Legacies of Ewan MacColl

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.

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, BelgiumThis 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