McGrath,

yup. That would make the difference alright :-)

countessrichard,

if you judge by all the recorded output of every band and demo tape Ashley was involved with before 1968, you will see little evidence of any interest in traditional English song. An interview I had with him in 1996 suggested essentially the same thing (for I too have met all these folks or in Ashley's case, spoken on the phone), as does the direct quote from Ashley in the Hinton and Wall biography putting his interest in the folk tradition still in the future in early 1968, and everything else that has been published. His influences and interests were Blues first of all and then Americana in all forms. As McGrath says, some of it was traditional music, so I must concede that point! But it was not English folk music; it was the same traditional music all British rock bands were starting from, and does nothing to suggest Fairport's future direction.

I don't think Ashley was "lying through his teeth," if he did indeed profess a long-time love of English folk song in 1969, but I do think at nineteen one tends to exaggerate and say "I've been interested in this for a very long time" when in fact you mean about a year, which would have been right when you met him. Especially if you're trying to look serious to an impressive full-time employee the EFDSS! It's similar to RT: when they were doing publicity for Liege and Lief it was natural to emphasize whatever traditional influences he had had--primarly, as I said, his dad's Jimmy Shands. But he doesn't emphasize that nowadays when talking about his early influences.

IanC, as I said, "skiffle" was an interpretation put on the Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra by music journalists; Ashley himself says it was a jug band and is quite clear on influences like Cannon's Jug Stompers. I've never seen much evidence apart from your quote that they played "folk music from the British Isles," though I have seen that article before. Indeed, it was written by my colleague Bruce Eder from New York, for a book of which I was one of the editors! (Too bad I didn't catch it then--but I never noticed the paucity of references to Skiffle in Ashley's own statements until looking through them for this thread!) I think some reviewers, including me, have assumed ESO was a "skiffle band," and then put their generic expectations of skiffle onto it. Ashley called it a jug band, though he certainly knew about skiffle too.