That there are 2, 3, or 4 separate festivals rolled into one is wonderful. The problem is that many festival goers don't allow themselves the opportunity to experience more than a single strand. A good case in point is the Japanese folk songs workshop I went to Saturday morning. It was a truly wonderful event that I was certain the dyed-in-the-wool traditional music crowd would appreciate. Here was a 20-something foreign graduate student singing the songs she learned at home from her parents and grandparents. In other words, she was a genuine "source singer," as the academics like to say. But where were they? No Sandy, no Caroline, no Joe, no Dick, no Judy, no Howard, etc. A lot of Asian faces, though.

Fantasy thought: The singer should have called her workshop "Folk Songs of the Outer Hebrides." She could have sang the exact same songs, claimed the language was an obscure dialect of Scots Gaelic, and said she was the daughter of a silkie. Everyone would have believed her!