Why waste your time listening to MacColl's programmes about the ins and outs of folk music. Choose one of the many other versions instead.

There's always.... let's think, didn't Richard Stilgoe do a programme about folk music once, back in the 70s? Or was it Steve Race, another radical musicologist.

Or really get up to date, and go on Twitter. So many MBAs in traditional folk music these days that there must be thousands of fellow academics willing and ready to share their views.

Or...

Until history throws up a new MacColl, man or woman, with his dynamism, his passion, his knowledge, his skills (to which anyone who saw him in front of an audience can attest), then for god's sake temper your often-justified criticism with heart-felt thanks that Ewan MacColl lived, and lived in our time.

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