I'm refreshing this thread cause a mudcatter had just PM me about Peter & I happen to run into him at an Irish session about 3 weeks ago & we had a good chat (he looked & sounded very well), then I just saw this advert in the Boston Folk Song Society's newsletter.
Here's the advert as follows;

"In the fall of 1986 I gave a course at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA-Boston) sponsored by the Department of Musical History. It was an introduction to Anglo-Celtic folk music which included discussions, lectures, listening to recordings and workshops with musicians who played & discussed their material. I'm looking into offering this course again."

"the course will include a brief survey of ballad scholarship, general characteristics of folk music & a comparison to other forms of music-primitive, popular & composed art music, folk music in it's cultural setting, the structure of ballads, theories of ballad origin, supernatural ballads as archaic survivals, the cycle oforal transmission & composition, ballad themes, nature of folk tunes, balad migration & variants and an appreciative understanding of the folk aesthetic".

"As soon as I know more about the status of the course, when & where, I'll make that information available in the FSSCB newsletter"

"Cordially
Peter Johnson"

My take on this is that if you've never met or don't know Peter the course would be worth the taking just on that alone. Peter has been activily promoting folk music & musicians since he left the Navy (or the Navy left him) in 1959. Aside from his qualifiactions to go on about the above areas of folk music he has a head full of personal settings & experences with so many luminaries in the folk world that this would not be just an academic course on folk music itself but it would also be an account of the living folk & how it breathes, eats & it's daily slice of life.

If & when Peter presents further info about this course I'll present it here.

Barry