Winger:
"Exactly where can we find those facts?"
They came from a collection of contemporary newspaper articles and essays called (I think) 'Spokesmen For Liberty', edited by Jack Lindsay
some time in he 1950s. This was from a contemporary newspaper article giving an account of Nelson's funeral. Why; are you disputing their accuracy?
If you are objecting to my putting them up on the grounds of their accuracy - sorry, not my problem - I supplied what I had; that's what the aricle said. Surely your not suggesting I shouldn't have put them up - are you?
To compare my doing so with some poor soul giving vent to a bad bout of inferiority complex with a display of necrobhobia, as inevitably happen at the mention of MacColl's name, well.......!!!

Shimrod:
Bronson appeared to agree with your opinion of the Riverside series.
This is the beginning of an article he wrote in 1957, published in The Ballad and the Song - a collection of his essays.

"Moses Asch, with Folkways, is a pioneer, and firms like Stinson, and Elektra, and Riverside have been putting intelligent and yeomanry effort into the guidance of public taste; while their best singers, such as Ewan MacColl, Jeannie Robertson, Margaret Barry, A. L. Lloyd, the late Leadbelly, Pete and Peggy Seeger, Jean Ritchie, stand in need neither of defense nor special pleading. With this leadership, we may anticipate the gradual abating of the medley type of record and the increase of homogeneous collections.
Thanks to the encouragement of many small successes, Kenneth Goldstein and Riverside have recently issued the boldest single venture yet in their eight double-sided LP set of Child ballads, sung unaccompanied by Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd. It is not, I think, an exaggeration to declare that this is the most important event in the field since the publication of Sharp and Karpeles' Southern Appalachian collection. It may be short of ideal that eighty-odd ballads are sung by only two persons, but in spite of their professional status, both of these men, in their very different styles, carry conviction. Lloyd, although he has learned most of his songs from print, sounds more folklike; but MacColl is rooted in a strong family tradition, and wins our fullest assent.
The length of many of these versions as sung by MacColl and Lloyd is a new experience, and as such it prompts reconsideration of ballad-form by bringing into sharp focus questions hitherto unasked or but dimly perceived. For one thing, it shows that the ideal musical structure is inevitably a non-recurrent phrasal pattern for the quatrain......"

Jim Carroll