Crow Sister. "Any chance of some links to online audio examples, or simply some further written elaboration describing what it is you especially appreciate about those singers you've cited?"

As for women, and for that matter, men singers I enjoy listening to, I haven't much time for gentle, arty technically correct vocals. I like singers with passion, and singers who can convince me that the song they're singing is real, and that if they haven't actually lived the subject matter, they damned well sound as if they have.

I'm not sure I can furnish many links. You have to remember that a good many of the singers I listed are now dead and never got the recognition they deserved when they were alive. However, a small number were included in Topic's Voice of the People, and more will doubtless appear on the new VOTP, which uses material from Peter Kennedy's collection, and is I believe due for release in September.

One or two of the other singers can be found on Smithsonian Folkways http://www.folkways.si.edu/ , while most of the Gaelic singers are on Cló Iar Chonnachta http://www.cic.ie/ . Both of these sites offer soundclips.

Finally, as Matthew Edwards pointed out, most of the singers I've listed have appeared on my Worlds of Trad Interent Radio station in the past and will again in the future. http://www.live365.com/stations/oneworldmusic

And Matthew is quite right. I should have included Emma Vickers in that top-of-my-head summary. Equally, I should have mentioned Chris Miles from Fife, Karin Edvards Johannson from Dalarna, Sweden, Pastore Pavan (La Nina de los Pienes) from Andalucia, Spain, Sheila Stewart, Sarah and Rita Keane, plus a whole lot more I'll think of directly I press the GO button.

Plu, there's a whole lot of great women singers whose names I don't know because they appear on field anthologies and the collectors and/or producers couldn't be bothered to say who they were.