I have no quarrel at all with a cockney lad singing Leadbelly songs as long as they aren't done with a cockney accent. If you really want to laugh your socks off at how ridiculous this might sound then I suggest listening to someone that came along later, Billy Bragg doing Woody Guthrie. Listening to a middle class girl from the northern states singing Sourwood Mountain would probably have been quite amusing to folks in the Appalachians at the time of which we speak. Personally I prefer hearing the "original" recorded versions but at that time very little was available. I am pretty sure that most of the shall we say succesful British folkies of today that came up in the sixties did their fair share of Leadbelly/Guthrie/Broonzy material. I do remember in Peggy's days at the Ballads and Blues Club that Rory and Alex McEwen used to do Leadbelly and Gary Davis material and I never heard her laugh then.