A bit vague, really. I was brought up by parents who had very eclectic tastes, but with a tendency towards the classical, although my dad really liked Joan Baez. He was an Irishman, raised in Scotland, and fiercely proud of this. (He had left Ireland at 3 weeks of age). So with my own tastes as a teenager added in, I had a fairly broad base, but with no real preferences. I had a year of Scottish country dancing at the local nightschool when I was 17, and spent a while listening to nothing but what I know now to be commercialised Scottish folk music. It wasn't until 1981, when we were due to emigrate, that I suddenly realised that I was going to miss British (especially English) folk music and traditions more than anything else. Not that I really knew much about them! I don't know where I got this idea from, although my husband had just joined a group of Plough Play mummers - Calverton Real Ale and Plough Play Preservation Society, who I think are still active - initially for the inevitable pub crawl, and I had got used to all the trappings of this. So I started listening to the excellent weekly radio programme put out by Radio Trent. Then, just before we left the country, he started doing Morris. We sought out the S. African sides and joined. By this time we were hooked. We spent our journey home in our rickety Land Rover listening to Steeleye Span and Ashley Hutchings' "Morris On" and the Jubilee Morris Men's practice tape in between story tapes for the kids! We even danced "Saturday Night" (Bledington) in the camp site at Kisangane (Zaire) on Christmas night as best we could for two people and four "ghosts"! Then we got back into the real world when we returned and here I am, now a Mudcatter.

mouldy