Jim Carroll -
"Vic can you name a young song writer in the uk folk revival who has produced the same quantity of modern quality songs?"

No, because, in my opinion, he is the finest songwriter to come out of the folk scene....actually, I'd go further than that; I'd say that he was the finest songwriter of songs in vernacular English since Robert Burns, but he would not say that he wrote folk songs though I can remember him talking at a dinner party about how it had been reported to him that his The Shoals of Herring had been sung as The Shores of Erin.. When I asked him if he thought that the change was conscious or was something like the 'folk process', his reply was something like, "I don't know. I am not in a position to tell."

However, it is not the quality of his songwriting is not under question. The point that he was divisive cannot be disputed with his attitude towards how folk songs should be sung being one of his qualities that caused this divisiveness.