That was really good. Two things that surprised me:

• the arrangements that combined instrumentation with recorded sound, due more to Peggy Seeger than anyone else I think. These were far ahead of their time and mark a path not taken. That kind of thing could be done much more easily now with a laptop, and integrated in live performance. I've hardly ever heard anybody try. Way more imaginative than simply piling up extra instruments.
  
  
• Ewan MacColl's mannered buzz-saw vibrato on climactic notes. Yuck. I don't think he did that elsewhere, and thank god he never persuaded any of his epigones to follow suit.

Parker was born three days after my father. Nice to able to pin his generation down that precisely.

I wouldn't have guessed he started out as a conservative Christian and never really dropped it.

They could have been more explicit about what actually happened when he was sacked.