I hope whatever health problems he's having, they're not too serious, and that he recovers well. An example of his graciousness: I wrote him a few years back, asking what exactky "Chicken on a raft" is. I thought it was fried egg on toast, and another local chantey singer thought it was creamed chicken on toast. Tawney wrote back a letter not only settling the question (it's fried egg on fried bread), but giving a full explanation of why it had to be fried bread and not toast (logistics of making all that toast for large Navy ship crews), and wrote about the meaning of some other lines in the song. This was all done through snail mail (I didn't have a computer then). Just a generous sharing of knowledge with someone he doesn't even know.

Chanteyranger