I'm sorry if I misled anyone by including the word copyright in the thread title. As far as I am concerned, copyright of the songs is not an issue because the songs are all in the public domain and nobody owns them. What is at issue here is the copyright of individual performances. It is this which needs protecting. That plus the right of any artist not to have their work tampered with.

Actually, I think I smell another copyright isue. Some of the stuff which our Mr Callow has used seems to have come from Topic's Voice of the People. All the material used in that series was remastered from the original recordings, at considerable expense to Topic.

I may be wrong, but I'd have thought that use of someone else's remastering work would constitute another breach of copyright. Indeed I would cite JSP's use of remastered Carter Family recordings which had been carried out by Bear Family. BF sued JSP over same and won.

Finally, one of the reasons why I'm so annoyed about this is that unaccompanied singing is an art in its own right. All of the people on Mr Callow's list (except possibly Emma Vickers, who was known to accompany herself on a melodeon) honed their crafts around the fact that they had no musical instruments to impede them in terms of ornamentation, rhythmic variation, tempo changes or whatever. As an unaccompanied singer myself, I know full well the straightjacket feeling which can arise when some eejit decides to join in on a guitar or banjo or whatever.

We have no way of knowing what the old singers would have thought of their performances being electronically dubbed with banjo accompaniment. However, until someone finds a way of communicating with the dead, we can probably safely conclude that they wouldn't have wanted it, and act accordingly.

They left us these songs to be listened to and enjoyed and learnt from, not to be messed about with.