Subject: RE: Why didn't MacColl like Dylan?
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Apr 17 - 04:19 AM
This is the last time I have any intention of responding to this level of discussion - it is, as it always has done acted as a diversion away from the contribution MacColl made to Folk song
It's like dismissing Einstein's theory of relativity because he picked his nose - true or not - trivia.
Let's get the easy, hoary old chestnut out of the way first
"For the record, Ewen MacColl was born James Henry Miller." (Ewan - for the record)
For the record - Bob Dylan was was born Robert Zimmermann - do you people continually bring up that fact as a criticism of his work as an artist and will you be doing so a quarter of a century after his death?
What on earth is the relevance of this piece of trivia?
The reason MacColl changed his name is easy enough to work out, if it interests anybody enough.
He was first and foremost an actor and a playwright - go count the number of actors, singers, writers who changed their names from Archie Leech, or Ethel Gumm, or Doris Kapplehoff, or, more or to the point, from James Leslie Mitchell or Christopher Murray Grieve (the artists who influenced MacColl
Ewan had an added reason of altering his name as he was attempting to steer clear of the authorities (including MI5) in order to set u a working class agit-prop theatre.
"Stalinist"
Ewan had been a Stalinist, as had been a large section of the left and middle-left movement at a time in our history when Stalin was flavour of the month to millions of people and believed him to be the leader of the world's first Workers State.
Around the time of my birth, it might be said that the British statesmen of the day were 'Stalinists' because of the part Russia was playing in the war - I've yet to hear anybody refer to Winnie Churchill as a Stalinist"
Over the period I knew and worked with Ewan. I never got the slightest impression that he still held those views -
On the contrary, Ewan was first and foremost a humanist (with a small "h") who believed 'ordinary people were getting a shitty deal out of life and were nor recognised for either their achievements or their massive potential - a view I have always held as did my family before me.
Ewan's social songs (such as those he wrote for the Radio Ballads) reflect Ewan's humanism and his respect for working people perfectly
His political songs did not advocate the setting up of gulags or holding show trials (that was and still is a feature of contemporary politics such as the House Un-American Activity Courts of Joe McCarthy and later, Guantanamo (though the latter has even done away with the trials).
His political songs were observations on how he saw what was happening in the world at the time, the best of the philosophical ones probably being 'Song of Choice' and 'Seven Days of the Week'.
MacColl's 'feigned' Scottishness'
He was born into a Scots family, fairly recently come out of Scotland.
When I moved to London, I lived with Ewan, Peggy and Ewan's mother, Betsy for a short period.
At mealtimes, to listen to Ewan and Betsy talk was sometimes like sitting at a meal with an Urdu family - in those days I wasn't as familiar with the Scots dialect and vernacular as I am now.
Scots was MacColl family's form of communication.
Ewan adored the ballads and thought them important enough to keep them alive (he breathed fresh life into sometimes multiple versions 175 of the Child ballads in his career as a singer)
In order to make them accessible to as many people as possible, he adopted the old theatre trick of neutralising the accent he was familiar with at home.
It most certainly worked with me - I am still hooked on the ballads after half a century of listening to and singing them, thanks to his influence.
Ewan's earlier influence of Scots songs came from home too
I know from discussions with some of his early contempories, historian, Eddie Frow being the main one, that both his parents sang at home, particularly his father William, who "had hundreds of bits and pieces of queer old songs and ballads he would bust into whenever he'd had a few drinks".
This is a description of Ewans first being discovered singing for pennies in a cinema queue in the 1930s:
"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 Dostoevsky—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)"
I really can't be arsed to take this too much further
I don't care who likes or dislikes Ewan's or Dylan's singing - that is a matter of personal taste and has no place here
I personally believe Dylan to have been a user in his scramble to the top - that is the impression I got from reading what Joan Baez had to say about him, but h doesn't interest me enough beyond his effect on our understanding of our own traditional songs
I did not "change my story" about Dylan's Civil Rights attitude - I really don't care enough to make the effort on something so unimportant, though I am amused that people who are quite happy to denigrate one artist long after he is dead, leap on their chairs with their skirts above their knees when their own pop idol is criticised.
MacColl cared enough about traditional songs and about people to take his work as a singer far beyond entertainment and putting bums on seats and that got up the noses of a lot of people who saw it as a career that could be as viable as anything turned out my the music industry, and were prepared to compromise it in order to get there.
He wasn't a "grumpy old sod", Steve, at least not in my experience, but I'd be happy to compare our experiences over a pint - not here.
Jim Carroll
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