As a teenager way back just past the middle of the last century, I spent a couple of years in a blur of Soho (mainly, but also Earls Court and Hampstead coffee bars and pubs), in New York City and Haight/Ashbury and on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris. This was what we were pleased (sometimes even proud) to call the "f*lk scene" and some of us thought (ha!) we were the bees' knees.

A few years ago, I was in New York City again. Not a lot of the same remained in Greenwich Village though the East Village was OK musically, but in Washington Square the very same (I'd almost swear) chord bashers were oh so in evidence and the Woodstock village green was overflowing with the grandchildren of Dylan/Band wannabes still wailing LARS in waves across the decades. However I'm relieved to report that real trad music is indeed still there across the pond, in the Virginias and Carolinas if there is someone to show you where to look, which fortunately, I had.


Meanwhile, back in England, nothing remains in Soho (OK, there's the 12-Bar, but the Jansch/Renbourn school never thought of themselves as "f*lk", it was just that the new invention, the "cl*bs", gave them money to practice). English music had long since migrated north-eastwards to Islington and thereabouts and many set off, Uhers and free reed things in backpacks, to see what was still around in the English villages. Quite a lot, actually. "Good ol' boys" (those who'd returned from world wars and their descendants) were playing for Morris and social dance, cared not a flying fuck for year zero (or 1954 as it is sometimes known), nor had they ever heard of the "f*lk cl*b" and didn't really want to, though one or two thought it a bit of a lark to trot along and get paid.

Today's teens and 20s are (compared to most of us) consummate musicians with a deep knowledge and love of trad music, among many other genres. Just don't make the mistake of labelling them "the modern f*lk scene". If there's a banjo among them its vellum will encircle your neck.