Wonder what he thought about when he was singing Jumpin' Jack Flash'!
Jim Carroll

Probably what I think about when I'm singing it, since he seems to visualise his songs in exactly the same way as I (and probably thousands of others) do. Is this ability to visualise, then, a badge of "folkness"? You seem to be offering it as such.

As for Walter's melodeon test, I get precisely the same effect on anglo with J J Flash...

Okay, it is of course a silly hypothesis, but simply substitute the name of any traditional (as opposed to revival) singer for Walter Pardon, and any non-folk song for JJ Flash, and what would be your response? Hoy, you can't sing that here – you're a folk singer! It's in your contract...

To put it another way, would you have vetted a traditional singer's repertoire in advance before you let him/her sing at your club? And would your audience have trashed the room in righteous fury if Walter had sung, say, Underneath The Arches - an "alien forty-year old pop song" at the time he was playing folk clubs - in his signature style?