Ewan MacColl was born in Salford on January 25th, 1915. He was born Jimmie Miller to Betsy Hendry and William Miller, a Scots iron-moulder and militant trade-unionist who was also a "sweet singer," Both his parents were active left-wing socialists.

Ewan’s father had left his native Stirlingshire in his mid-twenties when he met Betsy, in a pawnshop in Falkirk, falling in love with the young red-haired manageress. William stumped around the country with Scots revolutionary John MacLean and was blacklisted in almost every foundry in Scotland as a result. In 1910 the Millers moved to Salford in search of work. They had four children, but Jimmie is the only one who survived.

From his early youth, Ewan was as familiar with the heat of political debate and he also learned the songs and stories his parents had brought from Scotland. In 1930, Ewan left school after and elementary education, during the Great Depression, and he went into unemployment. He began to educate himself at the Manchester public library and soon found a few jobs as a mechanic, factory worker, builders' laborer, and street singer.

He joined the Workers' Theatre but found it too constraining and restricted and so he left to form his own street-performing group, the Red Megaphones. In the early 1930s he wrote for and edited nine factory newspapers, writing satirical songs and political squibs. He also wrote advertising jingles for local restaurants. After taking part in numerous demonstrations of 1932-33, he joined forces in 1934 with Joan Littlewood, a young theatre student who had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. They married and set up an experimental theater in Manchester called the Theatre of Action. Ewan played the lead role in Draw the Fires, produced by radical German dramatist Ernst Toller.

In 1935 Joan and Ewan moved to London where they formed a workers' dramatic school called the Theatre Workshop. The next year they came back north and set up the Theatre Union, which they modeled as a "theater of the people." They produced Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Jaroslav Hacek's The Good Soldier Schweik, and Jimmie's original script Last Edition. Called a "living newspaper, Last Edition dealt with the events leading up to the Munich Pact. In 1939, the police raided a performance of Last Edition. Miller and Littlewood were arrested, charged with disturbing the peace, fined, and barred from taking part in theatrical activity for the next two years.

As World War II beckoned, the members were scattered and serving in the war effort. They continued to correspond about theatre art and techniques, however, and when the war ended a number of them pooled their funds to set up the Theatre Workshop, inspired by the work and thoughts of Miller and Littlewood. It was around this time that Jimmie Miller changed his name to Ewan and he was inspired by the Lallans poets of the 19th century who attempted to create a standard Scots language and literature to preserve their identity in the face of English dominance. These contemporary writers took the names of earlier writers and Jimmie took the name Ewan MacColl, a pseudonym which eventually usurped his given name.

In an attempt to create a popular theater for the masses, Theatre Workshop traveled extensively from 1945-1952. Littlewood directed and produced while MacColl rehearsed the actors and wrote 11 new plays (many of them were translated and performed in German, French, Polish, and Russian). He often played leading roles in the performances as well. In the 1970s he would co-author (with Howard Goorney, one of the TW actors) a book of political plays and reminiscences about the Theatre Workshop entitled Agit-prop to Theatre Workshop.

In the late 1940s Ewan and Joan Littlewood divorced and in 1949 he fell in love with and married the dancer Jean Newlove. They had two children, Hamish and Kirsty, both of whom became singers and musicians. Kirsty later established herself as a pop vocalist and songwriter. She placed a number of songs on U.K. charts over the years and was a backup singer on recordings by such top acts as Simple Minds, the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Robert Plant, Van Morrison, and Morrisey.

When Theatre Workshop moved to London and became `fashionable', Ewan left and turned his attention to traditional music and song. In 1956 he met and fell in love with Peggy Seeger of the North American folk singing Seeger family. It was for her that he wrote "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", which many singers recorded during the 1960s until Roberta Flack's cover version took it to the top of the charts. It reached Number One in Billboard magazine the week of March 25, 1972, and stayed there for five more weeks. In the Grammy voting for 1972, Flack received the award for Record of the Year while MacColl accepted the trophy for Song of the Year. In England, the song also won an Ivor Novello Lyndon Award in 1973.

MacColl wrote an estimated 300 songs, many of them created for theatrical or media-oriented programs. Among his best-known songs are "Dirty Old Town" about his childhood town of Salford, "The Shoals of Herring," "Freeborn Man," "My Old Man," "The Thirty-Foot Trailer," "The Manchester Rambler."Many of these songs were born out of MacColl's work in folk clubs. In 1953 Ewan and such notable folk stalwarts as Alan Lomax, Bert Lloyd and uillean piper Seamus Ennis founded the Ballads and Blues Club, later known as the Singers Club. The latter club launched the careers of many young singers and groups until it closed in 1991. Ewan sang there regularly until just a week before his death.

Beginning in the early 1930s, he worked in radio as a narrator, actor, writer and producer, collaborating with experimental producers such as D.G. Bridson, Dennis Mitchell, and John Pudney. When he was only 19, the BBC commissioned him to prepare a program called Music in the Streets. In 1957 he collaborated with Peggy and BBC producer Charles Parker on a series of musical documentaries for BBC radio, which came to be known as Radio Ballads. These represented a major breakthrough in radio techniques, featuring a combination of recorded speech, sound effects, new songs and folk instrumentation.

By the late 1950s, MacColl and Littlewood had were no longer working as a team in theatre. MacColl's marriage with Jean Newlove had ended and Peggy and Ewan were joined both in personal and public life, becoming well known as a singing duo. They toured in the UK and abroad as singers of traditional and contemporary songs from 1957-1989. Between 1959 and 1972, they had three children: Neill and Calum (both musicians) and Kitty (who works in desk-top publishing and public relations).

They gave concerts, conducted workshops and toured widely, singing traditional and contemporary songs. They wrote scripts and msic for films and commercial television shows. Their involvement in and influence upon both theory and practice in the British folk revival was legendary. From the late 1950s through the 1980s, MacColl was a prolific recording artist completing dozens of albums of traditional and contemporary songs both as a soloist and with other artists, mainly Peggy. His (and their) LPs came out on such labels as Decca, Topic, Argo, EMI, Riverside, Rounder, Tradition, Stinson, Folk Lyric, and Folkways. Seeger and MacColl also formed their own recording company (Blackthorne Records). Among their recorded works were The Long Harvest (a ten-volume series of traditional ballads), The Paper Stage (a two-volume set of Shakespearean sung narratives) and Blood and Roses (a five-volume set of rare British and North American ballads.

In 1965 they founded the Critics Group, a cooperative company of revival singers interested in studying and combining folk singing and theatre techniques. From 1965 to 1971 Ewan wrote an annual musical stage documentary called The Festival of Fools, a dramatic musical revue of the year's news performed by the Critics Group. Seeger and MacColl were avid folksong collectors, chiefly among gypsies and travellers in Britain.

They produced two anthologies: Travellers' Songs of England, Scotland and Doomsday in the Afternoon, a profile of the Stewarts of Blairgowrie, a singing family of Scots travellers. In 1979 Ewan suffered the first of many heart attacks. Nevertheless he continued to work, tour, lecture and write songs. In 1980 he wrote his last play, The Shipmaster, a story of a sailing ship captain who cannot adapt to the coming of steam. It was in many ways analogous to his personal and professional life as his health was deteriorating. In 1987 he began writing his autobiography, Journeyman, which he completed a year later.

In the summer of 1989 he recorded his last album with Peggy, Naming of Names (Cooking Vinyl, 1990). On October 22, 1989, he died of complications following a heart operation. Ewan MacColl, for sixty years was at the cultural forefront of numerous political struggles, producing plays, songs and scripts on the subjects of apartheid, fascism, industrial strife and human rights. He had a large impact on the North American folk music scene as well, not only through his songs but also through the numerous articles he wrote on the subject for U.S. publications.