I agree, Pip.

". . . an awful lot of traditional material has something - does something - which only a little contemporary material does."

One of the major things that attracted me to traditional songs in the first place is that these songs have a history, a provenance—roots. Singing them gives me a sense of connection with the people and events that produced them in the first place and then sang them for their own enjoyment and expression.

I do sing other songs, some very good songs that are not traditional, but the majority of the songs I sing are traditional. And, no, I don't sing them merely because they are traditional.

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Perhaps I don't even have a horse in this particular race. Out here on the west coast of the U. S. and A., I've never been to an English folk club, but the impression of them that I get from reading various threads here on Mudcat is that I probably wouldn't like them all that much.

First, there was a discussion of some clubs prohibiting, or at least frowning fiercely upon anyone who sang a song that wasn't from his or her own culture and background. For example, if you're from Cornwall, don't sing a song from Yorkshire. If you're an American dropping in, sing American songs, even if you're especially interested in songs from the British Isles and that's what you're there to learn. And God help you if you try to sing in an accent or dialect not your own, even if you do it well enough that most people can't tell that it isn't your own.

Rules, regulations, restrictions, prohibitions.

Then there is the war over the "infamous" 1954 definition. Apparently, in a "folk club," no two people can agree on what "folk" means. And in some "folk clubs," one rarely if ever hears a song that might actually fit the 1954 definition, in preference to a mix of songs that the singers themselves have just written (and declared "folk" songs) along with the latest popular hits liberally mixed with Beatles' songs.

In the one, you stand there in a straitjacket with a sock in your mouth, afraid that you'll have the buttons cut from your uniform and be marched around the compound in disgrace if you pick the wrong song to sing, and in the other, the club is as shapeless as Odo, the security officer in Star Trek:   Deep Space 9, a shape-shifter who has to sleep in a bucket or he'll simply flow down the nearest drain.

I've never been to the British Isles. I would love to go for a whole variety of reasons. But if my reading on the folk clubs (derived from what has been written in these threads by people on the scene) is correct, I would undoubtedly visit just to see for myself, but if they are, indeed, as described here, I probably wouldn't hang around very long.

Okay, folks, rip me to shreds.

Don Firth