"We can but dream, Shimrod! We can but dream... "
A few other dreamers:

"Although his speech always retained its native Lancashire intonation, he became an acknowledged master of sung ballad-Scots; some of the recordings in our archive are without doubt among the very finest examples of Lowland Scots ballad artistry ever put on tape…….
By that time Ewan's own career had diverged from Joan's; with Peggy Seeger, who'd come into his life thanks to Alan Lomax, he devoted himself more and more to the folk-song revival, becoming its most redoubtable militant champion. He teamed up the late A. L. Lloyd to produce a series of valuable folksong L.P.s, and with his mettlesome Critics group; a sort of New Model Army of traditional songsters; he may be said to have left a lasting imprint on the singing styles and folk-cultural predilections of a whole generation of revival singers."
Hamish Henderson 1991

"MacColl demonstrated years ago that it is possible to create vital, contemporary songs within the traditional frameworks. Unfortunately, most of the contemporary songwriters who find favour among the folk club audiences, show little interest in, or concern for, traditional song forms. The idiom in which they most commonly compose is that of the pop songs, no matter how un-pop their lyrics. This is a pity because, with contemporary ''folk songs'' continually growing in popularity, the eventual result will be that the folk song revival, and the clubs, will lose all contact with folk songs."
Ian Campbell,
Folk Scene, 1965.

"MacColl's singing is altogether one of the most moving experiences available on folksong recordings today, when so much of what is presented as 'revival' folksinging is so embarrassingly false. His particular excellence is not so much in the ruddy-bloody, burly and masculine rant, and the barrel-chested sexual brag expected of men's songs in general, and of bawdy song in particular, and in which MacColl can easily take cards-&-spades when he feels like it, but in the poignant and emotional erotic songs in the character of the woman so frequent in the poetry of Burns, and so central and significant in The Merry Muses of Caledonia, where every such feminine-identification song is, precisely for the reason of that identification, to be suspected of being Burns' own, or importantly, revised by his hand."
Gershon Legman,
The Horn Book

"Apart from myself, MacColl is the only man of genius writing for the theatre in England today."
George Bernard Shaw.

And just a reminder of what it is really about, instead of all this in-fighting shit and begrudgement:

"But the songs are still here, the beautiful, gentle, harsh, ironic, good-natured, lusty, bawdy, exquisite, passionately beautiful songs of the people. Let us hope that they continue to survive, that the kind of women and men who gave birth to them will survive, that the world which gave birth to us all will survive. I'll drink to that! January 1989"
Ewan MacColl. Journeyman. 1989.

"Well, there they are, the songs of our people. Some of them have been centuries in the making, some of them undoubtedly were born on the broadside presses. Some have the marvellous perfection of stones shaped by the sea's movement. Others are as brash as a cup-final crowd. They were made by professional bards and by unknown poets at the plough-stilts and the handloom. They are tender, harsh,, passionate, ironical, simple, profound.... as varied, indeed, as the landscape of this island."
The Song Carriers 1965

Jim Carroll