thanks Joe - much appreciated!

the film still isn't anywhere over here as far as I see. But I sent for the script and the album straightaway.
Dave Van Ronk's Bad Dream Blues and Green Green Rocky Road were my introduction to open tunings. His version of St Louis Tickle was my introduction to ragtime guitar. I never saw him live but he's there every day when I pick up my guitar.

You feel like one of these train spotter types who notice that Hercule Poirot is sitting on the wrong design of railway carriage - but the anachronisms are bloody irritating. Llewyn was supposed to sing Shoals of Herring when he was eight - although MacColl only wrote it a couple of years before for Singing the Fishing.

I suppose what the Coen brothers are saying is that this music is worthy of your attention, and that it came out of artistic intensity and effort. a bit like that kirk douglas film about van gogh. and intensity - the cinema is really too much of a cartoon medium to convey inclusive chubby characters like Van Ronk and MacColl - they have to be hollow cheekboned suffering geniuses.