If you have read this far, then let me say that I am well aware of the debates about the meaning of most of the key words in my opening sentence. What is a "ballad"; what constitutes "traditional"; what is a "ballad singer" – I very carefully have chosen to talk about "singers of traditional ballads". And I have further specified that I am interested primarily in the "Child Collection" of traditional "English and Scottish" ballads, realizing that these old ballads have turned up all over the place, and that there are many fine ballads that lie outside of the Child Collection.

I am interested in living singers, not ones that have contributed to this area but are now dead, whose songs lie archived in the Library of Congress. And I am interested in people who are singing these ballads who actually live in North America. If you were to gather all of these people in one place for an old fashioned "round robin" who would be there? In other words, they don't have to be (but certainly can be) people from Southern Appalachia or Upper New York State, or Newfoundland or Texas. They don't even have to be native born. They can be transplants from wherever. Anyone who is singing this kind of stuff counts.

I would like to know who they are, what they sing, where they live, how old they are, and where they learned their versions of these ballads, and where they sing them. Did they learn them from family and kin, or from books and records and the Internet, or both? Are they primarily formed by the Folk Revival of the Sixties, or are their sources broader than that? What can you tell me about these individuals? Are they still actively singing these traditional ballads?

Thanks for your help with this. T.O.M.