Just an opinion from across the pond:

I've been learning and singing songs since the early 1950s. When I first started, I knew very little about the songs, and although I had a general sense of whether a particular song came from England, Scotland, the Ozarks, or somewhere else, that made no difference to me. Did the song appeal to me? If so, I learned it and sang it. It wasn't until later that I began delving into the origins and backgrounds of the songs, and that became a fascinating study itself, giving me insight into the songs and improving my singing of them.

With hundreds of songs from all over the English-speaking world (and a few from the European continent) committed to memory, whether or not a song appeals to me—for whatever reason—is still my criterion for whether or not I want to learn it and sing it. National origin just doesn't figure into it.

And the same holds for most of the people I know. At a local song fest or concert, one might hear a local singer sing a song from the California gold rush, followed by an Irish drinking song, followed by a Southern Appalachian love song, followed by a sea chantey, followed by a Scottish border ballad. And that's not just me. That's Bob Nelson (Deckman), Miken, Stewart, and whole bunches of others.

Standard practice in my neck of the woods.

If anyone were to tell any of us that we shouldn't sing certain songs, or we should sing only songs from our own cultures, this person would be either laughed at or, if they got snarky about it, would be smote hip and thigh and tossed out a window.

Apparently in some of the British folk clubs (judging from what I have read on several threads here), some people try to set up rules for who is allowed to sing which kind of songs. I can see why this may have come about in the first place, and it quite probably did aid in getting people to dig for regional songs that might have lain fallow otherwise. Well, far be it from me to try to tell anyone, especially in another country, how they should go about it, however, it strikes me that hard-and-fast rules of this sort not only put a straitjacket the singers (not to mention the listeners), but it tends to play into the hands of more thin-lipped nationalists and monoculturists.

If an American such as myself gets up the nose of a humorless superpatriot by singing songs like "The Braes of Yarrow" or "The Water is Wide," well, I'm more that happy to do so!

Frustrate the nationalists! Sing songs from lots of different cultures.

Don Firth