The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #142469 Message #3851354
Posted By: GUEST,Some bloke
20-Apr-17 - 02:57 AM
Thread Name: Why didn't MacColl like Dylan?
Subject: RE: Why didn't MacColl like Dylan?
Nice one Al. When people use your music it certainly does become theirs. Over the years I've introduced songs from The Radio Ballads to new audiences by turning them towards different genres to that they were written in. Rock, mainly. Whether the old curmudgeon would have approved is another matter...
I suppose in the '60s with Wilson in government and universal suffrage, UK "folk" songwriters didn't see "freedom" in the same aspirational sense as those involved in the US civil rights movement. Dylan's prose was more abstract to UK listeners whilst those listening to MacColl could identify with more of his songs.
But to compare? I doubt I'd compare baroque with opera or compare Ballads with instrumental songs but judging by the thread title, some people obviously do. The thread degenerates into comparing based on your own tastes which can be silly. It also becomes a platform for Jim Carroll to dismiss anything to do with MacColl that he didn't know about. A regular feature on Mudcat.
(A bit of an aside; I was once asked to arrange a local operatics group performing light opera. As well as a medley of Gilbert and Sullivan, Benjamin Britten etc, I included MacColl & Seeger's "Cabin Boy" (from Singing The Fishing.). Musically within the same genre.)