense — he was brought up, tho in Salford where he acquired the local accent from his peers, in a house where the Scots accent was the norm. Anyhow, Andy Stewart, the best-known singer of DWYT, was a born&bred Scot also, so there was nothing phoney about his accent either — even if there might have been about the song"

Yes, I know that. That's why I've always found it so surprising that his accent sounds so, well, foreign. To my ears, it simply doesn't sound like a native Scots speaker; it sounds like someone doing a foreign accent.

If you listen to Archie Fisher or Hamish Henderson or Alex Campbell then listen to MacColl you really notice it. MacColl "scottisizes" his hard 'Os' into 'As' in a kind of pedantic way - eg wrong as 'wrang', long as 'lang' - but really flatly. Just not the way a native Scots speaker does. Notice how carefully and tactfully the Hamish Henderson quotation above is worded, with its caveat about never quite losing his Lancastrian accent. When you compare him singing in an English accent with him singing in a Scots... the former is effortless, the latter is actually very very laboured and laid on with a trowel.

Fact is, MacColl wasn't a good mimic. When you hear him trying to do a Paul Robeson or trying to do a Woody Guthrie on some American songs, it really shows.

(These were quite early songs to be fair - I imagine he'd have been fairy embarassed by them in later years. He was a young(ish) man then, and more importantly was living in an age when he simply wouldn't have been exposed to the wealth of recordings he'd have had only 10 years later)

Sorry, I don't want to fall squarely on the side of the Ewan MacColl naysayers. I think he was a complicated man, whose music and books have introduced me to some great songs. The music of his that I like, I like very much indeed.

But the question of accents was a big, significant part of who he was, how he saw himself and, now that he's no longer with us and now we've only got his words and music to go on, how I hear him.