The following comments refer to the regular, "established" session as it occurs in Britain. The Irish experience is not, I think, fundamentally different (I'm not talking about sessions put on for the tourists); I have no experience of how things work in the USA or Canada.

Look at it this way: a group of people who know each other play music in (say) a pub. They do this in a public room. Common interest and mutual consent (whether stated or tacit) will determine what they play and how they play it. At some point, no doubt, strangers will want to join in. How should those strangers approach the business of integrating themselves into an established social unit? In much the same way as it is done in all other walks of life, I'd suggest; gradually and with tact.

That means approaching the grouping on its terms, not on yours. Once an incomer is accepted, they then have the right to participate in the mutual determination of questions of style and repertoire. Somebody who jumps in feet-first with inappropriate material or with an aggressive attitude has only themselves to blame if they receive a less than enthusiastic reception; it's akin to interrupting a conversation between people you do not know and trying to change the subject to yourself.

This is not élitism but the normal process of social inter-action; it's far from being confined to the human species. The fact that music is being played in public does not necessarily mean that it is open for anyone who wishes to participate to do so; one should spend some time getting the measure of the thing before making assumptions. There are many sessions, for example, where beginners are welcome; they may cease to be welcome if they try to dominate proceedings. A primarily instrumental session may listen politely while a solo guitarist sings a song or two, but they will probably be itching to get back to the tunes, in which everyone, provided they have some technical abilty and, more to the point, sufficient awareness to listen to what others are doing, can join.

Those who see any session they come across as solely a platform for solo performance are unlikely to be welcome for long if they begin to behave as if they were more important than the existing social unit; that is the root of the problem, I think, in many situations where an outsider fails to understand (or even notice) group dynamics and blames others for his failure to integrate.

It is perfectly true that there are situations where skilled players may be impatient of the less-experienced, but that again is normal and scarcely a new phenomenon. Some will be kind and helpful, others will simply want to get on with the playing and will not be prepared to set the pace (I don't mean the speed of the music!) according to the slowest runner. It is a question of compromise, and an aspirant necessarily must compromise more than the established players.

The idea that anybody, no matter how untalented, should be encouraged to perform in public, and that this is somehow fundamental to folk music is a recent one, based in large on the radicalism of the early Revival. Traditional folk music belongs to everyone in the sense that it is a common inheritance, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all performances are of equal value. Examine a few situations where music is traditionally sung or played by existing communities of long standing, and you'll find all sorts of unwritten rules as to what kinds of material or behaviour are appropriate in a given situation. These rules are not always immediately apparent to the outsider.

Anyone who believes that the pub session is necessarily going to be warm and democratic may be misunderstanding the normal operation of social dynamics; I have heard sessions described as a "blood sport", and some of them are just that; chiefly some Irish and Scottish examples, though I'd say that the majority are welcoming enough.

Ultimately, it is for the incomer to join the group, not the other way around. An interesting study of such things is Ginette Duncan's book, The Fellowship of Song: Popular Singing Traditions in East Suffolk (Croom Helm, 1980). This was based on research done in the 1970s in a small group of pubs which had a singing tradition dating back to the previous century; and where such matters as appropriate behaviour, ownership of repertoire and so on, were quite strictly codified. That is how the Tradition works; it's the Revival that has insisted on a kind of egalitarianism that some people will abuse and others take for granted.

Ms. Duncan, as an outsider who learned to obey custom and practice, was accepted; others were not. She describes an evening when a group of servicemen from a nearby airbase (Americans as it happens, but no nationality has a monopoly on insensitivity) completely wrecked the session by insisting on joining in with their guitars all the time, even when they didn't know the material and the emphasis was on individual performance. That's a phenomenon that many will recognise only too well.