 One of the most influential and controversial influences upon the revival, Ewan MacColl was born Jimmy Miller, the son of a Scots ironworker, but he was brought up in Salford, Lancashire. As a performer, he started with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, for whom he wrote a number of remarkable plays, before starting his Ballads and Blues Club, which mutated into the Singers' Club, from which sprang the Critics' Group of singers, whose aim was to improve their performance using mutual criticism and study of traditional styles. As a songwriter, his lyrics were much influenced by the actuality he recorded while making the epoch-making Radio Ballads for the BBC, giving his songs a gritty, almost conversational realism denied to many other attempts to write "in the folk idiom".
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