"you could sing only songs from your "own tradition" in his Singers' Club "
Only the residents - and it wasn't a requirement - we were encouraged to do so.
Peggy explains this policy at length in a letter to The Living Tradition some years ago (see the response to our letter 'Where Have All the Folk Songs Gone?' - archived on L.T. website.
The idea originally came from Alan Lomax who, when he first met MacColl and Lloyd,, found they were singing everything, including American stuff, in phoney accents.
He berated them for it and said that they should be opening up the British repertoire - they did, and the result was a large portion of the folk performers stopped trying to sound like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie and got their repertoire and their styles from nearer home.
As far as I'm concerned, that was the best thing that happened to the British folk scene when I came onto it.
MacColl's antipathy towards Dylan was not his singing, but the fear that audiences would revert back to copying the Yanks with mid-Atlantic accents.
He regarded Dylan as a mediocre singer (can't argue with that) and a somewhat pretentious poet, which he has now admitted he was.
Jim Carroll