>I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what Ewan MacCrap actually achieved!<

Terry,

I don't know what your gripe against MacColl is, but the next time you're in Oxford, you might want to call in at Ruskin College library. At the back of the library there is a room. In that room there are two enormous boxes of LP records. They represent the collective recorded output of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger.

Take a root through that box. Don't for the moment trouble yourself with the other ballad anthologies - Blood and Roses, The Long Harvest, the three LP Folkways ballad set, etc. Instead, dig out a set of nine LPs which Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd recorded for Riverside Records, New York. Eight of them are called the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and the ninth is an appendix called Great British Ballads Not In Child.

The set contains approximately 80 ballads, around 2/3 of which are by Ewan MacColl. Note the date of publication; 1956. That was before MacColl became a professional folk singer. That was in the days when most of his time was still being taken up as a working actor and playwright and singing was not very much more than a sideline. Perhaps you wouldn't regard the amassing of such a large repertoire under such conditions as much of an achievement but I certainly do. It is far bigger than any other ballad singer I ever came across, and I would back many of the versions which MacColl sang against most of the others we know about. What's more, I would argue that he was the greatest ballad singer who ever recorded.

While you're in that room, and if you haven't already heard them, you might want to play some of the radio ballads which have been deposited there. They weren't MacColl's sole creation of course, but they were a ground breaking conception and it is hard not to think of them as works of genius.

Take a look around that room. Wade through the piles of correspondence relating to the Singers Club, the Critics Group, The Festival of Fools, the Songcarriers and all the other projects with which MacColl engaged himself in a long and fruitful life. While you're at it, note the safety lamp which was donated to him by the National Union of Miners, and his honorary graduation gown from Exeter university. There's also a gold disc in there for sales of The First Time Ever, but we don't need to dwell too long on that.

When you've done with all these artefacts, stand back and look at the floor to ceiling stack of reel to reel tape recordings. Many of them are copies of other people's work which MacColl borrowed for various projects. But even when these are discounted that still leaves a formidable body of field recordings made by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. The singers they recorded include Joe Heaney, Harry Cox, George Dunn, the Stewarts of Blair and many other Scots travellers, the Elliots of Birtley and a large number of English travellers including Caroline Hughes.

The paper inventory of what's in that room runs to 34 single sided pages. Before you leave, take a look through the book of MacColl's self composed songs. It's pretty big.

I don't expect you to like MacColl's singing or to rate his compositions or to attach any artistic significance to the radio ballads. They are matters of personal taste. Equally, I am not an apologist for MacColl and I refuse point blank to join in any whitewashing exercises or to claim that his work was devoid of faults.

But to claim that the man never achieved anything is pretty damned pathetic.