32 Facts About Ewan MacColl

James Henry Miller, better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor.

Ewan MacColl wrote many left-wing political songs, remaining a steadfast communist throughout his life and engaging in political activism.

Ewan MacColl was born as James Henry Miller at 4 Andrew Street, in Broughton, Salford, England, to Scottish parents, William Miller and Betsy, both socialists.

Ewan MacColl was educated at North Grecian Street Junior School in Broughton.

Ewan MacColl left school in 1930 after an elementary education, during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a lifelong programme of self-education whilst keeping warm in Manchester Central Library.

Ewan MacColl joined the Young Communist League and a socialist amateur theatre troupe, the Clarion Players.

Ewan MacColl began his career as a writer helping produce and contributing humorous verse and skits to some of the Communist Party's factory papers.

Ewan MacColl was an activist in the unemployed workers' campaigns and the mass trespasses of the early 1930s.

Ewan MacColl was responsible for publicity in the planning of the trespass.

In 1932 the British intelligence service, MI5, opened a file on Ewan MacColl, after local police asserted that he was "a communist with very extreme views" who needed "special attention".

Ewan MacColl collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre, and with Seeger in folk music.

Ewan MacColl enlisted in the British Army during July 1940, but deserted in December.

Allan Moore and Giovanni Vacca wrote that Ewan MacColl had been subject to Special Observation whilst in the King's Regiment, owing to his political views, and that the records show that, rather than being discharged, he was declared a deserter on 18 December 1940.

When, in 1953 Theatre Workshop decided to move to Stratford, London, Ewan MacColl, who had opposed that move, left the company and changed the focus of his career from acting and playwriting to singing and composing folk and topical songs.

In 1947, Ewan MacColl visited a retired lead-miner named Mark Anderson in Middleton-in-Teesdale, County Durham, England, who performed to him a song called "Scarborough Fair"; Ewan MacColl recorded the lyrics and melody in a book of Teesdale folk songs, and later included it on his and Peggy Seeger's The Singing Island.

Ewan MacColl produced a number of LPs with Irish singer songwriter Dominic Behan, a brother of Irish playwright Brendan Behan.

In 1956, Ewan MacColl caused a scandal when he fell in love with 21-year-old Peggy Seeger, who had come to Britain to transcribe the music for Alan Lomax's anthology Folk Songs of North America.

At the time Ewan MacColl, who was twenty years older than Peggy, was still married to his second wife.

Seeger and Ewan MacColl recorded several albums of searing political commentary songs.

In 2001, The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook was published, which includes the words and music to 200 of his songs.

Ewan MacColl taught it to her by long-distance telephone, while she was on tour in the United States.

Seeger said that Ewan MacColl used to send her tapes to listen to whilst they were apart and that the song was on one of them.

In 1959, Ewan MacColl began releasing LP albums on Folkways Records, including several collaborative albums with Peggy Seeger.

Ewan MacColl has a short biography of his work in the accompanying book of the Topic Records 70-year anniversary boxed set Three Score and Ten.

In 1992, after his death, Peggy Seeger included it as an annex in her Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, saying that she had originally planned to exclude the song on the grounds that Ewan would not have wanted it included, but decided to include it as an example of his work in his early career.

Ewan MacColl sang and composed numerous protest and topical songs for the nuclear disarmament movement, for example "Against the Atom Bomb", The Vandals, Nightmare, and Nuclear Means Jobs.

Ewan MacColl dedicated an entire album to the lifestyle of Gypsies in his 1964 album The Travelling People.

Ewan MacColl stated that he had been a member of the Communist Party but left because he felt that the Soviet Union was "not communist or socialist enough".

In 1957 producer Charles Parker asked Ewan MacColl to collaborate in the creation of a feature programme about the heroic death of train driver John Axon.

Ewan MacColl produced a script that incorporated the actual voices and so created a new form that they called the radio ballad.

Ewan MacColl wrote the scripts and songs, as well as, with the others, collecting the field recordings which were the heart of the productions.

Ewan MacColl died in a boating accident in Mexico in 2000.