JC: If you narrow it down to families you have to include in your definition "light or grand opera, Barry Manilow, Louis Armstrong, Beatles, Harry Champion, Gracie Fields songs..", otherwise, why should your family repertoire be any more significant than those who don't sing folk songs?

Me: Look again, Jim. While you were out making the tea I widened the discussion to focus on the distinct regional repertoire of Tyneside and Northumberland. As to whether my own family repertoire was typical of the regional pattern I described, I really couldn't say. I only learned one song off me mam, after all. So leave me out of it and consider the big picture. Here's my question again (I hope you're allowed to quote yourself on Mudcat...):

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"?

Also, I'd really like some more light shed on the concept of"training". Can you oblige?