Despite my better judgement and my determination not to get involved in all this seemingly endless discussion, much of which is hearsay, myth and supposition, I finally can't resist throwing my three penn'orth in.
Firstly, Ferrara (5.8.08), I don't know where you got your information from but the idea that A.L.Lloyd 'stopped singing American songs and started looking for more British songs' and then became motivated to look into his own heritage because of Ewan and Peggy's song policy is just silly. Bert had been listening to and recording English traditional performers for some twenty years before the Ballads and Blues came into existence. And he certainly didn't need to be encouraged to sing English material by Peggy or Ewan. Admittedly, earlier, both Bert and Ewan and virtually everybody else on the '50s folk/skiffle scene had sung some American material, usually influenced by the Almanac Singers, Guthrie etc.
Secondly, Stringsinger, in defence of Long John Baldry, whom I knew well in the late 50s, when we would both, along with other teenage folk music players and singers, hang out in the GGs (Gyre and Gymble) in John Adam Street, next to Charing Cross Station, he was not a Cockney, he was a policeman's son who grew up in Edgeware . And to describe him as 'the Cockney guy who sang a style with which he was unfamiliar (and) showed a kind of insensitivity to the song' is as silly, and as ill-informed, as Ferrara's Bert Lloyd quote. John was perfectly familiar with the 'style' of music he played. He immersed himself in the blues and especially Leadbelly and, even as a late teenager well before Peggy saw fit to laugh at his, he was an impressive, powerful singer and a great 12-string guitarist. He was one of the first Soho players to own a 12-string made by the fine luthier Toni Zamaitis who died in 2002. He certainly undestood the blues as well if not better than most British singers of that period, and probably some Americans.
Someone earlier suggested that the GGs was a folk club that might have pre-dated the Ballads and Blues. It wasn't actually a club, it was simply a basement coffee bar run by a banjo player (Fritz) and a guitarist (Max?) where people dropped in and played either en route to Soho (if you came off the train at Charing Cross) or at some point in the evening during the obligatory circuit of pubs, clubs, coffee bars - the Partisan, Sam Widges, the Nucleus, the Farm (possibly the St Martin's Lane coffee cellar where Long John was spotted by another writer on this thread. Although the Farm was actually further up in Monmouth Street, next to the As You Like It salad restaurant, but when I usd to run it for a while, John, Davey Graham, Jerry Lochran, Clive Palmer and many other guitarists and banjo players used to drop in and play), The Duke of York, The Skiffle Cellar, etc.,
I don't think that the repertory rules laid down by E & P and the committee did any harm. most of the folk scene went on its own way and did its own thing, and some of the more rigid clubs tended to end up in a bit of a cultural cul-de-sac. But I'm all for people feeling free to sing whatever attracts them and whatever audiences are happy to accept. The only
criterion for me is whether or not its done well and (back to LJB) with understanding. As someone else pointed out many of the singers of folk songs in Britain have been listening to American folk music and absorbing other forms of popular U.S. culture all their lives, which might not be a good thing, and is exactly what Bert Lloyd and MacColl were attempting to counteract with the 2nd folk Revival, but, like it or not, many of us have probably got as much of a feeling for, say Appalachian music, as has a middle-class New Yorker. Most of the leading Old Timey revival musicians in the '50s and '60s were New York Jewish with as little or possibly less cultural relationship to the mountain ballad singers of Kentucky and Carolina than the average Brit. It's an area riddled with quicksands, and a subject as slippery as a greased pig, and it's a brave person who lays down rules and laws when it comes to traditional music.