The Ballad of Ewan MacColl
Screened online 21 - 25 October 2020 in collaboration with Manchester International Literature Festival.
A thriving centre of the Industrial Revolution, Salford had, in Ewan MacColl’s words, become a ‘Dirty Old Town’ by the twentieth century. This complex man, born in 1915, was a singer, songwriter, actor and labour activist who went on to become the undisputed leader of the British folk scene. But his story is also the story of working-class resistance in north-west England through the last period of the industrial age. BBC Arena’s The Ballad of Ewan MacColl combines music, history and politics to celebrate Ewan MacColl’s life and legacy, as told by those who knew him, including his wife Peggy Seeger, whose work is still committed to the radical politics of these times.
This evocative Arena film from the BBC archives, directed by Tim May, screened as part of Mancheter International Literature Festival. Exploring the relationship between culture and class politics which MacColl epitomised then and now, you can still watch responses to the film from performer Jennifer Reid, presenter and journalist Stuart Maconie and spoken word poet Tony Walsh, as well as an exclusive appearance by Peggy Seeger. Enjoy new poems inspired by the film from local poets Cheryl Martin and Ella Otomewo and learn how to start your own personal writing journey with a masterclass from acclaimed poet, playwright and lyricist Louise Wallwein.
ARENA: THE BALLAD OF EWAN MACCOLL
Producer/Director: Tim May; Film Editor: Guy Crossman; Photography: Chris Seager; series director Anthony Wall
Ewan MacColl was a committed communist throughout his life. He was equally committed to his own creativity, always putting it at the service of his political beliefs. By turns, he was actor, playwright, actor manager, songwriter, radio legend and the leader and chief inspiration of the folk revival of the 1960s.
From his teens, he had complete confidence in the power and relevance of traditional song — and no one could sing those songs like MacColl. He was to a traditional ballad what Laurence Olivier was to a Shakespeare speech. He was a working-class renaissance man.
When director Tim May was only a few weeks into production, MacColl passed away at the age of seventy four. This sad news meant that May had to adjust his approach. MacColl was survived by his partner of thirty years, both in marriage and music, Peggy Seeger. She became the principal witness in the film. Theirs was one of the great love stories of the century. MacColl’s song writing, his voice and understanding of the power of the ballad, allied to Seeger’s stunning instrumental virtuosity, made them a musical phenomenon.
Born in New York, Seeger comes from an American musical dynasty. Her father Charles was an eminent musicologist; Ruth Crawford Seeger, her mother, was a composer. As a child, Peggy’s home was an informal salon for the great names of the folk revival in the USA. Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly were regular visitors. Her late half-brothers Mike and Pete shared Peggy’s instrumental brilliance. Like MacColl, Pete was a lifelong communist. He became the eminence grise of the New York folk scene, in parallel with MacColl in the UK. Peggy spanned both sides of the revival.
The BBC’s iconic Radio Ballads provided the platform for her first major collaboration with MacColl. They were produced by another avowed left winger, Charles Parker. The Radio Ballads revolutionised the idea of a radio documentary feature. They were a massive success. In 1958, the date of the first transmission, television was only just coming out of its infancy and radio still commanded a great audience for serious programming.
Each ballad took a theme from working-class life: mining, trawling, the railways. They combined the actual speech of the workers and the sound of their particular industry with music supervised by Seeger and songs written and sung by MacColl. These programmes were hugely influential, not least on Arena.
MacColl had a facility for songwriting. In the film Seeger reports that he wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’, one of his very best, in ten minutes to cover a scene change in one of his plays. Most famously, he wrote the song that became a worldwide hit for Roberts Flack, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. It became one of the most recorded songs of all time. MacColl wrote it for Seeger.
Most of his songs expressed his politics, fierce denunciations of the injustices and wrongs he saw in industrial capitalism. He was composing them right to the end. While his musical reputation is secure, the other aspect of his work, the theatre, has been largely forgotten. As with the songs, he believed theatre should be an instrument to fight oppression and critique the capitalist system.
In the years after the war he was acclaimed as a dramatist. His success prompted George Bernard Shaw to say that MacColl, along of course with himself, was the only true genius of the British theatre. Eventually he withdrew from the theatre, exasperated with the increasing dominance, as he saw it, of the commercial and fatuously populist.
Theatre’s loss was folk music’s gain. The folk revival which swept both sides of the Atlantic went on to produce folk rock and influence any number of great musicians. The essence of traditional song can be heard in the core even of Led Zepellin. An Arena made twenty years after this one, a profile of Pete Doherty, featured Doherty singing ‘Dirty Old Town’ with Shane MacGowan and Kate Moss.
I found my love on the gasworks croft
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed my girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town Dirty old town
The song will live forever. It sums up MacColl’s spirit and his belief that joy of living could be found even in the grime and the grind of factories, gasworks and filthy canals.
Anthony Wall
6 October 2020
YOUR LOCAL ARENA: RESPONDING TO The Ballad of Ewan MacColl
Watch acclaimed ballad performer Jennifer Reid, DJ and writer Stuart Macone, and Tony Walsh, Manchester’s people’s poet, respond to the Arena film. Plus hear American folk singer Peggy Seeger, wife of Ewan MacColl, talk about the film and sing a tribute to her late husband.
Responding to the film
Stuart Maconie is a prolific, popular and extremely highly regarded TV and radio presenter, journalist, columnist and best-selling author. He is on BBC Radio 6 Music (with Mark Radcliffe) every weekend morning between 8 and 11am. His journalism has appeared everywhere, from NME to Elle and Country Walking. In 2017, Stuart retraced the Jarrow March in real time, to mark its 80th anniversary; his resulting book, The Long Road from Jarrow, spent five weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list, His latest book, The Nanny State Made Me (Ebury Press) examines the positive impact of the welfare state through the prism of his sixties and seventies childhood as well interviews with the countless beneficiaries of its work. He is currently working on a revised last chapter to reflect events since March 2020.
Jennifer Reid is a performer and researcher of nineteenth century broadside ballads and Lancashire dialect work song. She makes links between weaving songs in Lancashire and Bangladesh. She clog dances and only occasionally clog fights. Jennifer has performed in Venice and New York for the Creative Time Summit, in Croatia for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Brussels, Switzerland and regularly in the North West and London. Her work is preserved in the Doc Rowe archive and at the British Library and she sits on the executive committee of the Society for the Study of Labour History.
Peggy Seeger, a member of the North American musical Seeger family, is a singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and activist songmaker. She plays six instruments: piano, guitar, five-string banjo, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and English concertina. She has recorded 23 solo albums and participated directly in more than a hundred others. She lived in England for 35 years with the singer/songmaker Ewan MacColl and has three children and nine grandchildren. She moved back to the USA in 1994 but returned to England (Oxford) in 2010. Peggy’s autobiography, First Time Ever (Faber), came out in 2017. http://www.peggyseeger.com/
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Manchester’s Tony Walsh is one of the UK’s leading spoken word poets. In 2017 his poem ‘This Is The Place’ made headlines worldwide in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bomb, subsequently raising around £200,000 for Manchester charities. A former Poet in Residence for Glastonbury Festival and a regular on TV and radio, his powerful poems regularly reach six and seven figure audiences online. His work has been commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, Lake District National Park, The Observer, Channel 4 News and the BBC among others. Tony’s acclaimed debut collection, Sex & Love & Rock & Roll, will be followed in 2021 by Work/Life/Balance, with new titles for younger audiences also in the pipeline. Tony is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an Ambassador for National Poetry Day UK and was awarded an honorary doctorate by The University of Salford in 2018.
INSPIRED BY ARENA’S The Ballad of Ewan MacColl:
New Poetry by Ella Otomewo and Cheryl Martin
Cheryl Martin
‘My Salford Is Full of Flowers’
Commissioned Poets
Cheryl Martin, co-Artistic Director of Manchester’s Black Gold Arts Festival, has worked as a poet, playwright and director. She was a former Associate Director at Contact Theatre and Director-in-Residence at Edinburgh’s Traverse. A Manchester Evening News Theatre Award winner as both writer (for the musical Heart and Soul, Oldham Coliseum Theatre) and director (of Iron by Rona Munro, Contact), Cheryl also co-produced and directed an Edinburgh Fringe First winner for the Traverse, entitled The World Is Too Much. Cheryl’s first solo stage show Alaska featured at 2016’s A Nation’s Theatre, and 2019’s Summerhall Edinburgh Fringe and Wellcome Festival of Minds and Bodies in London. Her new solo show One Woman won an Unlimited Wellcome Collection Partnership Award; it will premiere in 2021 at Manchester’s HOME, going on to a national tour including the Unlimited Festival at the Southbank Centre. Cheryl was part of the 2019-2020 British Council Australia INTERSECT programme. www.cherylmartin.net
Ella Otomewo is a poet who found her voice in the spoken word community years ago, but now writes for both the page and the stage. She has facilitated creative writing workshops in universities, libraries, schools and at festivals, and has performed all over the UK, as well as in Amsterdam and Berlin. Ella performs her work both solo and occasionally as part of an ensemble with the renowned spoken word collective, Young Identity. This year she has worked with Manchester International Festival, Contact Theatre, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Art with Heart.
WRITING YOUR MEMOIR: A Masterclass from Louise Wallwein
Taking Arena’s The Ballad of Ewan MacColl as a starting point, explore how you can begin to craft your own memoir or life writing with poet, playwright and lyricist Louise Wallwein.
Louise Wallwein MBE is a poet, playwright and lyricist. Her work has been performed on shorelines, the sea, the streets, on the wing of a World War Two Shackleton aircraft and in theatres across the UK and Internationally Her work has been produced by BBC Radio 3 and 4, BBC One, Contact, Red Ladder, National Theatre Wales, Royal Exchange, Walk The Plank, BAC, Z Arts, HOME and Manchester Camerata among others. Glue, her acclaimed, theatre-demolishing one-woman show is published by SmithDoorstop. Louise works in communities with thousands of people to develop their voice. Her approach is fearless. louisewallwein.com Purchase Glue here: https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/glue/
Interviews
Lucy Hannah with Tim May
Tim May began his film career at BBC Arena where his subjects included Desmond Tutu, Paul McCartney, Edward Said and folk legend, Ewan MacColl. Until February 2018, he was a Partner at The Brunswick Group where he built and led an international Film team for the firm’s award-winning creative agency, MerchantCantos. Tim’s last documentary Minds Wide Open was produced for the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for neuroscience and premiered on Discovery Channel in October that same year. Now, through Strange Films and Music, the company he runs with writing & directing partner Karen Stowe, Tim is writing feature film scripts and in production on documentaries about Scottish rock band, Del Amitri, and the legendary singer, activist and feminist, Peggy Seeger.
Lucy Hannah with Richard Shaw
Richard Shaw founded Unity House in 2011. He continues to direct the company’s new work for online, exhibition and broadcast. Forthcoming broadcast films include 'Hepworth' and 'Set the Night on Fire: The Story of Ewan MacColl'. Due to air on Sky Arts in spring 2021, this new film about Ewan MacColl explores the musician's formative years in Salford, his period with Theatre Workshop and the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Contributors include Peggy Seeger, Calum MacColl, Christopher Eccleston, Barbara Dickson and Billy Bragg.
