"Ewan is the worst example of fake accents"
For crying out loud - no he wasn't
Ewan probably grew up with a Scots Salford accent, just as many kids born in England of Irish families grew up with a mixture of their parents accents and those they learned outside the home -
I now have a hybrid accent, originally Liverpudlian, now tainted with Mancunian, West Londonese and West of Ireland
Hamish henderson once described Ewan's accent as "idiosyncratic" (not phoney), which was about right.
I lived with Ewan, Peggy and Ewan's mother Betsy for over a month - when Ewan and Betsy got going they may have been talking Urdu, it was sometimes that impenetrable
His interest in ballads led him o deliberately neutralising his childhood accent to make them accessible to others, much as an actor wold do for a role - as far as I'm concerned, it worked - it was his and Pegy's singing of ballads that got me hooked on them for a lifetime
If MacColl has snided at other performers the way 'fellow performers and enthusiasts' are still doing three decades after his death, he would have deserved every lump of shit that was thrown at him - he never did, not in my hearing anyway
As Peggy one wrote in 'The Living Tradition, if people are not interested in what Ewan said or did, it's about time they let him lie in peace - he's no longer here to answer for himself"
Jim Carroll