I'm undoubtedly going to offend someone with the following, but I think it should be said:

It depends on the audience. In my repertoire, I have some "old standards" like—yes—Greensleeves (three carefully selected verses thereof), and what might be called the "standard" versions of Barbara Allen, Lord Randal, and a bunch of others. These are some of the first songs I learned starting in 1951, and that was well before there were all that many people involved with folk music—and before they all got so bloody damned sophisticated.

There are a lot of darn good songs out there that nobody sings anymore. Why? Because when someone started to sing one of them, there would be a klatch of jaded, world-weary folkies out there in the audience who would loudly sigh, roll their eyes, and sometimes sneer and snicker through the whole song. Lots of people were intimidated into not singing these songs, and many of them I haven't heard anyone sing—for decades. The super-sophisticated, ultra-cool folkies killed them.

They're good songs.

I don't do them for audiences composed primarily of folkies. I save these songs for general non-folkie audiences. They like them!

Don Firth