The relvance to this discussion of storytelling as a craft is crucial.

You've really got me thinking, Jim, with your suggestion that your source singers may have had a shared philosopy of 'seeing' songs.

I know all about this. It's a well established tenet of storytelling, and it goes way back to the dawn of the artform.

It's something many singers do because they happen to have great imaginations, but in story craft a good imagination is not considered to be enough. The 'world' of the story must have as much integrity as the story 'arc,' so needs careful and detailed construction.

Novellists, of course, have perforce to see their stories as they write, because they need to describe all the detail to the reader - and they have the luxury of having time and space to do it. People who write plays and films do not have that luxury on the page, but they also need to do it, just as much as novellists, because their work has to hold water on paper, and hold it so well that it won't leak when the other creative visualisers - the director, producer and actors - get hold of it.

The great story guru Robert McKee always insists that it takes as long to write a film or play as is does to write a novel - because all the visuals, places, people, clothes, everything MUST have complete integrity in the writers mind as he's writing. He doesn't have to descibe it - the images are technically the director's responsibility (though he can make suggestions) - but he MUST have the world of the film in his head, otherwise the story will simply not work.

Directors and actors for course know all this, and they have their own techniques for developing the world of the story from the writers beginnings. It remains crucial to the whole narrative process (and this applies to choreographers and composers too, by the way).

Now, I use this approach in my songwriting, because my songs are to me little movies (as anyone who's been to one of my workshops or read my book will know) - and I think like this because of my background as a writer and director.

What you're saying about traditional singers rings very true to me.

If you're right, what you're revealing is that not only have people passed down the songs (many of which are, of course highly visual - the very thing which draws me to them), but they've also passed down some of the wider story technique - the philosophy of story writing and telling which flows from the same source as all our other great narrative arts.

Now if this is so, then you may have hit a square point about source singers and revivalists. Some revivialist singers do use these techniques either on purpose or by instinct, but something important may indeed have been lost in the change between song transmission by patrimony, and song transmission by print or audio recording.

Maybe there was teaching and discussion around the controlled passing on of songs - and maybe that was the very reason for the control? So the giver would make sure that the recipient understood how to breathe life into the song, how to suggest the whole world of the story even though the words barely hint at it?

I may be taking this too far, but it's a thought.

If so, and this process has been broken by the Revival, it might explain why a lot of people do sing nice songs so blandly.

One other point, briefly.

Talking about phrasing: One story technique which is unique to song, but as important as the others above is the marriage of speech patterns to metre.

When I write for the page, or for the spoken voice, I have complete freedom of rhythm. But when I write to a tune I have a big challenge. My job as a songwriter is to try my best to match the natural rhythms and melody of the spoken words (and they have both, trust me) to the rhythm and melody of the tune. That's no easy thing - and it's seldom done as well as it might be - though many traditional songs are perfect, either because the original writer knew his or her stuff, or because the process has combed out the tangles one way or another.

And that's the critical point here. The writer can only do so much. The strictures of the medium are such that when you overlay the equally challenging demands of story structure over the demands of melodic structure you're setting the bar very high. (I personally believe narrative songwriting is the must difficult artform there is - but then I would!)

In the end it HAS to be down to the singer (as it is the director, producer and actors in the case of films and plays) to know his craft fully, to rise to the challenge, if the whole thing is to work properly.

Sadly, in the folk world, not everyone understands this.