One must allow for the fact that, as we in the folk world well know, many people are celebrated in their own circles, but do not [& do not always wish to] make the breakthrough to national, or wider, celebrity. It is, too, one of Grosvenor Myer's Laws that those who do are rarely those most highly regarded within thir own milieu: I would instance that, tho the Dubliners who hit the charts were an excellent folksinging group, most of us could at the time have thought of a dozen we thought as good or better, in folksong terms, who never achieved that sort of celebrity.

So all this talk of 'never having heard of' some of these people on the 'celebrity' programmes &c by no means that they are not celebs to some not inconsiderable body of admirers wthin their own field. An example: one of my Jewish uncles was astonished that he met someone who didn't recognise the name of the Chief Rabbi of the time; he was quite taken aback when I challenged him to name the Moderator of the General Asssembly of the Church of Scotland.

~M~