Lead, Brendan, Giok, thanks for all the good info. Weelittle, great planning ideas. Barry, we are in Jackson, Mississippi. We have one wonderful but small Irish pub. There is a sizeable community of people into set dancing and instrumental playing here, believe it or not, but not so many on the vocal side, we tend to have visiting singers from Hattiesburg and New Orleans. I do have a small list of interested people to get started with.

And foggers, thank you for defining the public/private issue. I definitely think part of this must be to get out of the public eye for at least part of the time. So we may need to do as you suggest, having private 'home nights' where lots of teaching goes on, and public 'floor nights' where we get out in public, perform and pull in some new people.

Some people around here don't grasp that trad singing originated in and belongs in homes, not just in a bar or on stage, and one reason we don't have more performers is this big gulf between performers and audience we have inadvertently established.