Ewan MacColl (1915–1989)

It's hard to write a review of this book. I feel that I should be telling it -- passing it on as oral tradition. No, I didn't know Ewan MacColl -- I only saw him once in my life, on one of his very last tours of the United States; it was a small place, but I did not talk to him or to Peggy Seeger. Yet I know and have known many people who were far closer to him, and people who argue over his legacy to this day.

There is a lot to argue over. MacColl was a busy man -- first in industrial work (or perhaps I should say in failing to find industrial work), then in theatre, then in radio and folk music. He was a man born in northern England who became a singer of Scottish songs. He was a teacher who never really learned what it was he taught. He made up songs when he had no reason to do so -- and then continued at a time when, arguably, he had reason not to do so. It is a career of contradictions.

And this autobiography brings those contradictions home. He spends far too many pages talking about the sexual dreams of his adolescence, then skips the entire period of World War II (when he was of prime fighting age, since he was born in 1915). He talks about the struggles of the theater companies he tried to sustain, without really examining the deep dark problem: if you're going to be an entertainer (which MacColl was for almost all of the last half century of his life), then your job is to entertain. Didacticism is not entertainment. Want to teach? Be a teacher.

If there is a problem here, it is that lack of reflection. MacColl, by most accounts I've heard, had a tendency to think that he deserved to be in charge -- that he was allowed to criticize others but was not to be criticized himself. There are hints of that here, as groups and troupes he founded split up or rejected him. Yet he does not seem to have realized that he was the problem, despite what was clearly an acid tongue. Nor does he seem to realize how that influenced the internal dynamics of his relationship with Peggy Seeger (who perhaps gets too little attention here; at least, despite their closeness, the words here don't give me much feeling for who Peggy was and is) -- a rich subject that doesn't get enough attention, given how much the two of them, as a team, affected folk music.

Then, too, MacColl has a bad tendency to be black and white. Were the industrial workers of northern England, including MacColl himself, oppressed and abused? They sure were, and they needed to do something. Did it have to be communism? A good, solid union might have been sufficient. And it might have been possible, which communism never was. (Remember, this is the era of Stalin.) MacColl never seems to address the inner contradictions of communism -- the fact that it ignores the extreme selfishness of individuals. This even though, for most of his life, he did not build or make or grow things but sang or wrote. (I never cease to be amazed at the number of intellectuals who seem to be communists because they think a communist society will appreciate their Art and so let them be artists rather than doing something useful like digging ditches.)

I was a little surprised, too, by the lack of balance. I hadn't realized how much effort MacColl put into the theatre before discovering that his real talent was as a musician. To spend so much space on his theatrical career is perhaps "correct," in terms of time, but I'd like to have known more about his relationship with his music -- the traditional songs, not the ones he wrote. But MacColl, by writing as he did, has told us about the years when we did not know him.

Sadly, the result of this is often bitter. MacColl complains about the performers who aren't very good, the politicians who aren't very honest, the people who aren't very smart. And of course all of those are real. Yet it leaves a bad taste. Far better to finish with the words that he wrote as a farewell to his family, which should have been his elegy but which he instead left two chapters from the end:
Farewell to you, my love,
My time is almost done;
Lie in my arms once more
Until the darkness comes...
...I'll be riding the gentle wind
That blows through your hair,
Reminding you how we shared
In the joy of living.

Yet if MacColl said too much after his farewell, I have to say something, too: This is one of the giants of the folk revival. You may not enjoy what you read (obviously I frequently didn't), but if you are interested in that world, this is a book you should read.… (plus d'informations)

The first of the BBC's radio ballads on themes of the life, work, and sometimes death of ordinary people, this remains a classic of the genre. It tells the story of how John Axon, an engine driver at Stockport (Edgeley), went out on an ordinary day with an ordinary freight train and died when his engine developed a brake fault and ran away on a down gradient before colliding with an empty train in Chapel-en-le-Frith station. For staying with his train under appalling conditions to try to bring it under control, he was awarded a posthumous George Cross (a level of official recognition of the bravery of ordinary workers which happens all too infrequently nowadays).

Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker did more than just re-tell the story of the day's events; they went out to interview the colleagues Axon worked with, and his widow. Their actual voices were heard on national broadcast radio; the first time this had happened, making "The ballad of John Axon" totally ground-breaking, both in terms of documentary sound recording (especially with the primitive equipment available in 1957) and in terms of media.

The actuality recordings were married to contemporary folk songs composed by MacColl; these are in the idiom of the time, and some would sound a bit too refined and "drawing-room" if taken out of the context of the whole programme. However, within the context of the overall sound portrait they work well.

This important recording has been unavailable for far too long. It is a fine memorial to John Axon and to MacColl, Parker and to Peggy Seeger (still with us), who did much of the orchestration for the production.… (plus d'informations)

I'm not sure what this book is about, but I like it anyway.

Most folk song books have an organizing principle. "Folk songs of somewhere." "The songs of so-and-so." "Songs of workers-in-this-job." This isn't really any of those -- yes, it says they're songs of Scotland, but there are far more songs of Scotland than you'll find in this book; more than a thousand have been collected in Aberdeenshire alone! Nor are these songs that Ewan MacColl collected (he picked up a few of them, but most are things he learned from other professional singers). Nor are they of a particular type or date.

In other words, this is a book of songs that Ewan MacColl thought would be good to put in a book of songs. An unusual principle, but not a bad one. There are a lot of good songs in here, with words, music, chords, and glossary.

The one real lack is background information. There are brief notes to most of the songs, but they aren't always adequate. The back pages list "Sources and Recordings of the Songs," but his is brief and hard to use -- and you have to know a lot of little secrets, such as which of MacColl's source books are reputable and which are not. Oh, and it helps to know that Ewan MacColl was actually Jimmy Miller, and the Betsy Miller he claims to have had so many songs from was... his mother.

In summary, this isn't the greatest book for the ballad scholar (you might as well go directly to the sources) -- but if you just want a book of highly singable Scottish songs, go for it.… (plus d'informations)