^^ GUEST 10 Nov 24 - 05:49 AM

2014 Guardian
review by Rob Young
Singing from the Floor
by JP Bean
Schisms existed almost from the beginning – "It was like puritans and cavaliers," says singer Harvey Andrews – as MacColl ran Ballads and Blues at the Princess Louise pub in London's High Holborn (later the renowned Singers' Club) as a petty dictatorship, a microcosm of imagined musical purity and authenticity. "He laid this stuff down whereby you had to sing from where you came from," complains revival singer Bob Davenport. "Traditional music was for entertaining, it wasn't for a further education class." For MacColl and other hardliners, folk music was a revolutionary tonic to fortify the troops against the advancing pop-music hordes. Eventually he set up, with Seeger, his own politburo – the weekly study sessions known as the Critics Group, a ritual of essentialism that was taken up elsewhere. In one Nottingham club, a panel of frowning committee members sat on a windowsill behind the stage, and their disapproving faces could be observed by the audience while the poor singer strove to please. For younger performers such as guitarist John Renbourn, these folk assizes were "sheer hell".
www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/26/singing-floor-folk-review-jp-bean

more
www.google.com/search?q=%22Singing+from+the+Floor%22+%22JP+Bean%22
_________________________