Shimrod. Hear bloody hear. I don't find MacColl's singing of Jock Hawk the least bit hilarious. Granted it was recorded early in his career, and it's possibly not the best example of his singing. It is incidentally, a long way from being the best example of his singing on that paricular record.

But it was cut at a time when he was trying out different approaches to different songs. Some of them worked and some of them didn't. As befits someone who was own severest critic, he generally scrapped the ones which didn't.

BTW. I note that Bothy Ballads of Scotland, the LP from which Jock Hawk comes, wasn't released until 1961. That's just three years before his masterpiece, The Manchester Angel, and five years after the material from which the Topic Ballads set comes. In compiling that particular release, I was struck by how inconsistent his singing must have been at that time. Some of the tracks, EG., The Cruel Mother and Clyde's Water, are simply devastating. Others, and I'm thankful that the 2 CD limit which Topic Records imposed on me, meant there was no room to include them, show a much more uncertain performer; someone who was still grappling with the problems of ballad interpretation.

But what was the point of starting this thread anyway?