Hello Vic

Hope you are well (just saw a TV ad about making the internet a nicer place).

My knowledge of the Critics Group is based on what I have read on Mudcat, the biography of MacColl, which spends quite a bit of time on it, BBC programmes about MacColl and Seeger and a few other odds and sods. I agree with what you say about it suiting some and not others. It has been said that for some it verged on destructive! But clearly others were inspired on a lifetime basis.

I absolutely take your point about top-down and bottom-up teaching. This contrast came into my mind when reading a transcript of a 'seminar' MacColl gave to teachers which was posted earlier. It seemed very top-down. In fact, more like a lecture than a seminar? And I think Gammon's use of the word 'guru' seems apt.

You comment on my quotation. I wrote

"It all seems to me mixed up with the largely untraditional context (eg clubs, concerts, radio programmes, gramophone records) within which the output of the classes run by Seeger and MacColl was consumed by the public?"

Sorry if this did not read as intended. I have the idea that the Critics Group was sort of invitation-based, and know it wasn't open to the public. The word 'output' here was intended to refer to the work that those who had attended the Group did when they went out into public.

I guess I was musing on how one the one hand there was a respect for 'the tradition', and on the other hand, some practice that was very different from that tradition. Perhaps the use of the term 'revival' sometimes functions to gloss over the differences? Not saying this would be terribly wrong, just noticing.

The biography is long and throws up a lot of thoughts, or it did for me anyway.