Richard writes; 'I cannot now walk around Carlisle
without feeling that I am in the company of the ghosts of Hughie the Graham and Hobbie Noble'
That's because you are Richard. Good ballad singing is like good acting, it demands that you enter the lives of the protagonists and allow them to enter yours. That doesn't mean to say it is histrionic.
I like to think of festival ballad sessions as 'breeding programme' situations rather than 'aviaries'. The Whitby ballad sessions have taken on a life of their own in the last few years and seemed to be a place where both punters and booked artists met to exchange some very powerful tellings of these songs.This can only be for the good of the tradition as a whole.
Dick is right too although this year we had less broadside type narratives and nobody sang 'The Flying Cloud', a ballad of epic and politically important dimensions.