Since there are clearly several posters on this thread who knew MacColl and his methods far better than I (who never met nor even heard him in the flesh), does any of you have inside knowledge of his creative input to the traditional songs he popularised? I'm thinking specifically of "Four Loom Weaver", which he credited as having been collected from Beckett Whitehead of Delph, in my part of England. Whitehead does not sing this in the collected recordings held at the VWML, and it strikes me as far more likely that he either recited or presented MacColl with the text of the old "Jone O' Grinfilt" poem and that MacColl set it to the grand tune we all know. And did something similar happen with "I Mean to get Jolly Well Drunk", which again has more of the ring of a polemical poem and little in common with Beckett Whithead's generally rural folksong repertoire? (He did sing "To the Begging I Will Go" but again MacColl seems to have made up a new tune for this too) I don't have any axe to grind over this, but it's a matter of interest that many songs were fed into the revival by MacColl and Lloyd after what had clearly been much creative tinkering, and were then passed down the line as completely authentic.