Okay, I admit, all said in annoyance last night. But i really don't think some people here aren't making allowances for the the time and place. Or the lives these people led.

How many millions did Ewan and Bert get out of teaching all the school kids in the land High Germany and countless other folksongs, and the radio ballads. And god knows how many other projects that gave the folk revival its momentum.

I remember going to a Ewan and Peggy gig one night in Leicestershire - it was the night the record comany had old them they intended destroying all the stocks of the radio ballad lps, because they didn't fit the label image. Peggy and Ewan had asked if they could buy them to sell at gigs - as it would have been impossible to finance producing them to that standard- and the company had said.

What I'm trying to say is that these weren't pampered people. they weren't photogenic enough for BBC2 to be queing to make in concert programmes about them! I'm quite convinced they wouldn't have done anything that wasn't with the primary intention of getting the folk music ship afloat.

personally i wans't buying quite a few of the ideas in Folksong in england, but it was one hell of an influential book. Even people who hadn't read it absorbed its ideas through the folk clubs and contact with those who had read it.

I suppose this is why such a lot of the traddies on mudcat go apopleptic when you a suggest maybe some of these old songs aren't actually worth preserving - they really aren't all that good as songs. but they are defended hook, line and sinker by people who have absorbed a view of history that doesn't hold water if you examine the minutiae, or even just weigh up the probablities of how it was.

So Bert invented a few folksingers. If that's what it took to get people listening, good luck to him. I wish I were that creative.