I can't actually see where we differ.

They knew folkmusic's profile could be raised in a modern society - because they had seen it done in America. They knew it was possible. they must been debating with each other, and seizing mainchances in the way that all unregarded artists do.

MacColl's success as a playwright behind the Iron Curtain - must have awakened in him the idea of the using a Brechtian model of doing folksong - and thus the radio ballads. Folksong was beng used in other plays in the 1950's like John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance and Weskers's Chips with Everything. MacColl with his theatre background must have felt part of all that.

The English being the English rose to the stimulus those two presented in their own peculiar way. And bloody frustrating it must have been, as Lonnie Donnegan and Donovan and Dylan in turns went stellar.

As you say Lloyd had a strategy, and presenting songs rather than fragments with a punchy and compelling and not too diffuse provenance must surely have been part of his effort.