Ewan MacColl (1915–1989)

Ewan MacColl was a British folk singer, songwriter, socialist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer. He was the father of singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl. He collaborated with Joan Littlewood in the theatre and with Peggy Seeger in folk music.

Many of MacColl's best-known songs were written for the theatre. For example, he wrote "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" very quickly at the request of Peggy Seeger, who needed it for use in a play she was appearing in. He taught it to her by long-distance telephone, while she was on tour in the United States (from which MacColl had been barred because of his Communist past). This song became a #1 hit in 1972 when covered by Roberta Flack and won MacColl a Grammy Award for Song of the Year, while Flack received a Grammy Award for Record of the Year.

As a songwriter, MacColl is best known as the author of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Dirty Old Town," "The Shoals of Herring," "Freeborn Man" and "The Manchester Rambler." He has written more than 300 songs. Peggy Seeger has assembled 200 of these into The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook.

MacColl was born as James Henry Miller in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire to Scottish parents, William Miller and Betsy Miller née Hendry. Both of his parents were socialists and William Miller was an iron-moulder and militant trade unionist who had moved to Salford with his wife to look for work after being blacklisted in almost every foundry in Scotland.[1] They lived amongst a group of émigré Scots and Jimmie, their only surviving child of four, was brought up in an atmosphere of fierce political debate interspersed with the large repertoire of songs and stories his parents had brought from Scotland.[1] He left school in 1930 during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a life-long programme of self education whilst keeping warm in the Manchester Public Library.[1]

During this period he found intermittent work in a number of jobs and also made money as a street singer.[1] He joined the Young Communist League and the socialist amateur theatre troupe, the Clarion Players. He began his career as a writer helping produce, and contributing humorous verse and skits to some of the Communist Party's factory papers. He was an activist in the unemployed workers campaigns and the mass trespasses of the early 1930s. One of his best-known songs, "The Manchester Rambler", was written after the pivotal mass trespass of Kinder Scout. He was responsible for publicity in the planning of the trespass.[citation needed]

In 1932 the British counterintelligence service, MI5, began a file on MacColl, after the local police told them that the singer was a "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention".[2] For a time the Special Branch kept a watch on the Manchester home that he shared with his 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.