If Lonnie Donegan had sounded more like Leadbelly, rather than like himself, that would have been less "authentic" rather than more.

What he got across to people in Britain was the message that you don't have to get your music just from listening passively to records made in a previous time, you can stand up and make it yourself, and you can sing the old songs in your own voice.

And for a lot of us, that's where it all came from, and we're still doing that after all these years.