"Shimrod - here's a challenge for you if you think singers at a singaround or floor siners generally should all be of a high standard.

Take a listen to some of the origainal folk albums which feature the singers from whom many of our traditional songs were collected. Are these folk straight off the farm or out of the factory good enough for your club? Probably not I'd guess so I suspect you would have deprived the folk world of their songs - because these genuine working class singers were too low calibre for your folk audience. Am I right?"

DEAD WRONG!

I have a large collection of recordings of traditional singers and while a few might be 'difficult' to listen to many of them are brilliant, once you you shake off any prejudice connected to living in a musical environment in which 'polished' recordings are the norm. The thing about these old singers was that they were enthusiastic about the songs and could put them over. Back in my youth I acquired a set of ten LPs called 'Folk Songs of Britain'; these were recordings of trad. singers, made mainly after the Second World War, by such collectors as Alan Lomax, Peter Kennedy etc. These recordings were a revelation! I just thought that it was amazing that Britain and Ireland were full of such songs and singers (and even more amazing that some of the singers sounded just like my parents or grandparents!). Those marvellous recordings have been an almost integral part of me now for over half my life. If any one of those singers, on those LPs, were still alive and turned up at one of the clubs that I attend I would be delighted!
The big problem inherent in much of what happens today is, I believe, based on a fundamental misunderstanding: just because the old singers sounded like 'ordinary' people (like your mum or your granddad) it is believed that what they did was unskilled and that anyone can do it, without any sort of effort or practice. This is so wrong!

At one time there was a culture among, for want of a better term, the 'working class' of self-improvement - and this culture is now passing from living memory. People who had very little were determined to improve themselves. They chose some field which appealed to them and they worked at it (often under very difficult circumstances): it might be poetry, natural history or music. I believe that many of the singers in the old recordings belong to this culture (although I can't prove it, of course). There's a quality in their singing which is missing from that of the lazy 'wannabees' who make many of our singarounds such a trial today.