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Ewan MacColl is widely recognized as a key figure in the English folk revival, who tried to convey traditional music to a mass audience. Dominant in the movement during the 1950s and much of the 1960s, his position has come under attack in more recent years from some scholars. While it would be arrogant to claim to 'set the record straight', this book will contribute significantly to the debate surrounding MacColl's importance. MacColl gave two extended interviews with co-editor Giovanni Vacca in 1987 and 1988, not long before his death, and these provide the impetus for a re-examination of his methods, his politics and his aesthetic aims. The book also provides critical overviews of MacColl's activities in the revival and of his practices, particularly as writer and singer. The time is ripe for such a contribution, following Peter Cox's study of the Radio Ballads, and in the context of biographies by Joan Littlewood and Frankie Armstrong. The contributions locate MacColl in his own historical context, attempting to understand some of the characteristic techniques through which he was able to write and sing such extraordinary songs, which capture so well for others the detail and flavour of their lives. Great emphasis is placed on the importance of seeing MacColl as not only a British, but a European folk activist, through discussion of his hitherto barely known work in Italy, enabling a re-contextualization of his work within a broader European context. The interviews themselves are fluent and fascinating narrations in which MacColl discusses his life, music, and experiences in the theatre and in the folk music revival as well as with a series of issues concerning folk music, politics, history, language, art and other theoretical issues, offering a complete description of all the repertories of the British Isles. Peggy Seeger contributes a Foreword to the collection. Allan F. Moore is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey, UK. His chief research interests lie in the domain of the interaction of music and lyrics in recorded song in the service of potential readings. He is series editor of Ashgate’s ’Library of Essays in Popular Music’ and author to date of five monographs including Rock: the Primary Text and Song Means (both Ashgate). Giovanni Vacca has worked extensively on folk music, folk and urban cultures and songwriting, and holds a PhD from Sapienza University of Rome. He has published Il Vesuvio nel motore (1999), on Neapolitan working class music, Nel corpo della tradizione (2004), an anthropological study on Southern Italy folklore and Gli spazi della canzone (2013), about the Neapolitan Song. He has occasionally written song lyrics for Neapolitan world music. Contents: Foreword, Peggy Seeger; Introduction, Allan F. Moore and Giovanni Vacca; On interviewing Ewan McColl as a young student: the interviews, Giovanni Vacca; The first interview (London, 23 June 1987); The second interview (London, August 1988): part I: what is folk music?; The second interview, part II: the ballad; Travelling people; The second interview, part III: folk culture and popular culture; The second interview, part IV: Scotland!; MacColl and the English folk revival, Dave Laing; Form and content: the irreconcilable contradiction in the song-writing of Ewan MacColl, Giovanni Vacca; MacColl singing, Allan F. Moore; MacColl in Italy, Franco Fabbri; Bibliography; Index.

Focusing on a series of pioneering radio ballads produced for the BBC between 1958 and 1961 by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, and Peggy Seeger, this article explores representations of industrial working-class culture in folksongs of the radical Left. Situating such work in relation to A. L. Lloyd, mass culture, the nascent New Left, gender, and the aesthetics of social realism (distinct from the project of Soviet socialist realism), I argue that early radio ballads were nostalgic panegyrics for the integrity of working-class identity in the face of unprecedented socioeconomic change. At the very moment when distinctively masculine working-class traditions seemed to be at risk of disappearing under the rising tide of affluence, Conservative Party rhetoric, female emancipation, and the emergence of a classless commodity utopia, these programs generated a portrait of an unwavering British subculture damaged and defined by capitalist exploitation yet resistant to the unwelcome advance of globalized modernity. Ultimately, such work revealed far more about MacColl’s own political convictions than about the intricacies of workingclass life in Britain.

In the ever-expanding field of nuclear history, studies of ‘nuclear culture’ are becoming increasingly popular. Often situated within national contexts, they typically explore responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as nuclear imagery more generally. This paper offers a critique of current conceptions of ‘nuclear culture’, and argues that the term has little analytical coherence. It suggests that historians of ‘nuclear culture’ have tended to essentialize the nuclear to the detriment of historical analysis, and that the wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘nuclear culture’ are simultaneously a strength and a more significant weakness, in that they have little shared sense of the meaning of the term, its theoretical underpinnings or its analytical purchase. The paper then offers a study of Ewan MacColl's 1946 play Uranium 235, whose career reveals much about the diversity of cultures of the nuclear in post-war Britain. The study moves us away from a single, homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ towards a pluralistic critical history of cultural responses to nuclearization. These responses, I conclude, should be seen as collectively constitutive of the nuclear condition rather than as passive reflections of it.

In this article Owen Holland examines Ewan MacColl's early work in agit-prop theatre and his later activity as a songwriter, performer, and collector in the second British folk revival. He argues that his experience in the theatre provides a necessary route into understanding the problems of his later work – and what unites the ‘two halves’ is MacColl's consistent sense of the function of art (specifically his preferred media of drama and song) within a wider politico-cultural praxis. There is a contradiction in MacColl's praxis, however, in that while he wanted to create a popular culture of participation, his dogmatic textual strategies and exclusivist tendencies often became coercive enough to undermine his intentions. The discussion of MacColl's writing is situated within a critique of the problems that appear in his wider praxis, and Holland concludes by asserting that MacColl's agency as a writer was achieved through the development of a performance-oriented aesthetic. Owen Holland is a PhD candidate in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge, affiliated to St Catharine's College. His research focuses on utopian fiction in the late nineteenth century, with a particular interest in William Morris.

Warden discusses how the British company Theatre Union responded to the Spanish Civil War with a production of Aristophanies's \"Lysistrata\" in 1938. In 1947, following the Second World War, the group (now Theatre Workshop) returned to the play: the left-wing playwright Ewan MacColl substantially revised and renamed his adaptation \"Operation Olive Branch\" and Joan Littlewood, his wife and cofounder of the group, produced the play as part of their touring repertoire. MacColl reworked the Greek comedy in a tragic vein and commented on current tensions and historical conflicts through the use of English, Irish, and Scottish accents and dialects.

It has generally been assumed that the Expressionist movement had little noticeable impact on British theatre. Claire Altree Warden here suggests that in the plays of Ewan MacColl (and in particular his The Other Animals of 1948) there is a discernible challenge to this assumption. In order to advocate a specific political position, MacColl took the conventions of Expressionism and developed a highly engaged, artistically innovative theatrical aesthetic that could tackle socio-political inequalities and the suppression of the dissident voice. Through linguistic experiment, episodic structure, representational characters, and a focus on the individual mind, the playwright challenges the audience to confront class injustice and hegemonic tyranny. Claire Altree Warden is based at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches English Literature. She also teaches Critical Theory and Theatre History at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and is currently preparing a new critical study of Ewan MacColl's plays.

In 1938, the group had performed a version of Lysistrata as a response to the Spanish Civil War, an event that cast a long shadow over the culture of the British Left.2 After the Second World War, MacColl revised and renamed the play; Operation Olive Branch, as it was now known, was produced by Littlewood in 1947 as part of the touring repertoire. According to the Third Soldier (noticeably only one of the soldiers is actually named), a soldier doesn't need a reputation, all he needs is a good sword, keen sight and segs on his feet.

Martin Carthy plays at Blood & Roses: The Songs of Ewan MacColl at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall tonight. A box set of Ewan MacColl recordings (Topic Records), an album of covers by contemporary artists (Cooking Vinyl) and a major UK tribute tour will follow later in the year. To listen to tracks by Ewan MacColl via a Spotify playlist, visit this article online at observer.co.uk/new-review

I do honestly believe that if our folk club [the Ballads and Blues Club, based in London] had not instigated what we called \"the policy\" - that is, when you're onstage you sing folk songs from your own culture - I think it would have taken a much longer time for its folk revival singers to stop trying to sing like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.