VARIOUS ARTISTS
Joy of Living: A Tribute to Ewan MacColl
Cooking Vinyl
7-4867-2
* * * * *
Looking for a last-minute gift? Anyone who loves acoustic
music will thrill to Joy of Living, a
two-CD collection of the songs of Ewan MacColl in time to commemorate the centenary of
his birth. Tribute albums disappoint when cover artists make one or two bad
assumptions: that they need to do something radically different with the
original songs, or that the performance is about them rather than the honored
artist(s). Two of MacColl's sons, Calum and Neill, did an extraordinary job of
finding musicians who understand their father's place in the folk pantheon. Many
of them owe their careers to his influence, but that could be said of legions
of English and Scottish artists of the past 80 or so years.
Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) was never an easy bloke—just a
brilliant one. It surprises many to learn that he was actually (sort of)
English. He was born to socialist Scottish parents, but as James Henry Miller and
in the gritty industrial Lancashire town of Salford, whose slums he
immortalized in one of his most famous songs, "Dirty Old Town." (It
is incisively performed on the album by Steve Earle—a guy who knows a few
things about life's downside.) He adopted the name MacColl in 1945, by which
time he was caught up in the Lallans
movement, a 20th century attempt—via Robert Burns and Robert Louis
Stevenson—at a Scottish Renaissance, including the insertion into everyday
communication of a blended English/Lowlands dialect language.
But one could say MacColl began reinventing himself at a
tender age. He dropped out of school, kicked around the Salford slums, and was
a devoted communist by the time he was 17—the age at which he got put on a
watch list for his role in organizing a mass trespass on public lands that
ultimately opened much of the UK's private land for hikers and walkers. Call it the praxis of
Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." His deep involvement with
agit-prop theatre—especially a form known as the "living newspaper"–led
to his first marriage (of three) to director Joan Littlewood. Another
little-known fact: many of MacColl's most-beloved songs began life as
accompaniment for plays.
MacColl's career is often compared to Pete Seeger's and not
just because his third wife was Pete's half-sister, Peggy. Like Seeger, he was
a collector/promoter as well as songwriter. Many of the Child ballads and other
public domain songs today performed come from the collaboration between MacColl
and Bert Lloyd. Alan Lomax was another mutual connection; Lomax's 1950 visit to
the United Kingdom inspired MacColl to champion traditional music on the radio,
in publications, and on the stage. On the later score, he took inspiration from
Seeger and The Weavers. MacColl's Soho Ballad and Blues Club opened in 1953 and
soon became an epicenter of the British folk revival, and a place where British
artists adopted as their own American-style accompaniments.
MacColl made over a hundred albums, something of an irony
for a guy who despised commercialism and denounced Bob Dylan as a "10th-rate
talent" and probably a capitalist tool to boot. Like I said—a difficult
bugger. Still, all one has to do to appreciate MacColl the artist is sample the
glorious songs he left behind—compositions that run the gamut from overtly
political to the achingly sentimental. How many contemporary love songs can
even be mentioned in the same breath as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your
Face?" Paul Buchanan gives a particularly wonderful performance of this
classic. Who else makes us feel nostalgic for disappearing ways of life without
romanticizing them in the slightest? Eliza Carthy skillfully captures the
glories and the challenges of the tinker's life in her cover of
"Thirty-Foot Trailer," and Seth Lakeman gives the performance of his
life on "The Shoals of Herring," MacColl's no-sugarcoating look at
the testosterone days of small-time trawling.
Every performance on this 21-track collection is tastefully
and appropriately performed—as indeed one might expect from a cast that
includes stalwarts that looked to MacColl for inspiration: Paul Brady, Billy
Bragg, Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan, Christy Moore, Martin Simpson, Norman
Waterson…. There is also a nice
mix of crossover artists such as Damien Dempsey, David Gray, Rufus and Martha
Wainwright, The Unthanks, and Bombay Bicycle Club, the last of which is anchored
by Jamie MacColl–Ian's grandson. David Gray does a fabulous job on the title
track and the amazing Karine Polwart serves up a shiver-and-quiver cover of
"The Terror Time." I'd rate the latter and Lakeman's interpretation
of "The Shoals of Herring" as personal favorites, though singling out
anything is the equivalent of declaring one sip of vintage wine superior to the
rest of the glass. If you buy this as a gift, purchase a spare for yourself.
Rob Weir
Postscript: As much as I love the song "Joy of
Living," had I named this collection I would have picked "Freeborn
Man," which squares and sums MacColl to the core!
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