For we Colonials: The Singer's Club wasn't a venue proper. On the west side of the big pond it would be something more like “Singer's Night” at the Pindar of Wakefield club.

Never went during the era. I did experience the usual suspects at the 1960 West Indian Gazette Anniversary Concert (+Paul Robeson, Cy Grant, Nadia Cattouse &co.) Came away thinking MacColl & Seeger didn't know Ghana from Guyana and probably couldn't find either on a map.

Cattouse & MacColl were doing a show with Trinidadian Edric Connor of the British Gov's Songs from Jamaica (Day-O &c) fame. The whole lot was pretty capitalist-adjacent when outside the “Club.” Which brings us to:

For MacColl and other hardliners, folk music was a revolutionary tonic to fortify the troops against the advancing pop-music hordes.

Dylan was managed by Yank folk mogul Albert Grossman, founder of Chicago's legendary Gate of Horn folk club. You think the Singer's Club were control freaks? Pffft! But… as Peggy's brother-in-law John Cohen once put it... Dylan was even weirder than Grossman, so it never really took.

And Peggy's brother Pete had spent the better part of the 1950s buying up publishing rights to a swath of American pop/commercial 'folk' with his newest business pal, mega-mogul Howie Richmond (TRO-Folkways, Paul Campbell aka The Weavers &c&c.) If one wanted to sing Leadbelly, somebody else had to get paid. The Smithsonian owns it all now.

Ahhhh, the good ol' days!