I like an awful of these guys mentioned in all these messages - particularly Jack Hudson.

But the Eric Bibb thread (particularly Art Thieme's comments) has really made me think and turn the clock back to when I first heard folk music.

I was a schoolboy living in Lincolnshire. If I went for a bike ride to Woodhall, or somesuch beauty spot - I'd ride past airforce bases.

Sometimes you would see a Thor rocket pointing directly up at the sky. But you knew the H-bomb it carried was targetted on Moscow. There were red and white Bloodhound Interceptor missiles, which some optimist thought could bring down a Tupolev Bear, which carried the Ruskies' H-Bombs meant for us. And if you were lucky you might see a Vulcan bomber, incredibly beautiful - they gleamed for they had a sheen on the surface which they hoped would deflect the flash when they dropped their atom bomb on a Russian target.

We were kids and I remember several children suggesting when the Cuban missile crisis was at its height - lets not go to work and to school today - lets all just die together.

When I heard Where have All the Flowers Gone and Blowing in the wind, on the radio for the first time. I knew someone was singing a song about the world I lived in.

That was it - that was the vortex - that music that I now know was coming out of Washington Square seemed to me and millions like me - more universal than literature, less willfully obscure that modern art, less superficial than cinema or television. In other words folk music seemed like an important artistic movement.

Of course nothing lasts. Dylan fell off the motorbike. Ewan said that people wearing caps and using harmonica stands weren't necessarily folk music - and who can disagree?

Still for me, that was when folk music spoke to the world. I never wanted to be Sam Larner or Martin Carthy.

My nomination would be Pete Seeger.