Sorry to hear your wife is ill Al, hope she improves soon.
Sorry also that we can't agree on a singer - it happens all the time; the nature of our different involvement, and, of course, personal taste.
I met McTell on a number of occasions, as I said, he used to turn up at the Comhaltas session in Fulham where we were regulars.
He seemed a nice feller; I remember someone complementing him on his 'Streets of London' and his replying, "I made far more money out of it than the homeless ever did" - I respect that.
His personality aside, comparing what he did with Peggy, Charles or anybody is a little facile - apples and bananas - different fruit altogether.
Personally, his singing did nothing for me, English singers who sing in an assumed American accent seldom do - I find myself not being able to take what they are saying seriously.   
He is a skillful enough performer of the genre of songs he has chosen, and he has a large following for that type of songs, but so what, so do a lot of others, nothing special, as far as I can see.
Nothing of what he songs has anything to do with the type of songs I have been listening to, performing (for a time) collecting and researching for the last half century.
I can't think of a single singer of the older generation we have taken songs from or interviewed, to whom his songs would have made the slightest difference.
For me, the real contribution people make to folk music is in what they leave you, what difference they make to your love and understanding of the songs.
I was drawn into folk song by accidentally (out of boredom really) going into a club run by a nationally (later internationally) known Group, and being entertained week after week for a couple of years, until I found that what I was listening to was beginning to sound rather samey, so I began to lose interest.
This was in pre-Beatles Liverpool, with a thriving Jazz and C&W scene, so we weren't short of places to go.
The club invited Ewan and Peggy along as guests one night - who?
It plunged me into a world of song I had never heard and knew nothing whatever about.
I became hooked on their songs, their approach, their knowledge and their incredible generosity in sharing what they had and the time they were prepared to devote to working with people like me who had nothing but our interest to offer (all for free).
This discussion is about being paid as a performer - I have never met anybody else on the scene who was prepared to devote a night a week for nearly a decade, to turning over their home to work with inexperienced singers who wished to learn more about folk song in order to become better at what we were doing.
When I got to know them later I stayed with them half a dozen times and was let loose on their collection of recordings and books - they'd converted their son Neil's bedroom into somewhere people like me could sleep in and record what they had, even providing a couple of tape recorders to enable us to do so.
Each time we visited, Neil was evicted into his brother Calum's room next door.
Later, when Ewan asked me to become a member of the Critics Group, they fed me and gave me a bed for a month until I found work and somewhere to live.
They weren't particularly well-off at the time; they lived in a three bedroom maisonette, sang for little more than expenses at the Singers Club, got occasional radio work from the BBC, and did regular tours when they needed to.
What real money they did make came much later when one of the songs they had written was accidentally taken up by the music industry (ten years or so after its composition).
I later found the same generosity throughout their particular group of followers, a desire to talk about and pass on what they had - I stayed with Charles a few times, in Birmingham, and later in Leominster, and was greeted with exactly the same incredible hospitality.
If I got anything from working with these people, it was the knowledge that these songs weren't mine, or anybody's in particular - as Walter Pardon once told us, "They're not my songs, they're everybody's".
For me, one of the uniquenesses of folk songs is that they came into existence to be passed on; ideas rather than commodities.
Sorry - gone on far too long
Best wishes to you both
Jim Carroll