Hardly grave-dancing, old man - I was bitching about Ewan MacColl's so-called politics on the letters page of Folk Roots when he was still alive. Alas I no longer have a copy of the appropriate number but this was back around 1987 or so - I signed myself Ralph Harris (as a private joke between myself and a certain Dancing Jim Wetherspoon) and the FR letter's editor gave it the heading Ewan Whose Army? which I thought was rather neat. I referenced the present thread on Lucy Wright's recent Miners' Strike thread which meantioned Ewan MacColl's Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?, the somewhat divisively propagandist title of which I parodied here.

I still stand by what I wrote 20+ years back in the letters page of Folk Roots, the gist of which was for the well-healed middle-class folk fraternity to resist the urge to romantise the real-life struggles of the working classes for the furtherance of their soppy art and stick to what they actually know about. Reducing the complexities of working-class culture to convenient socialist polemic by way of protest song is paternalist political nannying of the worst order.

So there.

Sweeney O'Pibroch, WCAP&FOXC&CLTTF (Working-Class Anarchist, Pissed & Full of Xmas Cheer & Contentedly Listening to The Fall)