page_title: The Manchester Rambler
section_title: Folk song
hierarchical_section_title: The Manchester Rambler / Folk song
caption_attribution_description: English: The Wainstones. A rocky outcrop on the west side of Hasty Bank. A popular place for novice rock climbers.
context_page_description: "The Manchester Rambler", also known as "I'm a Rambler" and "The Rambler's Song", is a song written in 1932 by the English folk singer Ewan MacColl. It was inspired by his participation in the Kinder trespass, a protest by the urban Young Communist League of Manchester, and was the work that began MacColl's career as a singer-songwriter.
  Since the 1950s, the song has become a standard among folk musicians, as it was for MacColl himself. It has been covered many times, including by The Dubliners and The Houghton Weavers. It has been sung both in clubs and in the open air on a variety of occasions, including at Kinder Downfall in 2009 when Kinder was designated as a National Nature Reserve.
context_section_description: "The Manchester Rambler", written in 1932 not long after the Kinder trespass and inspired by that event, was Ewan MacColl's first important song, according to Harker, who argues that it "marks a departure from the [singer's] leaden-footed and slogan-heavy juvenilia". It is also the first song that still survives for which he wrote the melody as well as the lyrics. Its swinging, jaunty melody demonstrates MacColl's ability to combine musical forms and popular rhythms to create a song which is at once familiar and unique. Like the melody, the lyrics are witty and playful. They put out a defiant political message with "I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday". MacColl plays with and updates traditional English folksong phraseology with "I once loved a maid, a spot-welder by trade / She was fair as the Rowan in bloom". The lyrics are suitably comical on the confrontation between the ramblers and the gamekeepers in the style of musical theatre, argues Harker, with lines such as "He called me a louse and said 'Think of the grouse'". The song has 5 verses, each of 8 lines, and a 4-line chorus.
  The song names the following places: Snowdon (North Wales); Crowden (by the Woodhead pass road in Derbyshire); the Wainstones (on the Bleaklow plateau in Derbyshire); Kinder Scout; Manchester; Grindsbrook and Upper Tor (both Edale, Derbyshire).
  "The Manchester Rambler" is published by Green Linnet on Ewan MacColl's 1996 CD "Black and White: The Definitive Collection", also released by Cooking Vinyl Records; the recording lasts 4 minutes 42 seconds, and MacColl is assisted on vocals by his wife, the folk singer Peggy Seeger.
caption: The Wainstones on the  Bleaklow plateau are among the places named in the song.
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