It's because musicians have precious few safeguards to what income they can garner from their art that they often have to resort to rubbish jobs to make ends meet.

No one owes anyone a living, surely? How many Folk Musicians do you know who actually make a living out of it? The real stuff, I find, isn't born from those sort of considerations anyway; the real stuff is what people do & have always done - very seldom does it ever get recorded, let alone pirated.

However, to describe nastily his work as "tidy, well-ordered musical MOR blandness" because he has objected to his CD being pirated is not only being mean to a fellow musician but patently inaccurate.

I described his music as tidy, well-ordered musical MOR blandness because that's precisely what it is. There is nothing nasty in me saying this, nor yet do I think he should roll over and allow his music to be pirated if he can stop it. The point of this thread was to alert the Mudcat Community to one very fine old LP which they could get a shot at hearing. Typically, it heads off into realms of the surreal. I hadn't even heard of Jim Causeley before today.

Oh and to be pedantic, It's a finely crafted Italian Melodeon, not Accordian.

http://castagnari.trad.org/index.en.html