The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142157 Message #3286899
Posted By: Jim Carroll
08-Jan-12 - 04:00 AM
Thread Name: M. Carthy on The Critics Group - Radio 4
Subject: RE: M. Carthy on The Critics Group - Radio 4
"It appeared to me that Ewan was telling people how it should be done."
MacColl did no more or less than any other tutor, lecturer, teacher, writer, group leader.... on any subject you would care to name - he passed on his opinion based on his experience in order to help a bunch of people who VOLUNTARILY went each week to hear him do so - no bars on the windows, no electronic tags - we were there because we wanted to be. His efforts were solely for those of us who turned up, not for the revival in general (my main criticism of the work was that it didn't get a wider airing)
I was a member of the Critics Group for a couple of years; (Pat for three years longer). I was a friend of Ewan and recipient of his generosity from 1968 to his death - around 20 years in all - we still count Peggy among our friends.
In both of them we found two people who were top of their particular tree, yet who were prepared to spend time and effort with newer and less experienced singers like us, open their home once a week to work with us, share their field recordings, library and record collection and result of their skills, experience and researches - all while singers on the scene in similar positions got on with their careers.
The end result of their generosity appears to be that, whenever MacColl's name is mentioned - now a dozen years after his death - he becomes a target for any ill-informed (and usually tailor-made) shit that can be dug up - here, for example, people would rather discuss Alex Campbell's and Peggy's sex life rather than the subject in hand The Critics Group.
I suggesst that if you are genuinely interested in MacColl's work and ideas, and how he put them across (which I doubt), you dig out some of the (around 300 hours in all) recordings of the Critics meetings housed at Birmingham Central Library, The National Sound Archive in London or at Ruskin College, rather than basing your somewhat unpleasantly snide analysis of his work on a few selected sound clips (sorry - reducing Ewan's method of work to telling people "how it should be done" is about as snide as it gets).
Jim Carroll
By the way - I was intrigued by your "successful electrician" description of me - I spent my working life as a jobbing domestic maintenance and installation electrician - state educated (Secondary Modern) and retired on a state pension; my only "success" was to be regularly empoyed through most of my working life.
The only thing that made me any different from any other worker on this planet was that, for a time, at the end of a days work I washed, bolted down my meal and went off to record traditional singers - now there's "success" for you.