There is always a danger on a topic such as this of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I thoroughly enjoyed Bert's singing - though I know that on occasions he could go horrendously out of pitch. Every singer I have know, Bert, Ewan, whoever, took liberties at one time or another with texts of traditional songs, but Bert's problem was that he made claims for some of them that didn't hold water.
I went to every talk I possibly could that Bert gave, including the most inaccurate and pretentious one I've ever heard on Irish music.
I have no idea if his pronouncements on Eastern European music were correct; I do know that he instigated a life-long love of that music, particularly the singing, in me.
His radio programmes, such as Folk Music Virtuoso, The Lament, The Savage in the Concert Hall and Songs of the People, still get regular plays in this house.
As flawed as Folk Song in England is, I would have no hesitation in recommending it to anybody coming to the subject for the first time.
I found Bert's scholarship extremely contradictory at times; inspirational rather than informative, but inspirational it most certainly was.
I have some great memories of seeing Bert in action; like the night during a singer's Club 'You Name it, We'll Sing it' evening when a member of the audience sent up a slip of paper requesting the song about "the unpaid brickie who went berserk and slaughtered two" - it was Bert who sang Lamkin! Or the lecture he gave at Keele on 'The Ballad' with Fred Jordan beside him on the platform. The photograph of the two of them on stage made it into Dance and Song, Bert giving of his best, Fred behind him, fast asleep, illuminated by a sunbeam streaming through the roof window.
The last time I can remember seeing Bert was at The Singers Club. The evening was drawing to a close when he appeared at the door in a dinner suit, swishing an enormous brandy glass, with that cherubic grin on his face.
Ewan spotted him and asked him to come up and sing, and like a greyhound from the slips, he was half-way across the room when a voice came from the door - "Al--bert" - his wife Charlotte in a long frock. Bert promptly did a u-turn and was never seen again.
If you could bottle memories like that you could get rich.
Bert was a complex individual, sometimes very private, and occasionally economical with the truth - but you can't take away what he did for all of us,
Jim Carroll