Good points Eve, but I'd say that the appreciation of singing is very different to the appreciation of instrumental playing, because singing is both music and talking at the same time.

That's how people like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Iggy Pop and Neil Young get to be fantastic singers even though they don't have great voices.

I myself have a sadly weasily voice. (I'd love to be able to sing like Sam - I agree absolutely that he's up there with Bob Fox, Chris Foster and Phil Beer in terms of timbre). But (a few) people are happy to pay to listen to me - because I can do other things than sound pretty (as can the above, of course), and that's important too.

Thus with the disputed singers in this show. Jim, Jon and the Unthanks are all technically superior to me in terms of tuning and phrasing, but they get more flack than I do because their voices are even further away from the 'folk standard' than mine.

I think that if you listen to all four with open ears, you'll hear that they're are all in different ways doing something new and interesting. It's not so much what they do, actually, it's what they don't do. It's in that gap between the prediction and the delivery that the magic is hidden, but you have to open your ears and heart to hear it.

I don't know to what extent this effect is deliberate - I understand it is in Jon's case - and to what extent it's an accident of birth, but there's no doubt that a lot of people like it, else these artists wouldn't be as successful as they are, (and that success is not just down to hype - 'you can fool a few of the people...' etc etc)

This show contained a lot of hymns, and it seems people have more problems with hymns 'sung wrong' than even trad songs sung wrong - but if anything the effect I'm talking about is even stronger.

Applying a 21st century post-pop approach to songs we know so well that we hardly hear them any more was, to me, refreshing, challenging and (mostly) beautiful.

Tom