"Music of the people."

Just reread what you are putting, irrelevant dinosaurs.

The Singers' Club was a time and event, not particularly influential in the rise of the folk clubs that came after, not of interest to the many people who recall old folk clubs with affection and enjoy what they see as folk now.

That people on here are putting forward the odd silly arbitrary way such things were run as a virtue is bemusing at best.

The U.K. Folk Clubs have a far stronger claim to a Genesis in US coffee clubs, Dylan, Paxton et al than the old men in fancy dress claiming a song they heard at their mother's knee is anything but something they got off an A L Lloyd album.

It is precisely because folk is far more than the narrow sub set of a sub set Jim Carroll is claiming as "pure" that folk clubs accommodated finger in ear farming dirges alongside '60s Americana, wannabe Pentangles and mucky monologues.