The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #160405 Message #3805411
Posted By: Jim Carroll
16-Aug-16 - 02:52 PM
Thread Name: Stop The Ewan Maccoll Bickering !!!
Subject: RE: Stop The Ewan Maccoll Bickering !!!
Ewan's metier was humour rather than belly-laughs, though there's an excellent rendition of William McGonagall's Tay Bridge Disaster by him on the Poetry and Song series of Albums. We have a two hour Critics Group class on Humourous songs - a marvelous example of how serious humour can be. His Chairlie Plenderleith Highland stories were classics and he wrote a brilliant satire on The British Empire entitled 'Great Grooting Brit and Ha-Muric-Ha' for one of the Festival of Fools (intended to go out on disc but never made it - we have it somewhere) I have to say, I found some of his attempts to satarise politicians too heavy-handed and unsubtle for my taste (Dracumag springs to mind) His rendition of the ballad, 'The Duke of Athol's Nurse', remains one of my all-time favourites. Looked on The web, but can't find the photo of him swinging from a tree by one arm in his back-garden - that's here somewhere too. He could be very funny when to mood took him, but it's not the thing I tend to remember about him.