I like to think there was Bert the singer and storyteller with an incredible knowledge of tunes and lyrical material, and there was also Bert (or A.L.Lloyd) the folklorist with a very broad interest in folk song and a writer about such songs from many places around the world. His broad knowledge and interest meant that he was very good at making suggestions about connections about the spread of songs from one place to another.

His published collections of songs were important not for his own field work but for the the material he gathered together ath others were less interested in, that's particularly the case with his Come All Ye Bold Miners. Who else would had pulled it all together in such an interesting way, a way that miners would treasure? What pleased him most was that once the original (1952) collection was published it had a kind of snowball effect and the second edition in 1979 was much larger as a result.

I also see dramatic evolution of Bert's ideas about how to define folk song if you take his writing from 1944 to 1979. In 1944 he knew very little about what later became known as Industrial Folk Song, in later discussion about folk song he makes space for this relatively new material where the author is often known and where the transmission is via the printed page.

As a singer he often admitted that he had tinkered with songs or joined a particular set of lyrics to a particular tune. As a singer he recorded some 200 songs over a 30 year period on over a hundred recordings. Some never liked the way he sang, but I always found him a most interesting and entertaining singer and one who liked to 'release a song from it's hobbles' as he put it. I believe he encouraged many others to do likewise. Recently the Illawara Folk Club in NSW put on a Bert Lloyd Centenary concert in his honour and chose a number of Australian Songs Bert had recorded for a variety of singers and bands to interpret. It was a most interesting night!

See more about the Bert Lloyd Centenary at http://folkstream.com/reviews/lloyd/centenary.html