I think that performing songs about some of the unpleasant practices engaged in by our ancestors can serve to keep them in our minds and, hopefully, prevent us from returning to them.

I'm thinking here especially about capital punishment. I find it sobering that this was abolished permanently in the UK as late as 1969. Public executions were abolished just a hundred years before that and the hanging beheading and quartering of those convicted of treason only in 1870 – that's just 20 years before my own grandfather, who was to administer justice in his role as a magistrate, was born.

Whilst in 'gallows songs' like Sam Hall, we feel little sympathy for the condemned man, I find songs like 'The Night Before Larry Was Stretched' bring home the horror of hanging a little too eloquently for comfort – probably the intention of the song! The one song that really sticks in my mind from my early years in folk music is Ewan MacColl's 'Ballad of Tim Evans' and I wonder what influence that had on the banning of capital punishment in the UK.

Perhaps our less-enlightened friends across in the US could do with a few more songs of that ilk.