Ref:
"ALL VOICES are "folk" voices. The beauty of folk music is that it doesn't require any particular quality."
Not necessarily true - any more than 'all songs are folk songs'.
The English language song tradition is, by and large a narrative one and for me, the songs work best when the the singer takes on the role of a storyteller whose stories come with a tune.
Traditional singers have told us again and again that the most important thing about their songs is the story - in some cases we have recorded singers whose tunes hardly vary, but whose songs cover the whole spectrum of human experience. In Ireland, the older singers refer to 'telling' a song and not 'singing' it. The tune is the means by which a story is delivered, not an end in itself. I don't think this can be said of any other singing form, certainly not opera (please don't regard this as a critical comment, it isn't, I enjoy opera as music, not narrative, that's why I can listen to singers singing in a language I don't understand).
As for quality - there's a Mount Everest of a thread going on at the moment discussing this, and other related subjects without needing to spread the fighting onto this one.
Jim Carroll
PS Thank you Barry Finn for those kind words.