"Can we hope that now MacColl's centenary year is almost over, we might hear a bit less about the man and his undoubted influence on the folk revival- surely it's all been covered?"
I certainly hope not.
MacColl's importance does not lie in his "influence".
He developed a technique of understanding, interpreting and performing folk songs that, as far as I am aware, has not been tackled elsewhere by anybody.
The teaching methods he was instrumental in creating, involving relaxation and voice production is, by my understanding, unique.
Much of this work was captured on the 200-odd tapes of his weekly workshops with the Critics Group - outside those meetings the material is basically unlistened-to in order to assess whether it is valid to todays singers.
Alongside this, is the work that he and Charles Parker did in identifying folk-song as an important aspect of working people's culture.
While the superstars of the revival were getting on with their careers, MacColl, Seeger and others were spending time with mainly inexperienced singers in the hope of improving the standards of the singing in the revival and in bringing a greater understanding of the importance of folk song in our history and culture.
Much of the blame for this work being as unavailable as it is is down to the mountain of garbage tittle-tattle erected around the man as a personality - heard a new MacColl urban legend last night.
Treating MacColl, or anybody doing similar work as merely performers is to reduce the importance of the work they did.
Whether you like or hate MacColl as a singer is a matter of personal opinion - no more. (though it must be galling to some begrudgers that a quarter of a century after his death his recorded output continues to grow - a four CD set of his unavailable recordings is in the pipeline).
Pat and I instigated the making of two, hour-long radio programmes of his work and ideas on singing rather than him as a performer in the early part of this year - the end result was extremely gratifying, though it hardly scratched the surface.
"Covered?" - we haven't begun to take the paper off the massive body of work he left behind.
Jim Carroll