I must confess that I was rather sniffy about the Spinners back in the day. I think that the way they have been described as light weight earlier in the thread, sums up my feelings about them. However, there were several things that I know or have heard about them that really gains my respect.
* I was told by one of the organisers of the National Folk Festival as it as then was in the 1960s that the Spinners allowed their name to be put on the publicity for the event as it would attract people to the events at Keele University. They were not paid. in fact they bought their tickets and paid for their accommodation.
* I was also told - not by an NFF organiser so I cannot vouch for this - that one of the 1960s weekends lost money and there was a threat that it would not go ahead. The Spinners made up the deficit.
* As the editor of The Folk Diary, I used to get phone calls from them on the day they were to appear at a concert in Sussex. I was asked where the local folk clubs were and who the guests were so that they could announce the details at their concerts.
* When they were appearing at the Chichester Festival Theatre not long after it opened, they got to hear in the interval that the great old Sussex singer, George Belton, was in the audience. They called him up to do a couple of songs in the second half.
* The very fact that they were a black/white group at that time, certainly one the earliest and most prominent, was important in itself. They did a lot of conscious raising for the Ant-Apartheid Movement.