Cap'n,
You have a habit of walking away from your arguments when they get too much for you, which I find extremely irritating and certainly did on this occasion. Having said this, I should not have become irritated and I apologise for doing so.
I also find terms like 'folk police' the refuge of people who have run out of ideas, so perhaps it is best avoided.
To continue the discussion on more amicable terms:
Peter Kennedy was not only part of the revival, he was one of its founder members; as a collector his 'As I roved Out' series drew many of us into the music in the first place; as a musician and dance caller, he performed regularly at clubs and dances in the early days, and as organiser, he was very much part of what went on at Cecil Sharp House early in the revival.
It seems to there are a number of ways to approach his behavious towards traditional performers: you can deny it happened and argue otherwise; you can accept it and condemn it or you can ignore it and say it wasn't important - which is it to be?
My friend and neighbour, Tom Munnelly is probably the most important collector in these islands in the latter half of the 20th century.
He has recorded over 20,000 songs from thousands of traditional singers. I doubt if more than a dozen or so have ever been inside a club or at a festival.
If you look through Mike Yates' collection (on the British Library web page) you will find the same proportion applies to his singers.
Over the last 30 odd years we have probably recorded somewhere between
50 and 100 singers; around a half -dozen have ever been in a folk club, if that.
In a moment of point-scoring weakness I went through the BBC archive lists and began to list singers who had never appeared in public; I listed forty and hadn't got to the letter C.
I repeat, the vast majority of traditional singers never saw the inside of a folk club.
Incidentally, Walter Pardon's 'alleged' attitude to his songs is a matter of record and can be accessed via the interviews we did with him which are freely accessible at the National Sound Archive in The British Library.
Jim Carroll