You mentioned Odetta. You bet she's worth checking out. She has a beautiful deep voice. She is still performing and if you hear of a concert in your neighbourhood, beg, borrow, steal - just do what you have to do to get a ticket. Her early reputation I believe (I stand to be corrected) was based on traditional folk songs. I think she is concentrating on blues right now. I saw her play a side stage at the Ottawa Blues Festival a few years ago. We stood there with the rain bucketing down and listened to her sing the blues with just one piano player for accompaniment. One of the best concerts I've ever heard.

Like Buck said above, it's a question of following the sign posts. For me, the first sign post was the Clancy Brothers. That led to Scottish and English music thanks to Alistair Brown of the Cuckoo's Nest Folk Club in London, Ontario. I kept finding one group or another (too many to mention) that grabbed my attention. Eventually my interest moved on to include traditional Southern U.S music, so my musical journey has gone more or less clockwise, from Ireland to Scotland to England and back to North America. Along the way I found that I loved country music as well, something I certainly did not when I was younger.

I think the most important factor, if you are really going to be serious about this, is the people you meet who open up music to you in a way that is completely different from the performances you listen to on recordings. I could name several, among them Alistair Brown, who has a couple of very good solo albums as well as the stuff he recorded with Friends of Fiddler's Green, Brian Peters, who really introduced me to the traditional English ballad, Margaret Christl, Brian MacNeill, formerly with the Battlefield Band, and Sean Keane. I sang with and learned from all these folks at the Celtic College in Goderich, Ontario, where Charmion and I have been going for the first week in August for the past six years. Goderich is fair piece from you, but I would really recommend you get involved in some similar activity where you can go away for a week or two and just do music till it's coming out your ears. I would bet the Folklore Centre could give you more information.

As you can probably guess, my musical path has tended (but not exclusively) to lead me to traditional British and American songs. That might end up not being your journey at all, but if you look you will find the signposts and the guides.

Edmund

$300? You poor misguided fool. It won't end there.