Sorry, missed this thread through going on holiday. However, I saw Derroll Adams two weeks ago. He was at Tonder Festival in Denmark. He looked very frail, being wheeled round the town in a wheelchair by his wife and daughters, and obviously not able to cope with all the people coming up to him to chat and wish him well. However, he was brought on stage for the Sunday night gala concert and spoke briefly to the audience of several thousand, who responded with frenetic applause - for his courage alone, he deserved it.
What always amazes me is the resonance of his beautiful deep voice, even in weakness, and his capacity for self-irony. About five years ago he appeared in the Mill at Tonder during a Singer's afternoon. He mixed up and then forgot the words of Trouble in Mind, had to call first on Allan Taylor, then on compère Iain MacKintosh for help - but oh, that stage presence and authority! Not a minute did he lose his audience but invoked his self-deprecating humour to help him through. In this, he impressed me far more favourably than Pete Seeger who, I felt at the time, was trying to distract from his failing voice by rushing around the stage unnecessarily when he was at Tonder in 1990. Today I think, maybe I was doing him an injustice, not having seen him live before.
Anyway, a year or two after Derroll's appearance at the Mill, he was there again, with Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and they both forgot their lines, but had a good laugh about it. (I suspect that in Jack's case drink was partly to blame ...).
Besides the two songs about Derroll mentioned above, Alex Campbell also wrote one called 'The Banjo Man'. In his turn, Alex had a very moving song written about him by fellow Scot Rab Noakes when he was dying of cancer, and a book-with-two-CDs brought out to mark 25 years of Tonder Festival includes a song Hamish Mhor and Alex, written by Brian McNeill and Ron Kavana about Alex Campbell and Hamish Imlach.
Sorry to be rambling on, but some of you may be interested to read it.