Its a personal choice if you wipe bums rather than set to work finding out some place you can play music for a living. For some people that's the right choice.

But you don't become a folksinger in a vacuum. Even people who seem artless and ethnic generally have some sort of feel for the audience. And you develop that in front of sentient beings. Call it performance skills, or what you will.

But these songs gain their power from an audiece following the story or identifying with the feeling in the lyric. One of the most overlooked skills is the way a good folksinger will punctuate the lyric thoughtfully.

you can learn some of these sklll singing Engelbert Humperdink songs in a pub. you won't learn them at home wiping bums.

Similarly - folksingers frequently dismay me with the dumbass things they say about recording and PA settings. Then you see these same people whingeing and making faces as though the PA man is a fool when they don't realise they are standing half a mile from a unidirectional microphone - the sound man turns the volume up trying to get some of their offering to the audience and the whole system starts feeding back. Instead of gettting out and finding out practical knowledge for themselves, they read some trash in a magazine about the way Martin or Ry Cooder sets up his guitar.