Jon
Delighted to hear it's being reprinted
The BBC collection is the most neglected folk asset Britain has - still basically unused, largely thanks to Kennedy's claim of ownership, but mainly thanks to disinterest by both the BBC and EFDSS
Up to my transferring the EFDSS recordings onto tape for the V.W.M. Library, they existed outside the Beeb only on very fragile discs which were constantly being played unsupervised on crude equipment by anybody who requested them - many were damaged and some were stolen
Anybody attempting to issue them publicly had to fight Kennedy for their use and usually had to pay him
I believe Bob Copper had a great deal of difficulty issuing his 'Songs and Southern Breezes' album on Topic
Many of them still remain woefully unused and it is sad to think that so little interest has survived in them that that will probably remain the case
Some time in the 90s we attended a library lecture at C#Sharp House given by a young American, Craig Fees, who had researched the project and had come up with masses of information - it would be interesting to know if he had done anything further with his researches
It would also be interesting to know if the recording team had interviewed any of the singers and if those recordings survived

My strongest memory of the project is a conversation we one had with Seamus Ennis, one of the main collectors, in a bar here in Miltown Malbay
I said to him, "I believe you worked with Peter Kennedy"
After a very pregnant silence he spat out, "That man's a thief"
Jim Carroll