Ewan McVicar

I was born in Inverness in 1941. I have been a boy banker in East Africa and South Yemen, a guitar teacher in the USA, and in Scotland an accountant, a psychiatric social worker, a songwriter, a project organiser, an author, a storyteller, a Fringe reviewer for the Scotsman newspaper, a publisher, and the runner of a small recording label. Plus other stuff.

I have worked in partnership with two remarkable people - visual artist and drummer Amu Logotse of Ghana, traditional singer and project creator Christine Kydd of Scotland.

I co-started the first folk club in Scotland, I was Writer In Residence to schools in Craigmillar in Edinburgh, I have created two key and much used websites for our kids to learn and to learn about our Scottish song and music. Iona Opie praised my book on Scottish children's playground songs, lots of folk praised Hamish Imlach's autobiography that I ennabled him to write.

I wrote a 1960 Top Twenty hit called 'Talking Army Blues', and 20 songs for the Scottish children's show The Singing Kettle. A bunch of my songs in traditional format have been commercially recorded, particularly 'Shift And Spin' and 'All The Tunes In The World'.

Over the years I have worked in about 200 hundred Scottish schools, telling stories and writing songs, creating new websites to show what we have made, and having laughs!

I have worked telling stories and singing in Holland, Russia, Uganda, the USA, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Canada.