Ewan MacColl

James Henry Miller (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989), better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was an English folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Dirty Old Town".
MacColl collected hundreds of traditional folk songs, including the version of "Scarborough Fair" later popularised by Simon & Garfunkel, and released dozens of albums with A.L. Lloyd, Peggy Seeger and others, mostly of traditional folk songs. He also wrote many left-wing political songs, remained a steadfast communist throughout his life and engaged in political activism.
He was husbands to Joan Littlewood, Jean Newlove (parents of singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl and Hamish MacColl), and Peggy Seeger (parents of Neill MacColl, Calum MacColl and Kitty MacColl).
==Links to Peel==
Peel seemed to not have played Ewan MacColl's music on his shows, except for a track that was played on a documentary that he was presenting called As I Roved Out: A Century Of Folk Music in 1999. Ewan and his wife, Peggy Seeger were associated with the more doctrinaire faction of the folk scene rather than the beatnik/hippy folk artists Peel favoured, although the latter did a session for his Night Ride show in 1969. 
Interestingly in 1932 the British intelligence service, MI5, opened a file on MacColl, after local police asserted that he was "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention". For a time the Special Branch kept a watch on the Manchester home that he shared with his first wife, Joan Littlewood. MI5 caused some of MacColl's songs to be rejected by the BBC, and prevented the employment of Littlewood as a BBC children's programme presenter[
. Presumably this ban had been lifted by the time MacColl, in collaboration with producer Charles Parker, made the famous Radio Ballads series for the BBC, between 1957 and 1964. 
Peel's producer John Walters visited MacColl and Seeger's Singers' Club in London in the mid-1970s and in his Zigzag column humorously described a cult-like atmosphere where he felt out of place, as if they suspected him of "voting Liberal". Whether this had any influence on Peel's attitude to MacColl's music is uncertain, but it may just have been that the singer didn't appeal to him. When the DJ's hero Captain Beefheart mentioned in a phone call that he'd been listening to Ewan MacColl records, Peel offered to send him some albums by Martin Carthy. 
The DJ doesn't seem to have played any of the many covers of MacColl's best-known songs, even if both the Pogues and Rod Stewart recorded popular versions of his "Dirty Old Town".
==Shows Played==
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*As I Roved Out: A Century Of Folk Music: The Shoals of Herring
==External Links==
*Wikipedia
*Discogs
Category:Artists