Joe wrote:
"So, what is it about source singers? What makes them different? Why is it such hard work to listen to them, but so satisfying when I make the effort?"

I think this question is worth considering. On the first part, I'd say that the easiest kind of music to listen to is that which sounds familiar. I seem to remember A. L. Lloyd reporting that schoolkids in the 1960s complained that English folk music sounded Chinese (anyomne have the exact quote?), so alien did it sound to their ears. By the same token, the music of the Beatles must sound very rough and structurally peculiar to a young listener to Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift. It’s no accident that many of today’s crop of younger singers are the offspring of folk music fans (though not necessarily musicians); they’ve grown up with that kind of music and are comfortable with it.

However, as we’ve discussed, a liking for ‘folk music’ does not guarantee enthusiasm for traditional singers like Walter Pardon. Why? Well, for a start, traditional singers almost always sang without accompaniment, while revival acts almost always use either instrumental or vocal harmony – it’s rare to find a solo performer offering nothing but unaccompanied songs booked at a club, or a festival outside of the old National, Whitby, etc., and even my old friend Roy Harris found it progressively harder to get bookings as an unaccompanied singer, despite his undoubted skills as a communicator and entertainer. The Scots revival is more tolerant of unaccompanied singing, mind you.

At least partly as a consequence of the lack of accompaniment, traditional singers often took their time and – like WP – sang in a rhythm to suit themselves. Revivalists tend to regularize rhythms, and feel a need to ‘get on with it’. Revival singers often practise hard at their art, refine the recordings they make on state-of-the-art equipment to the umpteenth ‘take’ and correct bum notes digitally where necessary, where traditional singers were often recorded on a first take on an old fashioned tape machine. Although some source recordings are musically superb, others (think Danny Brazil and his ruined voicebox) are challengingly rough. The revival product is more polished, generally more accurate, and more like commercial popular music.

Then we have the voices themselves. The old country singers used their own – often rural - accents, in contrast both to the transatlantic accents prevalent in popular music, and the self-conscious, sometimes quite mannered vocal styles of the revival. Most of them were not ‘putting on a show’ for an audience in the way that most modern revival performers do routinely (though see my earlier remarks about Sam Larner and Phil Tanner – or, come to that, Jeannie Robertson). Lastly of course, most traditional singers were of relatively advanced years by the time someone waved a microphone in front of them, and often simply sound like elderly people – although in a spirit of full disclosure, I feel I must confess that Walter Pardon was recorded at the same age I am now, and I’d still find it difficult to sing like him. I’ve also heard 40-year-old revival singers who, either deliberately or through long exposure to source recordings, contrive to sound thirty years older than they actually are.

One last difference is in repertoire. The revival has tended to favour racy narratives, dark gothic ballads and songs of social comment, where the old country singers were perfectly happy with songs that a modern urban audience might find bucolic or twee. ‘If I Were A Blackbird’ has been hugely popular with traditional singers but much less so in the revival.

Plenty of reasons there why a folk club or festival regular might find the likes of Walter Pardon difficult to get into. On the other hand I know several people who love traditional singing and can scarcely bear to listen to a revival performance. For myself, I know I shall never hear a rendition of ‘Henry Martin’ as thrilling as Phil Tanner’s and, when I got my Walter Pardon CDs down of the shelf the other day, hearing his voice was like welcoming an old friend to my fireside, although I never met him.