it was never standing room only in the traddy clubs - apart from on Carthy nights

It was for the Dransfields, Nic Jones, Tony Rose, The Watersons, the Coes and Peggs, the Young Tradition and others of that ilk, all of whom started off doing some US material at a time when the US was a 'secret culture', until they discovered a tradition of their own. Jasper Carrot came later. He sent me an image of the back of his head for inclusion in the Folk Directory. I didn't use it.

Revivalists played the clubs because that was the network that existed after trad jazz fled the ramshackle back and upstairs pub rooms for better premises such as cellar bars and community/arts centres which, surprise surprise, the more enterprising trad music organisers are making use of now. This means that people who'd rather stick pins in their eyes than go near a 'f*lk club' are getting exposed to their own cultural heritage and realising that they do like it and can identify with it.

Too right I'm pissed off at Steve's patronising assertions that Americans handed us the music just because a few wannabes did PPM covers. Next he'll be trotting out his usual chestnut that Mr Hutchings owes everything to the US because he once played in a jug band and started off Fairport as a Californian clone band, as he did in one of his earlier rants during which he admitted he and the Tyger had never even met. Don't suppose Steve ever met Jeannie Robertson either but just read somewhere that she'd complained how Edinburgh was a hotbed of bluegrass and banjo picking. It was and she did. It took one of these banjo pickers (Clive Palmer) and a self-taught bluegrass fiddler who played with Tom Paley (Robin Williamson) to help turn first the Scottish revival then the world towards the old songs and tunes that the travellers had never stopped playing.

Another Fred Woodism was that musicians have to start somewhere and that is not always, or even usually, the right place. But the vital point is that musical influences travel in both directions and musicians pick up and absorb them from everywhere and incorporate what's fits with their own roots. He and Karl Dallas and Eric Winter and I, from our differing political perspectives, used to discuss these themes all night long and Bert Lloyd would give me marks on my pieces. Funnily enough though we never mentioned that old git Alistair Cooke because what we were talking about was what was happening right then in 1970s England, not America in the 1930s. Now, had Steve been there he might have had a slight chance of trying to prove that English country musicians owed all to US blues merchants. Why, we could have shown him Bob Copper playing the blues down on the Sussex coast (which he did). That would have clinched it.