The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #105162 Message #4022366
Posted By: GUEST,Pseudonymous
05-Dec-19 - 07:15 PM
Thread Name: 2007 Ewan MacColl Bio - Class Act
Subject: RE: 2007 Ewan MacColl Bio - Class Act
Regarding the name change, Harker takes what seems to me to be a reasonable approach. When he writes of the years when Jimmy Miller was known as Jimmy Miller, he calls him 'Jimmy'. Then, from the time when MacColl changed his name, he refers to him as MacColl.
I have found the book fascinating (and I speak as somebody born in the 1950s who knew very little about MacColl before reading it, though I did know something of Joan Littlewood and her left-wing theatre work!)
For example, MacColl, the book tells me, read and enjoyed the works of Lewis Grassic Gibbon - another pseudonymous writer - whose works I have recently begun to read. The book is full of such details, and seems to me to have been well-researched.
I think that MacColl's first meeting with Alan Lomax might have been a significant point, though he had done singing work before that. See page 95 and the section following it. Lomax seems to have been the first to take MacColl for a recording session (apart from radio work). This took place in 1951.