"MacColl didn't put his finger in his ear"
Oh, come on - I've been hammering that point since I joined this forum. I knew Ewan and Bert and I know why they sang the way they did.
The technique is centuries, probably millenia old. It is used so the singer can hear the sound of his/her voice and so, keep in tune. If some of the people who took the piss out of it used it themselves, perhaps we'd have less out-of tuners.
Jim Carroll