"Did Martin ever sing in the Singers's club? "
Martin did sing at 'The Singers' - once, I think; he certainly was around occasionally in the Pindar of Wakefield days.
"philosophically flawed"
I hope he is not going to add to the myth and propose that anybody in the Critics Group suggested that there was a correct way that "folk song should be sung" - nobody ever did. The Group came into being when people on the scene asked MacColl to take classes.
He refused, and instead set up a self-help group to examine the technical and artistic problems of singing and the various ways to tackle them. It covered various wider areas - research, repertoire... even acting, but (wrongly, to my mind) never attempted to spread its influence outside the group, apart from encouraging the setting up of other self-help groups.
Shimrod's description of Ewan and Peggy's seminars more or less sums up the work covered by the group.
In my experience it covered ground-breaking aspects of singing and it's a great waste that none of the work was made more public so it could have been discussed honestly and perhaps borrowed from.
Though far from perfect, the work of the Group was useful for me as a singer for as long as I was a singer and many of the basic techniques that evolved still work forty years later, as rusty a singer as I now am.
For the record, recordings of several hundred group meetings are housed at The Charles Parker archive in Birmingham Central Library; digitised and open for public access - as far as I know.
As I probably won't get to listen to it here in Ireland I would very much appreciate a recording of the programme - will happily pass on the script of the talk I gave on the Group at the symposium to celebrate MacColl's 70th birthday in 1986.
Jim Carroll