For one night only, I shall attempt to be serious, so please bear with me because this has become very personal. I've been doing it for something in excess of forty years, and for my money communal singing and playing, be it in family, pubs, clubs, houses, festivals or anywhere else, paid, unpaid or paying, is the most vital component of what we are discussing. I've done it for money, used it in therapeutic work, politics, in the revival of a street tradition at least three hundred years old, been bitten in the arse by it when I got cocky, recorded, collected, performed at the Royal Festival Hall (no shit) and a club in Leeds with four audience and a stuffed pike, (which, on reflection I probably deserved) fooled nobody but myself and at the end of it all can only exhort everyone to bloody well get out there and do it, as performer, accompanist, dancer, organiser or - and let's not forget them since without them performers wouldn't have a platform - audience. Because that's the only way it will survive as a living art form.
This discussion is wondrous, but it hasn't played a note. Worse still, I even find myself agreeing with Diane. As for Parris - a far better writer said "If by a man's works shall ye know him, he is a festering pile of horse droppings". There is more worth in a beginners' session at the Grand Union, however dire, or at the Bear or the Board, or Whitby Scratch Morris than a thousand newspaper articles. And if this sounds like the ravings of an old fart, so be it; I love the music that I grew up with and all those who, according to whatever lights guide them, take on its performance, conservation and development.