Jim –

But I'm not talking about light opera, or Gracie Fields, or The Beatles, or about any family tradition of my own. I'm taking about a body of identifiable local songs, mostly minted in the 19th century by known authors and mostly fixed in their form but nonetheless admitting of small variations generated by oral transmission. People in Northumberland (even those not related to me) feel they own these songs and have a connection with them that they don't feel about the Gracie Fields and Lennon & McCartney songbooks. They sing them informally without, in the main, any "training". These also happen to be songs that were sung in folk clubs in the Fifties and are sung in folk clubs to this day. How, then, do they differ from "the folk song tradition that brought us all together in the Fifties"?

Okay, if it ain't in your view a pukka tradition I'm not going to pout about it. But I'm still confused as to why you don't think it is, other than that it isn't the "certain type of music" that you feel attracted to.