In the end improvement comes from a desire to improve- everybody who wants to will find their own road.
I stopped singing regularly when we started to collect and research in 1973, a mixture of lack of time to devote to both and a relisation that if I couldn't put in the time for practice I didn't enjoy the noise I was making.
Recent opportunities have aroused my interest in searching out places to sing and re-learning my somewhat overlarge and unmanageable repertoire.
I am now enjoying singing more than I can ever remember having done so in the past.
I'm certainly not singing better (30/40 years older and I don't think I was ever more than a reasonably competent singer), and I now have the added problem of having a repertoire of largely narrative songs in an environment where people are used to non-narrative, lyrical songs - but I find there are enough people interested in my type of song to make their responses helpful and encouraging - so far!!
I found the journey back a little daunting, especially when I discovered things I couldn't do that I could handle with ease decades ago.
I was horrified when I found I could no longer handle the ranges of two of my favourite songs - The Flying Cloud and The Sheffield Apprentice; I was over the moon when, with a little work, I got them both back.
For me, MacColl's advice was spot-on:
"It can't happen every time, not with anybody, although your training can stand you in good stead, it's something to fall back on, a technique, you know. It's something that will at least make sure that you're not absolutely diabolical"
The basic work I was introduced to in 1969 is now bearing fruit - I'm enjoying what I'm doing and I'm enjoying re-visiting all the songs I've been missing out on for so long.
I've selected an extract from the talk I gave at the MacColl symposium where I tried to give a general picture of what the Critics Group was about - feel free to throw stones at it or ignore it - I can only say that it seems to have helped me.
Jim Carroll

The group that was eventually to become the Critics was first started in 1964 at the suggestion of a number of people, including Enoch Kent, Bob Davenport and Eric Winter, who were not happy with what was happening in the revival at the time and felt that Ewan should start classes for singers in order to push up the standards. The main tendencies in the revival then seemed to be the Joan Baez, Bob Dylan soundalikes, or the school of thought that suggested that folk singing required no particular talent and all that was needed is that you should get up and sing as long as you got the words and tune more or less right (even this didn't matter as long as you were armed with enough jokes). Turning up drunk, falling all over the stage and over the front row ensured a return booking in many clubs, as long as it was carried off with showmanship. Both the soundalike, and the near-enough-for-folk-song schools are sadly still with us, though in the case of the former, the models of the soundalikes are different nowadays.
The idea of the group was that a group of singers should meet and, with mutual constructive criticism should work on each other's singing under the direction of Ewan and taking advantage of his considerable knowledge and experience. In order to do this, the first work to be carried out was to listen to recordings from all over the world of as many traditional singers as were available at the time, to analyse what they were doing and why, and to try and apply it to their own singing.      This was undertaken on the premise that, at the height of the tradition, traditional singers, far from being the natural, unconscious and artless songbirds that early collectors considered them, knew exactly what they were doing and worked extremely hard to achieve their objectives. The aim was not to copy the singers, but to take what was best and most useable. It was recognised that the tradition in most parts of the British Isles was past its peak, also that most singers were past their best when the recordings were made, and that it was necessary to try and find out what they would have sounded like when they, and the tradition were in their prime. It was in the Critics Group that I first heard the suggestion that not everything a traditional singer does is automatically good; nor was it true that every singer over a certain age who sang traditional songs automatically was a traditional singer.   I say this because there was, and to some extent still is a tendency to completely base styles on the older singers, asthma and all. The English revival has produced some of the world's youngest old age pensioners.
In order to discuss style and technique a terminology was devised covering ornamentation, tone and delivery. The group became conversant with these terms and were expected to be able to apply them to their own singing. Exercises were given to assist performance; for example, it was noted that nervousness produced physical tension, which could affect adversely breathing and pitch, so a technique of relaxation aiming to control any unwanted tension, was taught. This was based on relaxation techniques used in the theatre. Voice exercises were used to enable singers to find their own natural tone, thereby assisting them to be in control of apparatus. In the same way, singing exercises, including pieces from Wagner, Gilbert and Sullivan and Scots mouth music were given to help with precision in pitch and articulation and the handling of difficult intervals. The place of instrumental accompaniment in song was discussed at length and it was agreed that its role was just that, to accompany. A great deal of attention was paid to this aspect of performance. A group meeting would often take the following form; a singer would be asked to perform a number of contrasting songs, usually three, complete with introductions, as if this was a club performance. The group would then discuss that performance and suggest how it might be improved. The first criterion when discussing the performance was always "did it move you"?      Usually suggestions were tried out on the spot so the singer would go away from the meeting, not with a mass of difficult to digest criticism, but with practical ideas. Ewan would sum up the performance and the criticism at the end of the work. The most important work that the class did was connected with the relationship of the singer to the songs. It was noticed that good traditional singers were capable of performing their songs over and over again without ever seeming to tire of them; (the best of them could make a song sound as if it was just as fresh as the day it was made); while many revival singers often had trouble in keeping the songs alive after a third or forth singing. This was believed to be because of how the singer identified with his or her material, and because much of the traditional singers' repertoire was closely identified with their own lives. In orders to examine this area of singing, ways were devised to try and bring singers closer to their songs. This was done in a number of ways. One of these was to use a technique devised by Constantin Stanislavski in his work with the Moscow Arts Theatre. Singers were asked to analyse the texts of their songs and try to come to a conclusion why the song was made in the first place, what might possibly be the circumstance where it would be first sung. They would be asked to try and select an emotion that summed up the objective of the song. Then they would try to find parallel experiences that had provoked similar emotions. This provoking of emotion memory and applying it to the song being worked on quite often led to the solving of problems in identifying with the songs and occasionally produced some very moving performances. (This work was far more involved that I am able to deal with here, this being only a small part of it).