G'day Peter T,

I did meet him ... back around 1964/5, when he visited, and sang at, the Bush Music Club in Sydney. Many of the older members of the BMC knew him when he was out here on an anthropological research grant. There was a lot of local feeling that he might have gathered up the material shared by local collectors ... and presented it as his own work when he went back to the US.

Some letters I saw (including some to myself, as BMC Secretary in the early '70s) expressed his belief that he ought to have been awarded a "prestige job, in Australian folklore" but for agitation against him by "left-wing fellow-travelers". Nobody I knew - particularly at that time - knew of any sort of job in Australian folklore ... Everyone was collecting / organising / publishing at their own expense ... in their own time!

All of this dates from after his possible fieldwork in Australia ... and all the people who have talked to me about John Greenway are now dead. I doubt that we are left with any good way to judge his Australian period.

Oh ... in all fairness, I should mention that the late and lamented Chris Kempster, one of the original Bushwhackers Band (1950s band that defined a "Bush Band" ... not the '70s R & R converts who used a similar name) told me that watching John Greenway, and talking with him, taught more about playing "folk-style" guitar than he had worked out in the several years before!

Regards,

Bob