THE ESSENTIAL EWAN MACCOLL SONGBOOK,            SIXTY YEARS OF SONGMAKING

Re-published 2009 by CAMSCO Music, $29.95 + s/h

Over 400 pages. 9" x 12", paperback

The first ever comprehensive collection of this legendary songwriter's work, an enormous tome containing 200 of this British songmaster's best songs ("The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Dirty Old Town," "Manchester Rambler," "Shoals of Herring," "Sweet Thames Flow Softly," "Freeborn Man" and many others, some of which have been neither published nor recorded). Ewan MacColl played a vital role in the  folk song revival in Britain. This unique collection is filled with several hundred photographs, notes, and quotes, plus a biography, a discography and Peggy's personal tribute to him.

 Indeed, one of the very refreshing things about this book is Seeger's unsentimental honesty about which songs are dated, which she never liked, which need work, and which are pretty good. So for people who want the classics of MacColl's repertoire, this book isn't strictly necessary. But as a glimpse of the processes of writing songs, especially of writing from traditional models, this book is both fascinating and instructive. How did MacColl transform old Irish songs into social commentary, how did he apply Scots lullabies to political demonstrations, and how did he convert the landscapes of Britain's inner cities into places of mystery and romance? It's all here to be read, played, sung, and pondered, and for that, it's highly recommended.                     Review Dirty Linen

 I have no doubt that MacColl knew the value of his best work and kept one mandarin eye cocked on posterity. Songs such as Sweet Thames, Flow Softly (a title with the purl of Burns' Flow Gently, Sweet Afton), 30-Foot Trailer, The Moving On Song, Dirty Old Town - all represented here - are the stuff of greatness. This anthology is instructive in the varied insights it grants into MacColl's creative juices, whether the facsimile draft of My Old Man or the mouth-rolled changes from Famous Flower Of Serving-Men to Shoals Of Herring, his favourite mode (Dorian, since you wonder) or his unwitting self-plagiarism. Peggy Seeger does not dodge some of MacColl's unkinder attributes or spare us his hammy side (after his autobiography Journeyman how could she?), or his mysteries, such as the possibility that the Alfred Watts of Newcastle, who 'furnished' Ivor in The Singing Island (1960), may well have been MacColl himself. There have been earlier MacCollian songbooks, collections like Shuttle & Cage (1954) and Songs For The Sixties (1961) that used many mouths to feed them, but this is the one to which I shall return and use when contemplating the lives, times and works of Ewan MacColl. Consistency can be the hobgoblin that paralyses the human mind. MacColl comes out of this volume as somebody who never stopped learning and even learned how to change. 

                                                                                                  Review: Folk Roots