Early, you sound like your on my wavelength or do we just have the same chips on our shoulders? Good singing, in a close to Traditional stlye, revolves around three things. Tone. Timeing. Choice of material. The tone of the voice is something which can be worked on and improved but singers must be realistic and accept their limitations. Big money can be spent on top class guitars, fiddles or accordions but singers have to make do with what they have and we can't all sound like June Tabor or Ricky Skaggs. Timeing has to be learned and comes more from the size and shape of the words. Tunes can be streched, bent and mucked about with it's the rythims, patterns and sounds of the words that make a song. Never heard Willie Nelson? Choice of material is always subjective but try to make the songs YOUR OWN and not a carbon coppy of Track 6 from the last CD you were listening too. My list of names as examples of copying too closely would run to at least a dozen and that would only be so called stars of the current British Folk music circut.