"Jimmy Miller was his real name, McColl his stage name."
Actually it wasn't - MacColl actually officially changed his name and never made a secret of that fact - not to those who knew him anyway.
His name-change had far more to do with his army career than his stage career.
I'm never sure why it's such an issue - never seems to be with that Zimmermann feller.
"What annoys me is how Bert and McColl 'allegedly' invented people to authenticate their words and songs."
Do you have any flesh and bones to this legend Mike?
I once spent an afternoon with two friends, Ruth and Eddie Frow, both of whom I'm sure you will know.
They regaled me with information of the huge number of songs Ewan's parents both had, particularly the number of 'bits of queer Scots ballads' William Miller used to sing - both Eddie and Ruth were contemporaries of Ewan's parents.
For instance, one of Ewan's sources, Harold Sladen, was a lodger with the Miller family, and well known as a singer.
I have become convinced that Ewan took many of those 'bits' and built them into full songs for the revival.
Never get tired of quoting this - the first contact Ewan had with the arts world,
"Ewan MacColl was himself a victim of the Depression. The son of an unemployed Glasgow steelworker, who had moved to Salford in search of work during the twenties, he had suffered every privation and humiliation that poverty could contrive for him from the age of ten. His memories of his early years are still bitter—like his recollection of how to kill aimless time in a world where there was nothing else to do: "You go in the Public Library. And the old men are there standing against the pipes to get warm, all the newspaper parts are occupied, and you pick a book up. I can remember then that you got the smell of the unemployed, a kind of sour or bitter-sweet smell, mixed in with the smell of old books, dust, leather and the rest of it. So now if I pick up, say, a Dostoievsky—immediately with the first page, there's that smell of poverty in 1931."
MacColl had been out busking for pennies by the Manchester theatres and cinemas. The songs he sang were unusual, Scots songs, Gaelic songs he had learnt from his mother, border ballads and folk-songs. One night while queueing up for the three-and-sixpennies, Kenneth Adam had heard him singing outside the Manchester Paramount. He was suitably impressed. Not only did he give MacColl a handout; he also advised him to go and audition for Archie Harding at the BBC studios in Manchester's Piccadilly.
PROSPERO AND ARIEL (The rise and fall of radio, a personal recollection – D G Bridson 1971)"
Adam's meeting with MacColl was circa 1934, at least a decade and a half before the Folk Song Revival was a twinkle in anybody's eye.
We are at present working on two radio programmes to commemorate the 100th anniversary of MacColl's birth.
One of the problems has been cutting through the urban legends surrounding the man - pretty much, "if it doesn't fit modern preconceptions it must have been invented".
Coincidentally - or not - we have met the same problems with comparing the information we received from field singers we interviewed with modern theories as to who wrote the folk songs.
There must be a great deal of researched information on these subjects that the rest of us aren't privy to - yet - perhaps one day....!
Jim Carroll