Tastes differ as to who was a Legend, but when I was a kid it was not all that hard to meet people I think were great, because folk singers didn't have all that much money, and stayed in people's houses when on tour. Friends, more prosperous than I, invited me to share dinner with Jean Redpath, and other friends even wangled a dinner invitation from Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger in London (in or about 1964).

McColl was very proud of his new (hand made) tape recorder, and recorded a 3 songs, notably a version of Child # 10 (Twa Sisters) which he had from Belle Stuart, and very similar to a version I see in the Mudcat collection, attributed to somebody I never heard of. Apparently McColl never personally cut a record of that. But a friend listened to the tape and put the music in his master's thesis, and I think it got around from that.

McColl was a very sharp and urbane man, and said things about singing, and teaching singing, that left a lasting impression. He and A.L. Lloyd either founded, or were anyway at the center of the Singers' Club in London, and a number of the best known British folk singers came out of that milieu. He and Peggy had extremely bitter things to say about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, whom they considered to be flashy twerps who were cheapening things.

Another very exciting experience was a workshop at the 1970 Berkeley 2d World Folk Festival, featuring Charles Seeger, Bess (Lomax) Hawes, and Sam Hinton. Since there was no singing, but just talking about ideas, it was a very intimate (i.e. small) group. It was exciting because of the things Bess Hawes had to say . . .