"It was one single narrow drawer in a very large storage cabinet. . .  ."

Verily!!

My observation on the similarities between the singers and groups in the movie and what may be construed as their real-live counterparts is a generality—which I think the writers intended—and did not mean that they were exactly the same.

Case in point:   The New Christy Minstrels always had at least one perky, bouncy girl wearing pigtails. It wasn't always the same girl. There were frequent personnel changes in the NCMs. I had two friends who had been in the group for awhile, and they informed me that Randy Sparks was something of a tyrant, not unlike the guy in the movie, and he would sometimes go on firing jags and replace the singers he sacked with look-alike/sing-alikes.

Mitch and Mickey were not exactly like Ian and Sylvia, but there again, another friend was singing in a Vancouver, B. C. club where Ian and Sylvia were also performing, and he said that they were constantly fighting backstage, and broke up and got back together about an half-dozen times during the two weeks they sang there.

It's not hard to draw parallels, even if the lines are a little squiggly. Such is the nature of parody.

Incidentally, I heard Marais and Miranda at the 1964 Berkeley Folk Festival and had a chance to meet and chat with them for awhile. Other than that they were a man and wife who performed together, there were absolutely no resemblances or parallels between them and Mitch and Mickey. A delightful and charming couple, obviously very much in love after being together for many years.

That particular period (early 1960s), contrary to popular belief, was a royal pain in the ass to many singers such as Bob Nelson, Walt Robertson, and myself here, and undoubtedly elsewhere, who were seriously interested in the music itself. One typical manifestation out of many was when, after singing "The Wreck of the Sloop John B." during coffee house gig in answer to a request, the requester informed my that I hadn't sung the song right. "What do you mean?" I asked. "You didn't sing it like the Kingston Trio!" he complained.

I had learned the song from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag in 1954, possibly before the members of the Kingston Trio even met. If anyone wasn't singing it right, it was the Kingston Trio! That sort of crap was happening all the time.

Some who seem to think the early 60s "folkoid spasm" constituted a "Golden Age" of folk music have tried to claim that singers such as myself owed the "pop-folk" singers for the fact that we found singing jobs and had receptive audiences. But the coffee house phenomenon had come into existence in the late 1940s and early 1950s in New York, Boston/Cambridge, and Berkeley/San Francisco, and it spread up the West Coast to Portland and Seattle in the mid to late 1950s (this, of course, is not taking into consideration the coffee houses that sprang up in London during Charles II's reign, or the ones in Boston where guys like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin hung out). Many of them had entertainment, and folk singers were favored, because it was lot cheaper to hire a guy or gal who was self-accompanied than it was to hire a jazz combo or other group. When the pop-folk singers appeared on the national scene, their fans did swell the audience a good bit, but these newcomers were more fickle than the hard-core audience that was already there, and moved off with the next change in pop-music taste.

I got most of my early gigs from people who hired me because they heard me sing at a party (or "hoot" in a small hall or private home—in the early 1950s, long before carpetbaggers pre-empted the word "hootenanny."). And that included doing a television series on folk music for the local educational TV channel, funded by the Seattle Public Library. From that point on, gigs came fairly thick and fast. Other than the fellow from the library who asked me to do the series, if I owed anyone, it was Walt Robertson, whose locally produced television show (1952-53) had already stimulated an audience for folk music in the Puget Sound area.

I felt that "A Mighty Wind" did at least a fair job of skewering a phenomenon that deserved a bit of skewering.

Don Firth