Ewan MacColl with his mother and Peggy Seeger

[banjostead]

My pleasure Dick,

Joe Stead

[dickmilesmusic]

absolutely brilliant, thanks for putting this up, dick miles

[banjostead]

it's strange how time clouds and changes perspectives.

[jamo387]

Doesn't matter anyway. The guy was a dopey commie. He sang the praises of mass murderer commies like this one from "The Ballad of Stalin":

"Joe Stalin was a mighty man and a mighty man was he

He led the Soviet people on the road to victory."

The guy was a F*cking idiot irrespective of his ethnicity.

[kariminns]

This is greatness, what an incredibly tallented family! She has such a sweet voice.

[DottyWang]

They took that axe and chopped down the dirty old town - and look what was built in its place. Where's the love they lived? My next-door neighbour died and I never found out for six months. I could cry for the destruction of Beijing. Two steps forward and one step back.

[swalta]

This is great, been looking everywhere but cant find the name of this song, could anyone help me out?

Cheers

[donnydumpling]

@swalta man was made to mourn

[birdstuckinchimney]

@donnydumpling Actually this is not the wonderful Rabbie Burns poem 'Man Was Made To Mourn', it's the wonderful Rabbie Tannahill poem 'A Wee Drappie O't''.

You can be forgiven for the confusion though as Burns obviously loaned the repeating schematic of his lyric from the first line of the verse of Tannahill's poem that is sung here.

[kirid23]

i remember seeing ewan mccoll and peggy seeger singing years back. Mesmerising. :-)

[fenian08]

guess thats why he wrote dirty old town and salfort town etc

[TerrySleeper]

I had always assumed that Maccoll was a Scottish guy, but, in fact, "Maccoll" was a showbiz name. He was born James Miller in Salford, now part of Greater Manchester. Just for info.

[missporrige]

Yeah, not a showbiz name though, Maccoll and Seeger were blacklisted so changed their names for legal reasons.

[KennBurch]

Jimmy Miller, who WAS Scottish(his mother and father were both Scots, so it's silly to say he wasn't)took the name "Ewan Maccoll" , the name of a 19th Century Scottish poet who wrote in the Lallans(Lowland Scots)language, as a symbol of his membership in the Lallans movement, a successful 1940's effort to revive the use of Lallans as a living creative language.

And Peggy Seeger NEVER changed her name. Not even to Peggy Maccoll when she and Ewan finally married in the 1970's.

[hetrodoxly]

@KennBurch

Jimmy Miller changed his name because he was on the run from the police, he had a great love of his birth place and the Lancashire mill towns, the fact he became part of the Lallans movement (half way house) which is Saxon in origin.

[KennBurch]

@hetrodoxly Whether or not the word Lallans was Saxon in origin, it was still a SCOTTISH literary movement and Ewan's parents were Scottish(his mother was Highland Scottish, his father was Lowland Scots). There is no good reason to try to deny Ewan's Scottish ethnicity. Why would anyone insist on doing that?

[KennBurch]

Respond to this video...And there is no contradiction in Ewan's love of his childhood home of Salford and his Scottish ethnic and cultural identity. There was a large Scottish exile community in Salford working in the mills.

Face it, he was Scottish and there's no reason to try to take that from him. It's not as if it makes him a superior person if you claim him as English.

[hetrodoxly]

@KennBurch

I've just stated some facts and mentioned nothing of what you claim? lallans isn't just a Saxon word it's a Saxon language it's now been accepted by the European commission pushed through by Northern Irish royalists.

[KennBurch]

@missporrige No. Peggy NEVER changed HER name. She was(and still IS) Peggy Seeger. Her father was Charles Seeger, the founder of the discipline of musicology, her younger brother was Mike Seeger, a solo performer and also a member of the New Lost City Ramblers...and, of course, her older half-brother is a guy named Pete who still plays banjo and leads singalongs.

[missporrige]

@KennBurch Haha okay dear calm down. I was talking about Ewan MacColl mainly anyway. If you look on my page, I did a play of his and had to do a lot of research about him.

[nlmaccoll]

billy? it's not kirsty. kirsty didn't spend time with peggy and ewan together. she saw ewan only at weekends when he could get there. the baby is neill

[rca88]

Wow, that was lovely. I have been able to find only one other clip of Ewan McColl singing on youtube. Lots of covers, though, which is great. And some pictures with music. I sure wish there was more of him actually singing, though.

[ivelleh]

Where did you find this wonderful clip? And the child is Kirsty or perhaps Billy? I've closely followed their lives and have nearly all of the original radio ballards on tape from the early sixties

[nlmaccoll]

curiouser and curiouser....

[KennBurch]

The little boy was Neill, Ewan and Peggy's first son, who was born in 1958.