Archives West Finding Aid

Joe Heaney (AKA Joe Éinniú; Irish: Seosamh Ó hÉanaí) (1919 - 1984) was an Irish traditional (sean nós) singer from County Galway, Ireland. He spent most of his adult life abroad, living in England, Scotland and New York City, in the course of which he recorded hundreds of songs. A magnificent singer in both Gaelic and English, Heaney sings in sean-nos, the highly ornamented style of traditional Irish song.

Ewan MacColl (1915 – 1989) was an English folk singer, poet, playwright, labour activist, organizer, songwriter, actor, and record producer. MacColl was born James Henry Miller in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire. In his young life, he founded the first folk club in England, the Ballads and Blues Club, as well as the Critic's Group, an influential early singing group. During the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, MacColl was one of the main composers of British protest songs. MacColl is known for ambitiously recording a representative sampling of Professor Francis James Child's English and Scottish popular ballads. While his early repertoire was mainly of street songs and traditional material, he was also an important songwriter who produced expressions that had an appeal to all levels of society; his songs have been covered by performers as diverse as Dick Gaughan, the Pogues, Roberta Flack, and Elvis Presley, and many have been collected in several versions from the oral tradition.

Peter Seeger (1919 – 2014), born in Patterson, New York, was an American folk singer and social activist. He studied sociology at Harvard University beginning in 1936, but left just before his final exams two years later, choosing instead to roam the American South making field recordings with music scholar Alan Lomax. These experiences were the foundation of Seeger's repertoire of work songs, lullabies, folk songs, and ballads that he would revisit throughout his musical career. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of civil rights and environmental causes.