"neither "Strawberry Fair" nor "Scarborough Fair" (which I think you must mean) were written by Ewan MacColl, were they?"
Nope - but MacColl and Joan Littlewood collected it in the forties; it took Dylan and Sim and Gar to try to claim ownership.
Haven't aired the story that shows the other side of the MacColl legend for a while, so here goes.
While he, Peggy and Charles Parker were putting the finishng touches to th radio ballad, The Travelling People, they began to look for songs that Travellers had made themselves as examples of their creative abilities.
They were sent a tape of an 'old gypsy woman' singing such songs and decided to include one in the programme, giving it to Sheila Stewart to sing. Immediately prior to the programme's release they discovered that the 'gypsy woman' was John Brune with a funny voice, singing his own songs - they were forced to remove it from the programme as it would have undermined the whole programme - 'a real gypsy song' written by a folkie. That is why Sheila, one of our finest traditional singers, never appeared in the programme.
Sheila tells this story herself in an interview published in The Living Tradition, so, unlike many of the ones told against MacColl and still circulating twenty odd year after his death, it is well authenticated.
Had the rather nasty stunt remained undiscovered it would have severely damaged the credibility of a programme that did more to make us aware of the hardships and abuses still being meted out to Travellers nearly a dozen years into the 21st century - think on't!
Jim Carroll