1st Edition

Legacies of Ewan MacColl The Last Interview

By Giovanni Vacca, Allan F. Moore Copyright 1991
294 Pages
by Routledge

294 Pages
by Routledge

294 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more
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.

Biography

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.

Engaged, opinionated, furiously creative - the controversies Ewan MacColl generated in life have scarcely lessened since his death. His legacy of writing and activism continues, but folklore scholarship has moved on, so it is particularly appropriate that a re-examination of his multi-faceted and highly individual work is undertaken now. It is welcome - and also particularly appropriate - to see international perspectives developed on MacColl and his achievements.

Georgina Boyes, In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium

 This is the sort of testimony historians are always hopeful of finding yet which often simply does not survive ... This book gets us closer to MacColl’s thought than anything else easily available; in that it is greatly valuable.

English Dance & Song