Snail,
Do I really have to keep calling you that- seems very discourteous?
If we learned anything from collecting it was that singers come in all shapes, sizes and abilities, ranging from those who could sing well anywhere: be it the smallest folk club in Boggart Hole Clough, or a concert venue at The Royal Festival Hall; to those whose voice shook and who forgot the words if a single person with a tape recorder asked them to sing into a microphone. An example of the latter, a Travelling woman, certainly with interesting songs, told us "we don't sing those songs any more, we've been modernised", and spoke of "the shame of singing". Would it have been fair of us to ask her to perform at a club on the strength of her (father's) songs? We were very friendly with her and her family and she might well have agreed.
It should be remembered that nearly all the singers we recorded had never sung outside their own communities, some not even outside the circle of their own homes and families. The idea of singing to an audience of total strangers would have been an anathema to some of them. The way we worked with singers meant that we spent a fair amount of time with them, in one case over thirty years, and during that time we got to know them quite well; some we counted among our closest friends.
Ultimately, the decision to sing or not to sing always lay with the singers we met, but at the same time, we believed it to be our decision whether or not to exert any influence we might have had over them to persuade them to sing, particularly against their better judgement.   We believe it would have been extremely arrogant and unfair on our part to exert such influence.
Strangely enough, the only time the situation ever arose was with Walter Pardon. Walter was a superb public performer who set himself high standards (far higher than many revival singers if this and other threads are anything to go by) and was very self-critical of his own performance. At one stage of his life he told us that he no longer wished to perform publicly as he felt he could no longer do the songs justice and travelling was getting too much for him. A club organiser who had asked him to perform and had been refused, approached us to try and get him to change his mind. I wonder what you would have done in our situation!
"Pearls before swine".
The clubs have not always treated source singers and musicians as well as we believe they deserved. We were present one night at a London club, when an Irish flute player who had been recorded by the BBC, but was by then past his best, was totally humiliated by the residents, so much so that he quietly left half way through the second half of the evening without waiting for his booking fee.
I wonder who you consider to blame for the night Joe Heaney was booed off the stage by an audience when he appeared at a Clancy Brothers concert; the concert organiser, the audience or Joe for agreeing to sing in the first place!
Sorry for the delay in replying.
Jim Carroll VGC (Victorian Gentleman Collector).