I see once again my right to have an opinion and express it about folk music is challenged on mudcat.

One thing is certain about these songs. The audience is what gives them their power.

Those of us who lived through the height of the recent Irish troubles will remember what a rough ride many Irish singers had in UK clubs - particularly wih republican songs. But I've seen an audience get angry with just the idea of an Irish song after one particularly terrible bomb outrage. Similarly I saw singers stopped from singing Blackleg miner in this area (Nottinghamshire) during the miners strike of the 1980's. History changes and our perspective changes.

If Brian Peters can evoke an interest in folk music and illustrate history to schoolchildren using folksong - that is surely all to the good. We all know what went on in Victorian factories and child labour. This is a great way of getting it over to a receptive audience. If an artist can get a little fizz from any of these old incendiary devices, that's all to the good.

An artist has the right to edit and cut and republish in the most potent way possible to his audience - almost a duty. Call it an obligation. The originals will still be there in the library for the historian and researcher

Look at the different ways folksongs have been sung - John Jacob Niles, Bert Lloyd, Joan Baez, Martin Carthy - and now Brian. The primary obligation of the artist is to make the material live. This is conditioned by his audience, whoever they may be - the minute he stands up to sing. If he ignores them - gets bogged down in other considerations, he will bore people.

If you can't understand this - you can't understand much about the nature of art itself. As Henry Moore used to say about the pebble on the beech that you pick because its shape appeals to you aesthetically, that act of selection and appreciation is the work of art - not the action of the insensate sea on the pebble.

That spark with the audience, that's the dfficult thing to achieve. That is what we must go for - every time. Not some abstract notion of truth, which historians will bicker over, because that is all they can do.