Earlier in this thread, Jim Carroll wrote:

>>It is true that standards in the revival were higher in the sixties than they are now, but I got thoughroughly [sic] sick of Alex Campbell and his clones telling audiences that their out-of-tune guitars were "near enough for folk song"<<

Well Jim, during the early 1960s I hung out with Alex quite a lot. I only heard him use that phrase a few times, and on those occasions it was quite clearly meant as a JOKE. You know … as in satire … irony … all that kind of stuff …

Moreover, I don't ever remember Alex performing with his guitar significantly out of tune. (Though of course, as all working guitarists know, no guitar is ever perfectly in tune - for further information, see numerous Mudcat threads on the structural limitations of fretted instruments, the defects of the equally tempered scale, etc, etc.)   

And finally (for now) I'd like to add that although Alex, like most of us, had his off days, at his best he was a superb performer of traditional and contemporary songs, a matchless communicator to audiences of all kinds, and a tireless and unselfish publicist for artists who were less well-know than himself.

Wassail!