Ernest John Moeran has been one of the least written about composers that were active in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, and who worked in the folksong-influenced pastoral style that has come to be associated with the conveniently but misleadingly labelled English Musical Renaissance. Of attempts made during the seventy years since his death to produce an authoritative and comprehensive biography, only Geoffrey Self's study The Music of E.J. Moeran was completed and published. Although some academic research has been undertaken, with some of Moeran's life and work being the subject of detailed scholarship, none resulted in a full biography. The seemingly intractable problem that prospective biographers have encountered has been an apparent shortage of credible primary source material about the composer's early life, in particular his childhood and years of education. This has led to an unsatisfactorily incomplete evidence-based picture of the adult composer, and it seems that there has been insufficient information to make an extended biography worth writing. Moreover, Moeran destroyed much of his work – including everything that he composed as a child or schoolboy – and his lifelong peripatetic existence ensured that many of his possessions, including manuscripts, were scattered and lost. Few family papers have survived, and the passage of time has meant that there are no longer witnesses to verify or contradict what has previously been claimed or stated. Perhaps inevitably, the place of evidence has been taken by a perceptual framework that has been constructed over the years, based on the compounding of rumour, unsupported assertion, exaggeration, and invention, some of which undoubtedly originated with the composer himself. Facts have been supplemented or superseded by a detailed and ostensibly credible mythology. The understanding of Moeran's personality and the reception of his music has become so rooted in this mythology that the task of separating fact from sometimes sensational fiction is now extremely difficult.

The most powerful and enduring aspect of the mythology has been the story of Moeran's experiences during the First World War.