"but what can't be denied is that their contribution by far outweighs any flaw in their work."
And their work needs to be taken in perspective.
I heard Alan Lomax speak at the symposium held to celebrate MacColl's 70th and it made me realise how far people like Ewan and Bert had moved on from those early days.
Lomax described how both of them, and just about everybody else, were singing American songs in a phony American accent (he referred to it as 'Mid-Atlantic American), and he described some of the problems he had persuading some people that these islands have their own magnificent repertoire of folk songs still worth collecting.
MacColl and the Singers Club got a great deal of stick when it adopted a 'sing songs in your own accents' policy - as Peggy stated in her letter to The Living Tradition some time ago, it was a club policy for club residents, though I'm aware that Ewan proselytized wherever he went.
Over the last four decades I have become aware of the richness of the British and Irish traditions and how much we would have missed had not Lomax 'had his wicked way'.
It's very easy to be right all the time with hindsight.
Jim Carroll