Subject: RE: Folklore: What did you do in the war, Ewan?
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 19 Dec 09 - 03:52 AM
Perhaps I should clarify my position regarding MacColl.
I have been an admirer of his singing since some time in the early sixties when I was given one of his albums for my 21st birthday.
I first met him around 1967, when he and Peggy offered me the use of their spare room and recording equipment in order to copy some of their field recordings. They also offered their help and advice in facilitating my setting up a singers' workshop in Manchester.
A year later Ewan invited me to join the Critics Group, which I jumped at, and in 1969 I moved to London; again, they offered me a bed for the weeks it took me to find a home and work.
I was (and remain) extremely impressed by the workshop technique Ewan had devised to help singers improve – 'groundbreaking' is the word that springs to mind.
I remained a member of The Critics Group until it broke up a couple of years later. Pat, who I met in the Group, had been a member for a couple of years before I moved South.
When the group was disbanded in order to form an acting company, we continued our friendship with Ewan and Peggy, remained members of the audience committee of The Singers Club and became residents. Our friendship lasted until Ewan's death in 1989 and Peggy's move to the US shortly after.
In 1978, sometime after the end of the C.G., Pat and I approached Ewan and asked him if he would agree to be interviewed and in the September we made a start, carrying on till the following February.
Our objective was to get as much information as we could about his approach to singing, his collecting work, his teaching methods, (Laben, Stanislavsky, relaxation and voice exercises etc….) which we stuck to over the six months. At one stage wires became a little crossed as Ewan believed us to be recording information for a biography, while we were neither interested nor qualified to tackle such a project. We finished the job and later got permission to make copies of all the recordings that had been made of Critics Group meetings from its beginning (around 250 cassettes worth).
Any knowledge I have of MacColl and his work comes from the above.
At no time have I been interest whatever in defending MacColl from the personal attacks that are par for the course whenever his name is mentioned. Nor have I any interest in covering up his faults; I was close enough over a long period to see many of those first hand, but none of them merit the dishonest shit thrown at him (throughout his singing life and up to twenty years after his death). I will try and set the record straight when something comes up that I know to be untrue and unfair, I feel I owe him that much – but that's as far as it goes.
MacColl's and Peggy's generosity towards other, less experienced singers, the time and effort they put in with us, the use of their home and library, the times they volunteered their services without cost in order to help set up new clubs (4 we've been involved with) – all this while the other 'superstars' of the revival were seeing to their own careers – make Ewan and Peggy a bit special in my book. I know of no other established singers apart from a couple of ex-Critics who involved themselves in such work (if we took anything away from our time in he C.G. it was to pass on what we had and what we'd learned).
As far as I'm concerned MacColl's legacy to folk music, the books, albums, songs, recordings, the 137 Child ballads he breathed new life into…… is more than enough to identify him for what he was and achieved, and that is what will remain when P O'B's (et al) bilious vomit is swilled down the drain hole of history.
Earlier on Winger was astute enough to suggest that I was "fuel for P O'B's flame".
Again, let me make my position clear. I welcome any opportunity to discuss MacColl and his work as he was an important part of my life and also a vital figure in the revival that has given me and many others so much pleasure and interest, in my case approaching half-a-century's worth. I sometimes wish that these discussions did not take place at the 'village idiot' level that this and other such have plummeted to on occasion, but beggars can't be choosers. When I do get pissed off with the childish vitriol being slung about, I can always fall back on the fact that these threads are often started by the type of people who find it acceptable, even amusing, to attempt to publicly humiliate a guest singer (any singer) at a folk club by scrawling "arsehole' on the back of his chair (though let me hasten to add that our o.p. only stood on the sidelines cheering, not being in possession of either the bottle or the imagination to devise such a stunt himself, but was content to leave it to somebody else).
Pretty indicative of the level of some of these debates, I'd say.
Jim Carroll
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sj
