Something a bit uncanny and, slightly unsettling, happened the other night at our local singaround. A young woman, who must have only been in her 20s, sang 'Maria Marten and the Red Barn' - and she sang it so well and with such style that the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck! My Grandmother, who didn't sing, but was born in East Anglia in the 1880s, used to talk about the infamous murder in the Red Barn (which had happened several decades before she was born).

Now, of course, the singer in question had probably learned the song from Revival sources. But she and her partner seem to have recently discovered traditional songs and are doing a really good job of singing them - they have great taste, not only because of their choices of songs, but because they are not 'tape recorders' just mimicking their favourite singers.

So where am I going with this? I don't really know but our singaround is packed for every session and there definitely seems to be more younger singers, singing traditional songs, than there used to be a few years ago. Of course I can't extrapolate from one singaround but is there something going on at the moment? And, if there is, I wonder what relation it bears to the Old Tradition and to the Post-war Revival?