Ewan MacColl was born in 1915, in the city of Salford, in industrial Lancashire, of Scottish parents. He was a playwright, actor, singer of British traditional songs and a song-writer. Along with people like A.L.Lloyd he founded the British Folk Revival which starting in the late 1950s/1960s and is still going today.

In the early 1960s the Pop Industry invented a form of light, rather fluffy, mainly guitar-based, acoustic music which they called 'folk music'. A bit later some (mainly American) singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, and others, moved this fluff a bit closer to American traditional music.

Many people went to British Folk Clubs hoping to hear such fluff - and in some clubs they got it. But in other clubs they encountered something completely different in the form of the sort of real traditional songs favoured by Ewan MacColl and his followers; they also occasionally encountered his rather fierce brand of Left Wing politics. Some of those people, like me, for example, realised that MacColl's ballads and songs were what they had been looking for all their lives. But others, whose limited imaginations couldn't take them beyond the fluff, hated him - and they still hate today, nearly 23 years after his death.

But he was a giant and a genius (the only one that I ever met) and the mental pygmies who couldn't cope with that genius, when they first encountered him, still can't cope with it today, nearly 23 years after his death. They still try to blacken his name on threads like this - but they won't succeeed.