Ewan MacColl (1915-1989)
Ask many an American or British folk music enthusiast over 40 to name prominent folksingers of the mid-20th century, and they'll probably name Ewan MacColl and his wife, Peggy Seeger.
Peggy Seeger's website offers a wealth of information about both of them. Here's the link for Ewan MacColl.
'Whittaker' will be mentioning Ewan (briefly) at a lecture to some of our Scottish music students this morning. Specifically, there'll be reference to his The Singing Island published collection (1960), and a setting of one of his songs in a brand new Faber folksong compilation, The Language of Folk (2013). Both in the Whittaker Library collection, naturally.
'Whittaker' was asked for a book about pronouncing Scots songs, yesterday. To be honest, the helpful, 'it's a blue one with gold lettering' didn't offer much to go on.
Whittaker found Scottish song books with glossaries at the back - useful to a point, but they only informed the singer what the words meant, and not how to pronounce them.
Enter the helpful Tweeps on Twitter!
By 'return of post', came two great suggestions, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser's Lowland Scots Pronunciation (not only have we got the book here in the Whittaker Library, but it's also available online via the Internet Archive), and ScotSpeak, by Christine Robinson
And as though that wasn't enough, a couple of new items arrived in the post at the Whittaker Library today - the new Faber books, The Language of Folk, Vols.1 and 2. How's that for a fortuitous coincidence?
