Jim:

Lloyd and MacColl had different circles, which sometimes overlapped, so there wasn't really a Lloyd/MacColl circle at all.   Frankie Armstrong was in both. Anne Briggs was a favorite of Lloyd. Shirley was praised and helped along by both in her early career, moreso Lloyd I believe. If you look at Folk Roots, New Routes, for example, you'll see songs she learned from both Lloyd and MacColl.

Later on as the folk scene developed new "authorities" like Ashley "The Guv'nor" Hutchings, Shirley Collins remained associated with them.

Guest Reply by name,

On the one hand you say "Good or Bad don't come into it," on the other "popular is good."

That's a contradiction.

Your other point, that it's all really personal taste, I accept.

Guest LSC was trying to say that sales figures on Shirley's albums automatically meant she was good. I was saying "not so." Beyond that, none of us here even knows what those sales figures are.

My point was that there are other things that make something popular besides being good. If I went around and distributed free copies of a CD, and I distributed a lot of them, there would be many people who had them. It would not make them good. Therefore, price can help. If I spent a lot to market something, a lot of people might buy it, even if it was dreadful. And if authority figures urged people to buy something, they might do so, once again even if they themselves thought it was dreadful, or found out it was dreadful after buying it. None of these forms of popularity makes anything good.

Satisfying community aesthetic standards, one could argue, makes something good to that community. But we have not established through this small sample here whether Shirley really does that.