It was a well meaning attempt to widen our horizons, and maybe in some cases it did.

Certainly when you discovered Martin Carthy five years later, you had already come across some of his songs like High Germany in Singing Together. Mr Appleby must have been pretty well up on the folk scene for his time - acquainted as he seemed to be with Scots, Irish, English, Welsh, Jamaican and American folksongs.

The plummy accents singing the songs seemed to us very unhip, we were listening to Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele round that time in the 1950's. Still as Peggy Seeger said recently in a thread - in that period, people earnestly consulted her and Ewan as to how to make a start presenting traditional material - people just felt all at sea.

Its a big pity folksongs aren't presented to kids nowadays. One would have thought, now that we have so many different ethnic strands within our community, it could be a big unifying force. Mind you the folksingers entrusted with the job would need a passsion to communicate with children, rather than looking inwardly to some tradition that not too many people have had handed down to them.

Come to think of it - it wouldn't be all that bad an idea outside the classroom also.