Hi Bardan,

I DO know what you mean ... and yet ... and yet. If I'm honest I used to think the same as you when I first got interested in folk song - give me a decent singing voice - not these croaky old geezers. Then, for my 21st birthday, I got a load of record tokens and bought Topic's 'Folk Songs of Britain' series (on vinyl LPs, of course - I'm showing my age here!). Soon I found I was coming back to them again and again because I found that once I got past the superficial roughness (and surprisingly few singers were singing "off key" by the way) I realised that there was something rather weird and wonderful going on. I just loved the contrast between the ordinariness of the voices and the strangeness (and occasional great beauty) of the material.

There's a theme that runs through this thread which suggests that folk song should be directly relevant to the lives of people living NOW and that old is BAAAADDD and new is GOOOODDD. I have to say that I find this way of thinking a bit alien. I suspect that many people rather like to escape from the humdrum nature of their day-to-day lives, now and then (I know I do!), and I suspect that the 'old people' who sang the 'old songs' often felt the same. I'm also not very impressed by new things unless they work (like digital technology - which works about 85% of the time!). Much contemporary music doesn't work for me - which is why I tend to like the old stuff.