'to my ears at least'

here is part of the conundrum. When I listen to recordings of traditional singers then read critiques of them, I also have this feeling that I am being invited to hear feats of technicality, which are in head of the traddy lobby. And its not because I haven't perservered - I really don't see it, and I think at best - its very unlikely that they are observing some weird scale of music that our corrupted 20th century ears miss out on.

Most of them sound bloody rough to me. they sound like old people who can't sing very well. They probably lived in societies where the singer of songs, tellers of stories was one of the few sources of entertainment on offer in bleak impoverished surroundings.

However the traddies and revivalists are welcome to their beliefs, and to their corner of most folk clubs. It just seems to me evident really beyond argument that 90% of the people who go to folk clubs are devotees of what happened with acoustic music in the 1960's and hope to express something of their own society through the more accessible forms.

I love nothing better in a folk club, than when someone manages to write a song about our lives, whatever the quality of the singer. And I love that little gasp of delight from the audience when they suddenly realise that it is their lives and communities that have been deemed worthy of being celebrated in song.