Ewan MacColl: who built the folk clubs of the British folk revival

Ewan MacColl: from Salford to the British folk revival

Ewan MacColl was born James Henry Miller on 25 January 1915 at 4 Andrew Street, Broughton, in Salford. His father, William Miller, was an iron moulder and a trade unionist; his mother, Betsy, came like her husband from a Scottish family, and both were committed socialists.

He grew up in the slump years of industrial Lancashire, and politics came before music. In 1931 he formed the Red Megaphones, an agit-prop street theatre group made up of unemployed young members of the Clarion Players. In 1934 the group became the Theatre of Action, and that year he married Joan Littlewood, the actor and director with whom he would spend the next decade and a half making radical theatre. In 1936 the two of them set up Theatre Union in Manchester.

Theatre Workshop and "Dirty Old Town"

In 1945 James Miller took the name Ewan MacColl, influenced by the Lallans movement, the revival of literary Scots then under way in Scotland. A year later Theatre Union members and others formed Theatre Workshop, with Littlewood as producer and MacColl as its dramaturge, art director and resident playwright. Its plays mixed song, movement and documentary material, a method that would shape much of what MacColl did later on radio.

One of those plays, Landscape with Chimneys, was staged in 1949. For it MacColl wrote "Dirty Old Town", a portrait of Salford's industrial streets drawn from the city he had grown up in. It reached a far bigger audience years later through other singers. The Dubliners released it as a single in 1968, and the Pogues recorded it on Rum Sodomy & the Lash in 1985. Rod Stewart included it on his first solo album, and the Pogues' version is played as Salford City walk out at home matches.

The folk clubs and the policy of your own tradition

By the early 1950s MacColl was turning from theatre to song, and he became one of the central figures of what is now called the second British folk revival. With the American collector Alan Lomax, the Irish piper and singer Seamus Ennis and A. L. Lloyd, he helped start the Ballads and Blues club in London; the date and early shape of the club are disputed, but in time it became the Singers' Club, with which MacColl and Peggy Seeger were closely associated. It kept going until 1993.

The club scene grew fast once the skiffle craze of roughly 1955 to 1959 had put guitars into thousands of young hands. By the mid-1960s there were probably more than three hundred folk clubs in Britain. Many met weekly in a back room or upstairs room of a pub, with a group of resident singers and a slot for floor singers, members of the audience who stood up to sing a song or two of their own.

MacColl's contribution was a rule, and an argument. At his club, singers were expected to perform songs from their own tradition, so an English singer sang English songs and did not put on an American accent for a cowboy ballad. Clubs that followed the same line became known as policy clubs. The policy was controversial at the time and is still argued over, but it sent a generation of singers back to their own regional and occupational songs: mining, weaving, farming and the sea. The club circuit he helped build is the one later singers came up through; our history page picks up a later chapter of British folk and naval song.

The Radio Ballads with Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger

MacColl's most original work was made for radio. Between 1958 and 1964 he, the BBC producer Charles Parker and the American singer and musician Peggy Seeger made eight programmes known as the Radio Ballads. Each one was built from the recorded voices of the people it was about, cut together with new songs MacColl wrote from their words and with music arranged and directed by Seeger. There was no presenter and no script read by an actor: railwaymen, fishermen, miners and boxers told their own story, and the songs carried it forward.

The first, The Ballad of John Axon, went out on the BBC Home Service on 2 July 1958. Axon, a Stockport engine driver, had stayed on the footplate of a runaway freight train near Chapel-en-le-Frith in February 1957 and was killed; he was awarded the George Cross after his death. Singing the Fishing, broadcast in August 1960, won the Prix Italia for radio documentary that October, Its subject, the men and women who followed the herring down the coast, makes it the Radio Ballad closest to the sea.

"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

MacColl wrote his best-known love song in 1957 for Peggy Seeger, who needed a song for a play she was appearing in. He wrote it quickly and taught it to her over the telephone from England. The two married in 1977 and performed together until his death. Roberta Flack recorded the song on her first album, First Take, in 1969, and when it was released as a single in 1972 it spent six weeks at number one in the United States and was the biggest American single of that year. Flack won the Grammy for Record of the Year, and MacColl, as the writer, won Song of the Year.

The song is still in copyright, so no lines are quoted here. MacColl's own recordings of it with Seeger are the easiest place to hear it as he wrote it.

A. L. Lloyd and the sea-song side of the revival

The revival's sea songs came above all from MacColl's partnership with Albert Lancaster Lloyd, known as Bert. Lloyd, born in London in 1908, had worked on sheep stations in New South Wales as a young man and in 1937 signed on the whaling factory ship Southern Empress for a season in the Antarctic. He wrote Folk Song in England, one of the standard books on the subject, sang a shanty in John Huston's 1956 film of Moby Dick, and was artistic director of Topic Records until his death in 1982.

Together MacColl and Lloyd recorded the whaling songs of Thar She Blows! and the shanties and forebitters of Blow Boys Blow, both released in 1957, along with a long series of the Child ballads. Those records put working sea songs back into circulation among young urban singers, and many folk-club singers learned their shanties from them. The thread runs on through our guides to sea shanties and Royal Navy songs, and to modern groups such as the Fisherman's Friends.

MacColl died at Brompton Hospital in London on 22 October 1989, after complications following heart surgery. His children include the singer Kirsty MacColl, from his second marriage to Jean Newlove, and three children with Peggy Seeger. A bench in Russell Square carries a plaque in his memory.