Jim has made the accurate point "I doubt if you are a traditional singer - we are all revival singers using somgs and playing music made in the past and passed on to us". This raises the question how should we be performing them?

Jim laments the passing of folk clubs where you can expect to hear a folk song. In the clubs I used to go to in the 70s and 80s there were plenty of traditional songs, but very seldom were they sung in anything resembling a traditional style, even when unaccompanied. More usually they were accompanied, usually on acoustic guitar but sometimes with other instruments.

As recordings of traditional singers have become more widespread I have noticed a trend back towards that style of singing, but even so it now seems to be uncontroversial that traditional songs can be accompanied, to the extent that this is probably the norm. That being the case, the conventional acoustic folk style of the folk revival is no more authentic than Cecil Sharp's piano arrangements on one hand or folk-rock arrangements on the other.