"Not sure what degree of continuity there might have been."
This is Ewan's statement of intent when he and Peggy launched the
Singers Club in 1961 in conjunction with Eric Winters' Sing Magazine.
Jim Carroll

"Why I am Opening a New Club
Ewan Maccoll and Peggy Seeger have set up their own folk song club, the Singers' club, in the heart of London. Run jointly with the magazine SING. it opened on 25 June at 2 Soho Square.
Maccoll and Seeger are not strangers to this building. For many months they sang there with the Ballads and Blues Association, until they broke with manager Malcolm Nixon after disagreements on artistic policy. Here Maccoll explains what led him to start the new club.

At a time when there are a great many folk clubs on the London scene, people may wonder why I have plunged in at the centre, in a season when attendances tend to fall off.
1.        It is necessary to rescue a large number of young people, all of whom have the right instincts, from those influences that have appeared on the folk scene during the past two or three years; influences that are doing their best to debase the meaning of folk song. The only notes that some people care about are the banknotes.
2.        Some top-liners in the folk song world; Bert Lloyd, Dominic Behan, for instance; have done little public singing in the past two or three years. Peggy and I have sung to live audiences more in the States and Canada than in Britain. Our new club will provide a platform for singers of this calibre who, like all folk singers, draw strength from live audiences.
3.        Our experiences during our US tour and at the Newport Festival have shown us the danger of singing down to an audience. It is the danger that the folk song revival can get so far away from its traditional basis that in the end it is impossible to distinguish it from pop music and cabaret.
It has happened in the States at clubs like the "Gate of Horn" in San Francisco where the cover charge and a meal are likely to run to about £5 a head for an evening. True bawdiness is reduced to mere suggestiveness. The songs, sapped of their vigour, become "quaint". It's happening here too in the "Tonight" programme. I was scared when I saw what's going on in some of the clubs. But it's not too late to retrieve the position.
4.        The position in Britain is relatively healthy. It's easy to bring Harry Cox and Sam Lamer to London and other centres and to bring fine Gaelic singers into Edinburgh, for instance. There's no tendency for them to be snapped up and commercialised. But we are determined to give top traditional singers a platform where they will be protected from the ravages of the commercial machine.
5. Finally, we need standards. Already the race for the quick pound note is on in the folk song world. "Quaint" songs, risque songs, poor instrumentation and no - better - then - average voices; coupled with a lack of respect for the material: against these we will fight.
Sing August 1961."