"As for your penultimate paragraph, please read this above post again - Date: 30 May 08 - 03:45 PM."

This is where you accuse the tutors on the folk degree of not doing their job? Well, if someone joins the degree singing original songs with a guitar and leaves, four years later, still doing that, why does it mean that the tutors are not doing their job? The students are not being indoctrinated into the English tradition. They are artists, who will absorb the influences they wish to and discard the rest. Like any artist. Or any student, come to that.

As I say, i've known several students from the degree in recent years, and they receive excellent tuition in English folk song. They certainly are exposed to more than 17 English songs. I'm listening to a recently-released CD by one of those students right now - Hannah James of Kerfuffle. It includes the likes of Down By the Greenwood Side, Two Sisters, The Northill May Song from Bedfordshire, The Snows They Melt The Soonest, the Castleton Carol...you know, all those English songs the degree students have no knowledge of.

Very good it is, too.