Oh dear, I really have got to disentangle from this. I've got practice to do.

Dave Polshaw

I think that your comparison of 'source singers' to todays floor singers is stretching things a bit far.

Why? They are just ordinary people singing for the love of the songs and the companionship of their family and friends.

Jim replied that he would have not turned down recording a source - That is far from saying that he would record old Jimmy Blogg's drunken rendition of "The leaving of Liverpool" with 3 forgotten verses.

So Jim has just recorded Gladys Bloggs's rendition of a previously unknown ballad (she was pissed as well, by the way) but then turns to her brother and says "Sorry Jimmy, you're just not good enough and nor is your song."? The Bloggs family have been famous for generations as singers and drunkards and have always supplemented their repertoire from the popular songs of the day. I'm sure Jim wouldn't presume to tell them what they should or shoudn't sing?

Are you suggesting that he should treat the Sussex farm labourer with a book full of songs that no-one has ever heard the same as the people who get up and give poor renditions of todays pop songs to an out of tune piano in a pub vault?

Well, that's about collecting not folk clubs and is more hypothetical than rhetorical. You'd better ask Jim. I would have thought that Rugby songs, back of the bus songs, drunken pub singing and such should be a matter of record. I was once at a deeply traditional session where someone who was not part of the scene sang Hotel California. WE ALL JOINED IN THE CHORUS. Shows our age I suppose.

Struggling back to the point, I didn't think this was about Drunken Jimmy or pop songs or Dave and the Goths. I thought it was about the not-always-perfectly-in-tune and the occasionally-forgetting-their-words singers, or, at least, their toleration by folkclub MCs, who were considered to be responsible for the Collapse of the Folk Clubs.

My position is that, at the Lewes Arms, we are happy to have them and we seem to be thriving.