If I'm 'out of order', so be it. If people can't take off their rose-tinted spectacles and look dispassionately at a few home truths, then English folk music as a participatory form will die with them.

I feel at times that enjoying folk music in a boozer, retiring to the bar for a chin-wag with an ould mate(s) when there's someone singing stuff that I'm not intested in,(it DOES happen), is to be a weirdo.
Maybe a bit like an extreme minority pastime ( with apologies ) like a steam engine enthusiast or somesuch.

Bingo!

I think you'll find that that sort of participation in music is an extreme minority pastime. When I go to sessions and singarounds in various parts of the country I tend largely to see the usual suspects. It would surprise me if the actual number of active participants (as in singers and players) ventured into the low thousands. There are probably ten times that number in the UK doing line-dancing or some other faux-American hoofing. And fifty times that number who will have a go at the karaoke night at their local pub. Pub quizes? Thousands or more.

The pub session or singaround, enjoyable though it is, seems to me to be doomed. Music sessions - on the basis of a group of people booked to play "Irish" music - are maybe less endangered, provided the players keep themselves in a neat corner and don't frighten or drown out the punters, but singarounds run counter to the whole ethos of modern pub-going. In that sense, I'm afraid the issue is commercial.

Think of the great singarounds you have known. Invariably they've been at festivals where sheer weight of numbers prompts publicans to allow their pub to be used for a couple of sessions in the course of a year. Otherwise there are precious few still running as glorious and noisy celebrations of traditional song in a bustling pub, with breadth and harmony enough to raise the ceiling. People come from all over the country to the Sheffield carolling because it is so rare.

It's sad, but you only have to look at the effort needed to keep the Anchor in Sidmouth as a singing venue, or to keep the excellent Herga club going through its peripatetic existence; licensees and brewers don't like folk music because they're unsure of the licensing implications and because they would rather attract free-spending 18 to 30 year olds who will eat as well as drink than a bunch of weirdos, many of whom will nurse a drink for hours and contribute mere pennies to the till.

Thus, on those rare occasions when a publican can be found who doesn't automatically say no, singarounds are often relegated to little-used and uncongenial back rooms, where anything above a feeble dirge is likely to cause the stacked and broken chairs to topple and the piles of unusued promotional ashtrays to crack. Let's face it, so many folk venues present a pretty dismal prospect to the newcomer.

And what's with the sensitivity about beards? I remember stewarding at Towersey when a small child came up looking for her father. "What's he look like," she was asked. "Er, he's got a beard," she said. "Hmm, that narrows it down a bit!"