Jeannie Robertson, Harry Cox, Sam Larner, Joe Heaney The Stewarts of Blair, Walter Pardon, John Strachan.....

These are the people I listen to & revere - and more. May I point you in the direction of Ollie Gilbert and Mrs Pearl Brewer over at the Max Hunter archive? However, I wouldn't say Traditional Singing starts with them any more than I would say it ends with them. And whilst they inspire me - and whilst I rave about them endlessly to my various folk friends - I mostly acknowledge their idiosyncracy, individuality and the fluidity of their respective styles and repertoires. I regard them as individual artists rather than evidences of some mythical Tradition - the notion of which was invented by early revivalists to bypass very real issues of indivual creativity. People are, first and foremost individuals; I'm drawn to Folk as an eccentricity; I listen to Davie Stewart and I hear a creative artist who uses Tradition Song as his medium much as Picasso used paint - in this respect he's on a par with Captain Beefheart or John Coltrane. That is the nature of Musical Tradition as an essential cultural process - it is dependent on individual human creativity without which it wouldn't exist, much less have survived some 50,000 years down the line in the myriad ever changing genres, styles and idioms it does today. That's all down to individuals doing what's right for them to do & I very much doubt it was ever any different.

Although maybe it's different in Ireland; I don't live in Ireland; I have never been, although I have an Irish name and Irish ethnic and familial roots. I do have a small smattering of Irish Songs in my ready repertoir (Denny the Piper, Blue Eyed Mountain Queen, An Bunnan Bui (in English from Paddy Tunney), Turfman from Ardee, Katie Kay etc.) which I regard as very essential to my personal ID. Likewise my Northumbrian songs, though my status as an ex-pat Geordie is more crucial somehow, but even so certain individuals look at me askance when I do my version of The Colliers Rant because it doesn't suit their received notions of Orthodox Folk Style, which I suspect is half the problem here really (even though what those people have actually said is that it's too traditional for their tastes). Fact is, as with Child 102, there is no traditional precedent for the song, much less its performance. My source is Bell's Rhymes of the Northern Bards from almost 200 years ago and I've no doubt the song was very old then. So sing it how the hell you want to sing it. Myself, I sing it by way of Holy Communion with the lost landscapes of my childhood spent in the South-East Nortumbrian Coal-field; it's a bitter lament for a lost world, and lost potential.

I live in England, where Folk is very different from the state-funded TV-evangelised All Singing All Dancing All Traditional Emerald Idyll Jim describes as existing in Ireland; where Musical Traditions are alive and well and a constantly cropping new Pure Blood Genuine 100% guaranteed Travelling Traditional Singers to ensure the music remains unchanged and untainted for another few millenia yet; where every school kid is playing pipes, fiddles, bodgrans, penny whistles and singing Sean Nos with the best of them. In England, there is no state funded concensus on how 'it' must be; we are a multi-cultural country where people are free to do pretty much what they like in the name of creative expression and musical experience. In spite of this, Engish Popular Culture continues apace, and the English Population (unlike their State-Funded Cousins over there in Folk Utopia) really have better things to worry about than Traditional Music, which is the reserve of a dwindling bunch of grizzled old Folkies on one hand, and a sprightly bunch of university educated BYTs on the other. There's not much middle-ground - like me - aged 50, I'm both too young & too old because Folk skipped a couple of generations so in my Folk Life I'm talking to people 10-20 years my senior (and older), or 20-30 years my junior (and younger). Either way, it's minority stuff, a rare sort of specialism very much on the wane despite the enthusiasm of its various and diverse protagonists, amatuer, professional, semi-pro or whatever. It exists because of the passions of individuals, maybe individuals like Jim Carroll, who really ought to curb their enthusiasms when it comes to musical possibility.

I must say that I LOVE the various and diverse aspect of this. Whilst we had fey-folky teachers in their braless early 70s Laura Ashley clad glory slipping us the occasional ballad at school, we also had sythn-obsessed wild-eyed experimentalists and crumhorn weilding medievalists to put another spin on things. To me it was all part of the same Folk Zeitgeist that had gangs of skinheads terrorising local pensioners by chanting Gaudete out of dark bus-shelters on dark December nights in 1973 when I was 12. Mostly, we listened to each others record collections, and learned that Music is very much a matter of Doing What Thy Wilt - even Folk Music, because that's what the old guys were doing.

When I think of my own cultural history and how that diversity of experience informs my cultural creativity, then I really balk at some state-funded Folk-Fascist thug telling me I'm somehow doing it wrong. There is no wrong, even if people don't like it, they are free to listen to something else, just as they're free to do it as it suits them. As musicians & singers we are charged to be true unto ourselves, not to some state-funded fantasy off-the-shelf identikit nationalism which (thank God) doesn't exist over here - and certainly not in this house. As a kid I sought out records by Willie Scott, Billy Pigg and Phil Tanner with the same enthusiasm as I did those by Neu! Sun Ra and Daevid Allen. These are my cultural and musical roots & traditions; and it's as common as it is unique to each and every one of us, just as it was common to Walter Pardon and Sam Larner; it isn't PURE, but sure as hell it's REAL - and long may that reality continue.