Since the debate is widening, let's turn over another stone.

At primary school,my contemporaries and I learned to speak one dialect in the classroom, and another in the playground. Both were somewhat different from the way we were expected to speak at home, in the presence of our parents.

There was an equally sharp linguistic contrast between the hymns we sang in school assembly, the 'polite' songs we learned in music lessons, and the much cruder songs and chants we picked up in the playground. This didn't bother us - we took it for granted, the way kids do.

By the time we hit puberty, a lot of us had become so excited by American songs (jazz, blues, country, folk or rock,according to taste) that we wanted to sing them ourselves. Putting on what seemed to be an appropriate accent felt like the right thing to do. After all, we were well used to putting on different accents for different occasions. Sometimes the results were dire, but sometimes the process appeared to work reasonably well. Most of us didn't reflect on it much, we just got on with doing it.

Fifty years later, after a listening to a great deal of ethno-musicological and ideological debate, I'm still inclined to the 'just do it' approach. Sometimes I learn a song because its words expresses something I want to say better than I could say it myself. Or sometimes a song's tune haunts me like a spectre until it's infiltrated my repertoire. And sometimes I pass these songs on to other people, hoping that they will share my pleasure in them. Where the song originally came from, and what accent it 'ought' to be sung in, matters less to me than whether it works in front of an audience.

This seems to be the path that Ralph McTell and many other British 'mid-Atlantic' singers have taken. A lot of people have enjoyed listening to them. And quite a few of those listeners have been isnpired by them to discover more traditional music (from both sides of the pond). On the whole, this seems to me to be a good thing.

Once upon a time, so the story goes, Peggy Seeger nearly fell off her chair laughing at a young Londoner's attempt to sing a Leadbelly song. And once upon a time I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at Dick van Dyke's attempt at a cockney accent in 'Mary Poppins'. Well, a good laugh usually does us no harm, but let's get over it and move on. Just do it - and if it works, keep doing it!

Wassail!