Winger:
"Well done, Jim. By your own definition you've just become a fully paid-up Folk Luvvie. ("What is a Folk Luvvie - well; as I was just saying to Martin the other day................")."
If it pleases you to thinks so - please feel free; I knew and worked with Ewan for over 20 years, and consider(ed) both he and Peggy good friends, as well as contributors to my love and knowledge of traditional singing. This is not the creeping, first-name, assumed familiarity that infested the revival at one time (and maybe still does); merely personal reminiscences I was asked for.
By the way, I intended to ask you - do you always tell anybody who offers you advice on singing to "fuck off?"
I think that one of Ewan's greatest achievements is probably that, nearly twenty years after his death, he still manages to provoke frothing-at-the-mouth hatred from people like yourself, whose contact and knowledge of him and his ideas was so marginal as to be non-existent, .
Regarding the myth of the Singers Club policy not allowing singers to sing songs out of their own region, there is, of course, the other side of the coin:
On numerous occasions E&P and other members of the Critics Group were offered bookings at clubs on the condition that they didn't sing their political songs; and also, they were requested by some not to sing 'modern' songs (ie-their own compositions); kettle/black springs to mind!!! (They turned down both requests, by the way).
Jim Carroll