Where you learn you material is no longer the point. Those of us who sing folk songs are folksong singers, not folk singers. But at risk of sounding like Barry Goldwater, there are things that make you you, other than what you saw on telly last night. They include (without limitation) the unspoken conditioning from your parents, the things that are hardwired in your genes, and the cultures you were brought up in and absorbed before you were a fully thinking being.

As they say around Gravesend, you can take the boy out of Denton, but you can't take the Denton out of a boy.

Those are YOUR traditions. We all have such traditions. In some they are more mixed, in others, less mixed.

Going to live in Australia when I was 3 (for 3 years) did not make me Australian. Doing a "stage" in Alsace did not make me French. A cuckoo does not become a tit because it hatches in a tit's nest. No matter how many line-dances I learn they will not make me Texan, and no matter how many alarm clocks I wire up as timers it will not make me Irish. And no-one who was not born into, to parents of, and brought up in a cultural milieu will ever understand and feel it like someone who was.


It is however arithmetically incontrovertible that if the only degree in folk music taught in England studies Scottish Irish and English folk music, English folk music is not being studied as much as if it were (or there were) a degree in English folk music.