Editing Ewan MacColl (section)

===Political songs===
MacColl was one of the main composers of British [[protest song]]s during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1950s he penned "The Ballad of [[Ho Chi Minh]]" and "The Ballad of [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]]" for the British Communist Party.

<blockquote><poem>
Joe Stalin was a mighty man and a mighty man was he
He led the Soviet people on the road to victory.
All through the revolution he fought at Lenin's side, 
And they made a combination till the day that Lenin died.
</poem></blockquote>

<!-- MacColl soon became ashamed of this and it was never reissued.  -->When asked about the song in a 1985 interview, he said that it was "a very good song" and that "it dealt with some of the positive things that Stalin did".<ref name="auto">{{Cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqddXoilff4| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130623200716/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqddXoilff4&gl=US&hl=en| archive-date=2013-06-23 | url-status=dead|title=YouTube|website=Youtube.com}}</ref> In 1992, after his death, Peggy Seeger included it as an annex in her ''Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook'', saying that she had originally planned to exclude the song on the grounds that Ewan would not have wanted it included, but decided to include it as an example of his work in his early career.<ref>See [http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=39480#2832022 Mudcat Cafe]. Seeger's note to the song reads:
<blockquote>Ewan wrote a number of songs like this in his early years, alongside more subtle texts like "Dirty Old Town" and "Stalinvarosh." There is no doubt that Joseph Stalin was a brilliant wartime leader and that many of his reforms&nbsp;... were correct and productive. Idolisation of Stalin by the left wing the world over continued until the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (1956), when he was posthumously denounced by [[Nikita Khrushchev|Khrushchev]] for his "personality cult" and his human rights crimes. Disillusioned and subsequently turning to China for political role models, Ewan stopped singing this song or even referring to it. He would not have included it in the main body of such a book as this unless it were for reasons similar to mine: (1) as a sample of the old politics, which viewed the earth as mere clay out of which man fashions a world for man and (2) as a sample of his early work, highly dogmatic and low on finesse. It exhibits a lack of economy, an excess of cliches and filler lines, many awkward terms and an errant chronological flow. It has many of the characteristics of political songs of its time and is virtually a political credo set into verse and put to a tune. It is just that. – ''The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook'', Appendix IV. p. 388 (quoted in [http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=39480#2832022 Mudcat Cafe])</blockquote></ref> The B-side of the record, ''Sovietland (Land of Freedom)'' was not included in the songbook.

MacColl sang and composed numerous protest and topical songs for the [[nuclear disarmament movement]], for example "Against the Atom Bomb",<ref>{{cite news| url= https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/aug/10/folk.politicsandthearts| title=Power to the people| newspaper=[[The Observer]]| date=10 August 2008| last=Irwin| first=Colin| location=London| access-date=19 February 2009}}</ref> ''The Vandals'', ''Nightmare'', and ''Nuclear Means Jobs''.<ref>Peggy Seeger, ''The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook'', p. 21</ref>

MacColl dedicated an entire album to the lifestyle of Gypsies in his 1964 album ''The Travelling People''. Many of the songs spoke against [[antiziganism|the prejudice against Roma Gypsies]], although some also contained derogatory remarks about "[[tinker]]s", which is a word for [[Irish Traveller]]s.{{cn|date=July 2023}}

He wrote "The Ballad of Tim Evans" (also known as "Go Down You Murderer") a song protesting against [[Capital punishment in the United Kingdom|capital punishment]], based on an infamous murder case in which an innocent man, [[Timothy Evans]], was condemned and executed, before the [[John Christie (murderer)|real culprit]] was discovered.{{cn|date=July 2023}}

MacColl was very active during the [[1984–1985 United Kingdom miners' strike|miners' strike of 1984–85]] in distributing free cassettes of songs supportive of the [[National Union of Mineworkers (Great Britain)|National Union of Mineworkers]], entitled ''Daddy, what did you do in the strike?''<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://ewan-maccoll.info/AlbumInfo.aspx?ID=242|title=Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger – Daddy, What Did You Do In The Strike?|website=Ewan-maccoll.info|access-date=7 October 2019}}</ref> The title song was unusually aggressive in its language towards the [[strikebreaker]]s. This collection was only released on cassette and remaining copies are rare, but some of the less aggressive songs have featured on other compilations.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=http://ewan-maccoll.info/AlbumInfo.aspx?ID=45|title=Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl – Items Of News|website=Ewan-maccoll.info|access-date=7 October 2019}}</ref> At MacColl's 70th birthday party, he was presented by [[Arthur Scargill]] with a miner's lamp to show appreciation for his support.<ref name="auto"/>

In his last interview in August 1988, MacColl stated that he still believed in a socialist revolution and that the communist parties of the west had become too moderate.<ref name= Legacies>{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Allan F |last2=Vacca| first2=Giovanni |date=2014 |title=Legacies of Ewan MacColl: The Last Interview| location=Farnham, Surrey |publisher=Ashgate Publishing Ltd. |pages=116–117 |isbn=978-1-4094-2430-7}}</ref>{{rp|116–117}}  He stated that he had been a member of the Communist Party but left because he felt that the Soviet Union was "not communist or socialist enough".<ref name= Legacies />{{rp|43}}