SINGING, SONGWRITING AND RECORDING

My song Talking Army Blues spent 13 weeks in the Top Twenty in 1960, performed by Josh Macrae. A couple of my songs for adults (Shift and Spin and All The Tunes In The World) have been widely sung and recorded, and the Singing Kettle children's show have used 20 of my songs.

In 1959 Ewan co-started with Drew Moyes the first Scottish folk club, in Glasgow. Since then he has performed solo and with various unknown groups with names like Glasgow Green, Bawheid McBear and Robbery With Violins, in venues ranging from peace rallies in George Square to a winter tour of Finland, plus stage, street, hall, pub, festival, and you-name-it. He plays various instruments and noise-makers from African thumb piano to American autoharp, Philipino mouthbow and beyond. He has written some forty songs which have been commercially recorded, some twenty of them for the Singing Kettle children's show.

He has acted as producer for two albums of new songs of Fife issued by the New Makars Trust, of which he is a trustee. From 2000 to 2005 he edited, for the USA Alan Lomax Foundation and Rounder Records, three albums drawn from 1950s archive recordings - of Scottish traditional singers Davie Stewart and Jimmie MacBeath, of the famous 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh, and of children's songs and rhymes - and he worked on three more, giving transcripts and notes for 1951 recordings of John Strachan, and of Jimmie and Davie.

In 2006 he edited, for the School of Scottish Studies and Greentrax Records, an album of children's songs and rhymes drawn from the School's archives, Chokit on a Tattie.

Ewan runs his own small recording label, Gallus, which issued the I Was Born In Glasgow LP, and many short run CDs and cassettes.

Click for Talking Army Blues on Youtube