# "Ballad of Spring Hill (Spring Hill Disaster)" (Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl)
The great socialist Ewan MacColl recorded a version on his album of traditional Scottish ballads.
The film culminates with Jimmy joining Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill (from Simple Minds) to record a cover of the Ewan MacColl classic, "Dirty Old Town", which was later released as a charity single, to raise money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association.
Ewan McGregor | Ewan MacColl | Kirsty MacColl | Ewan McKendrick | Ewan Christian | Ewan Carmichael | They Don't Know (Kirsty MacColl song) | Ewan Stewart | Ewan McPherson | Ewan Cameron (physician) | Ewan Cameron | Ewan Birney | Ewan Aitken | Catriona MacColl |
A founder member of the company was former BBC radio producer Charles Parker, who with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, created the radio ballads, award-winning musical documentaries broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s and now available via Listen Again on
Two songs by Ewan MacColl, "Freeborn Man of the Traveling People" and "The Shoals of Herring", are given modern arrangements, featuring piano and synthesizer as well as more typical instruments such as guitar and fiddle.
Dispensing with second guitarist Danny Kalb, Ochs performs alone on twelve original songs, an interpretation of Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman" set to music (much as Poe's "The Bells" had been set to music on the previous album) and a cover of Ewan MacColl's "The Ballad of the Carpenter".
He was the subject of a famous 1957 radio ballad (The Ballad of John Axon), the first of the series, written by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and produced by Charles Parker.
Almost all Child Ballads were recorded by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger or Burl Ives, but in this case we have one of the rarest Child ballads.
In the meanwhile, Paddy signed and recorded established folk artists for Tradition, including Jean Ritchie, Alan Lomax, Odetta, and Ewan MacColl.
The bonus CD, Garage Sale features three cover versions, including Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe", Gene Clark's "From the Heart", and Ewan MacColl's "Sweet Thames Flow Softly".
It was also the series that brought together Smallfilms with Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner (thanks to Michael Rosen's work with Kerr and Faulkner in Ewan MacColl's Critics' Group).
In the past, many such 'source' singers were deemed so upon ‘discovery’ by field researches such as Cecil Sharp, Alan Lomax, Hamish Henderson, Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl or other song collectors who were prominent in 1950s and 1960s.
In 1966, soon after arriving in London he joined The Critics Group, the left wing folk/theatre group led by Ewan MacColl and co-founded the Stop it Committee, the UK American Anti-war Group, remaining active in both until the Critics Group split up in 1973 and the Stop it Committee disbanded after US withdrawal from Vietnam in April 1975.