Without question Ewan MacColl was the most influential man in the British Folk Scene in the 20th Century. The son of Scottish Immigrants and born and raised in Salford, Manchester, MacColl was a singer, writer, actor, playwrite, activist and everything inbetween.
There had been a Folk revival in Britain in the early 1900's which had catalouged a wide array of British music for posterity. This was largely a middle class revival. MacColl took back Folk music from the middle classes and gave it to the working classes in the folk revival of the 1950/60's.
MacColl believed in the legitimacy of Folk music, that you had to commit yourself fully to the songs and they stories they told as you recited them, and in doing this he became the foremost interpreter of traditional music in Britain. Then came his acclaimed Radio Ballad's series, where he wrote new music in the Folk style and coupled it with recordings of real people and real life stories that, for the first time, were to be heard nationally.
MacColl used folk music to advance his political stances, and he never shied away from making a statement about his government, or the world at large, if he felt the cause worthwhile. He was a communist in belief and championed the working classes and the people of the lower end of society.
His songs crossed genres, and have been covered by hundreds of others, some even breaking into the very foundations of the British and Irish Folk scene in such a way that people would sware that they were hundreds of years old.
Most famous amungst his work are the songs The First Time Ever I saw Your Face, Dirty Old Town, the Manchester Rambler and The Shoals of Herring, but these are merely scraping the surface of his archive.
If one should learn of a single person in British Folk Music history than that person should be Ewan MacColl, for even now, over twenty years since his death, his shadow lays large upon that genre.