ABSTRACT
My focus in this chapter is on a general issue that is rarely addressed. Although Ewan MacColl’s various roles as playwright and activist, as songwriter and animateur, are widely discussed (for example Watson 1983, 179-203; Brocken 2003, esp. 25-41; Verrier 2004; Harker 2007; Cox 2008), there is nothing extant on MacColl as singer. To the extent that he is foundational to the British folk revival, then how he sang (not just how he acted in the context of singing) is crucial to how other singers developed. MacColl did, on a couple of occasions, refer to certain aesthetic aspects of the act of singing. There is a passage in his autobiography where he comments on the rethinking of ballad singing which he undertook from about 1980, when he chose to become conscious of the singing choices to be made (MacColl, 2009, 334-41). One of the remarkable things about this passage is that he openly admits that some of the more instinctive choices he had made two or more decades earlier were not necessarily successful. Some of these ideas also find their way into the interviews in this volume. But even here, his comments remain at a fairly general level. My aim in this chapter is to probe deeper, to begin to approach MacColl’s idiolect and, most importantly, to try to discover to what extent that idiolect relates to the tradition MacColl was so keen to maintain.
