The album, assembled by his musician sons, Calum and Neill, features covers of Mr. MacColl’s best-known songs, the foremost being “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which Roberta Flack turned into the No. 1 song of 1972. (Naturally, Mr. MacColl despised that version, considering it elaborate and labored.) The set showcases Steve Earle rendering an appropriately disheveled “Dirty Old Town,” a song recorded by stars from Rod Stewart to the Pogues. There are also pointed and austere performances from Rufus Wainwright, Billy Bragg, David Gray, Jarvis Cocker and more, covering the songwriter’s classics from “The Shoals of Herring” to “Moving On Song.”

In many of his songs Mr. MacColl cast working people — miners, whalers and factory employees — as heroes and muses, and he wrote often of Gypsies and the displaced. His elevation of the working class reflected political beliefs that were inseparable from his art. He grew up in soot-choked Salford, England, the even wronger side of the river from Manchester; his Scottish-born father was an iron molder and both parents were socialists who instilled in him an unshakable adherence to leftist politics. Early on, he wrote an ode to Stalin; later, he identified as a Maoist.

Even in those polarizing worlds, Mr. MacColl could stir special trouble. “He joined the Communist Party three or four times — and got kicked out three or four times,” Ms. Seeger said in a phone interview from her home in Oxford, England. “He kept trying to comment on how imperfect a lot of the leadership was.”

Mr. MacColl’s earliest efforts to erase the line between art and politics centered on drama. In 1931, he created an agitprop theater group called the Red Megaphones, which later became Theater of Action. There, he met the first of his three wives, the theater director Joan Littlewood. He was 30, with a long history as a playwright and actor, when he changed his birth name, James Miller, to Ewan MacColl and devoted himself to folk. He believed music could be more effective than theater at spurring people to political action.

Mr. MacColl brought to folk a new urban focus. “The first wave of the folk revival, from the late 19th century, had a nostalgic view of rural England that didn’t reflect the industrial tradition,” said Rob Young, author of the folk history “Electric Eden.” “People like MacColl and Peggy Seeger led a second-wave revival, which stopped folk from becoming a nostalgia industry for the middle- and upper-middle classes,” Mr. Young added. “They gave it vitality.”