The turn that this thread has taken recently makes a section of an article that I wrote for the current Living Tradition seem relevant here; the one that I wrote on Sandra Kerr. We have seen earlier in the thread that Sandra has expressed mixed feelings about Ewan MacColl over the years but it was clear from my interview with her in June of this year that overall, she gained a great deal from him.
Here is the section of the article that deals with Ewan, Peggy and The Critics Group: -

I started with the obvious question about how she became involved in the first place.

“I was in a skiffle group at school. Then some other friends who were also in a skiffle group took me to The Singers Club when I was about 17 and I was immediately converted. I heard Ewan (MacColl) and Peggy (Seeger) and Bert (Lloyd). I can remember thinking what extraordinary tunes the songs they were singing had; they did things that other tunes I knew didn't do. I know now that this was because they were modal, but I just remember their strangeness. There was no instrumental music, just songs, and one that stuck out in my mind was Van Diemen's Land - Harry Cox's version which Peggy accompanied on the guitar and Ewan sang. I was struck by its beauty.”

I reminded Sandra that it was 30 years this year (2019) since Ewan died, but somehow, he still manages to be a controversial figure. “Always was; always will be,” she said. “I'm not actually sure that he didn't court controversy. However, there is a lot of misconception about where he was coming from, but for all his contentious nature, I would not have missed the chance that I had under his kind of teaching; he was wonderful. I was so lucky because I was only 20 when Ewan and Peggy asked me to go there and live with them in Beckenham. I was a kind of live-in au pair to help with the children, but at the same time I was having one-to-one lessons from both. It was amazing; to this day, I can't believe that this happened. It was wonderful.”

It must have been around these years that Sandra became involved with The Critics Group. I had a feeling that the approach they adopted was very different to the usual folk song and music workshops that are run today; like, for example, those on song accompaniments on concertina which Sandra would be running in my home town, Lewes, exactly a week after our conversation.

“The Critics Group was different in the sense that it was a passion, a renewal, to learn from the tradition, to go as far back as we could go so that we could hear what these great singers were doing, the likes of Joe Heaney and Elizabeth Cronin. We could hear what they were doing and try to emulate that, try to get it back. I think that at that time there wasn’t a lot of discussion about how you should sing those songs, without being dictatorial. People can spend hours talking about a fiddler's technique and style, but I don't think that at that time people were thinking about vocal style in the same way. So that was a revelation, and was totally encouraged by Ewan.”

“We spent a lot of time during that seven or eight years listening to the field recordings that Ewan and Peggy had in their wonderful library. This led to all sorts of exercises. Ewan brought to the group the things they had been taught at the Theatre Workshop by the best movement and vocal teachers, so we were taught all that, as well as relaxation exercises, how to improve diction and projection, using Laban’s Theory of Efforts in singing - he transferred all of this into vocal terms, which was a very useful tool in describing how a singer was using their voice; how the voice was moving through the air. It was fascinating stuff, and I still use it to this day e.g. using Laban’s terminology to describe what a singer is doing: things like ‘this is a gliding effort’ or ‘he’s using a thrusting effort’. It's all very useful.”

I asked if what Sandra had learned then had been useful in the way she has run community choirs and week-long festival events, both of which she has been doing for many years.

“No, I wouldn't say that necessarily; because the Critics Group finished in 1971 and I have done and learned a lot of other things since. But where it has been most useful has been in talking to university students about approaches to singing. Let's say that you are singing a ballad; let's say The Banks Of Green Willow. You have to think about who you identify with here, what sort of mood you want to create with the ballad. You take them back to, let's say, the wonderful singers that Cecil Sharp recorded in the Appalachians. One singer had just sung Henry Martin to him. When she’d finished she said: ‘When I am singing these songs, I feel like I'm the feller it’s all happening to.’ That's wonderful, that total identification.”

The Critics Group and the Singers Club were not just about studying the tradition, they were also trying to encourage creativity. “Absolutely!” said Sandra. “Ewan encouraged this to get people to write from their own position, their political stance. The first song that I ever wrote was when I was living with them, pre-Critics Group, but that was one of the tasks that Ewan gave me. He asked me to find a theme that you would find in a traditional song and then bring it up to date, so I wrote a song called What’ll The Neighbours Say about a young girl getting in the family way and saying, ‘This is my child and I don't want all this...’ and so on. Anyway, 15 years later when Frankie Armstrong, Kathy Henderson and I were putting together a song book, My Song Is My Own (Pluto Press), someone sent us that song from Scotland saying, ‘You ought to put this in your book; it's traditional’.” In some ways Sandra ought to have been delighted. “I was delighted. It was the best accolade! A song that you have written to be regarded as traditional!”