A curiosity here for me. I am not much bothered about Irish artforms, why should I be, I am not Irish. I do however care very much about things that are not folk being called folk, which leads people to assume that I oppose evolution in form of folk arts, and there I absolutely disagree with their assumption.

I am strongly in favour of innovations in the way to present folk music and song. Even re-writing the words and tunes (not losing the old ones). That, IMHO, gives folk music and song its vibrancy. Some however bewail (say) the hymn tune to "Byker Hill" and wish only that it be played as a 9/8 rant, as they think it used to be (I express no view whether they are right).

Anderson (in my limited experience) likes to be judge, jury and excecutioner in his own cause, whereas a fair bit of the time I have a less than clear idea what it is that the Captain is arguing, between his typing, punctuation, spelling and grammar.

I think (on this) I probably support the Captain, but it is difficult if you think that a particular instrument ruins a song. It happens to me a lot of the time with pianos. To be just to the artist you need to try to discount the prejudice, but part of your review is the aptness of presentation so if you think that a particular instrument is the invention of the devil you will think that it was inapt to use and detracts from the singer and song - so that its use was "bad musicianship".