I was just re-reading Jim Carroll's post of Feb 3rd. A very interesting post, with all kinds of excellent advice about choosing your song, analysing its structure and getting inside it. Jim, I can understand why you suggest singers might want to "dig a little deeper into the background of the song" and to consider what you list as the historical or social implications and the archaic, vernacular or folklore references. That's what I try to do and what many good folk revival performers do. However, this seems pretty much at odds with the way traditional singers went about it. I heartily agree with your praise of Tanner, Larner and Cox for their "commitment and involvement", but I doubt that they or their ilk were thumbing through the pages of L. C. Wimberly to find out the archaic background to their songs. (I claim no exhaustive knowledge of Wimberly, but I have looked up references to particular ballads there, and my impression was that some at least of the analysis is pretty conjectural - please do tell me if this is not the case).

Even if the ballads are indeed filled with folkloric references that we in the 21st century can scarcely grasp, did they mean any more for a 20th century traditional singer than they do for us? Was Cyril Poacher much concerned with the "circle magic" of "The Broomfield Hill" when he led the riotous choruses of "Green Broom" in the Blaxhall Ship? Did the Coppers need to know the history of wit-combat ballads to enjoy "Hey Ho, Sing Ivy?" The garbled ballad lyrics and incomplete fragments collected from some traditional singers suggest to me that they weren't too concerned with getting every detail in place, even though a general sense of story might survive.

I raise this because it seems to me that self-consciousness is one of the factors separating traditional from rival singers. Tanner et al did indeed get inside their songs through "a lifetime of listening and singing", but that's a very different process from combing the volumes of Child for the desired combination of stanzas, or cherry-picking a score of tunes in Bronson. In seeking archaic and mysterious subtexts for songs (a great temptation, I freely admit), aren't we laying ourselves open to precisely the kind of romanticisation that has had every revival performer and floor singer from here to kingdom come introduce "Reynardine" with remarks about werewolves and the supernatural? Bert Lloyd may indeed have "stuck closely to the traditional texts", but substituting the single word "teeth" for "eyes" was quite enough to set every fantasist's juices flowing, and I suspect he realised that very well.