"In almost every country village there is a stock of well-known songs and stories in the dialect, of various qualities, the best of which have seldom risen to the dignity of being printed, even on a broadsheet; yet they maintain their hold on the minds and in the hearts of our villagers, by whom the songs of our greatest singers are altogether uncared for, and almost unknown; and with whom even the popular street lyrics of our large towns obtain only a transient resting place before they pass away into obscurity.... And we have little doubt that the singer has greatest influence, and is most loved by the people who, avoiding all elaborate forms of expression and high flights of sentiment, comes to them in their own simple way, and, with their own homely phrases, weaves his songs, as it were, with a musical thread into portions of their every-day life."

[J.Ramsbottom, "Writing in the Dialect", undated newspaper cutting in John Harland's Scrapbook of Manchester and District]