The questions assume quite a bit.

I had heard singers of folk songs off and on all my life. I recall listening to a few programs about folk music on "American School of the Air" back in the late 1930s or early 1940s when I was barely more than a rug-rat, which meant I was more than likely listening to Alan Lomax, but hadn't a clue as to who he was until years later. I also heard singers like Burl Ives, Susan Reed, and Richard Dyer-Bennet early on.

I first became actively interested in folk music (active to the point of buying a cheap guitar, a book of chords, and a couple of song books) when the girl I was going with at the time, who had been interested in folk music for some time, inherited her grandmother's 1898 George Washburn "Ladies' Model" parlor guitar, and set about learning to play it to accompany the many songs she was avidly learning (mostly out of song books, and some off the few records that were available at the time). This was during in my second year at college.

I had already taken about a year's voice lessons as a teenager, and I started taking classic guitar lessons, because I wanted to learn the guitar faster and be able to do more than just strum chords. A few folk music enthusiasts "tsk! tsked! at this because they claimed that if I knew something about music, I couldn't be a folk singer because I would no longer be "natural." I wisely put this down as pure bovine excrement. Just because I could sound a bit like an opera singer if I wanted to didn't mean that I had to.

I studied and practiced and learned songs, and after a few years I started getting singing jobs. A gig here, a gig there, an invitation to do an educational television series on folk music (I wasn't just learning songs, I also learned about them), and once I had done that, I fairly readily got jobs singing in clubs and coffeehouse. Lucking into a chance to do a TV series gives you some pretty good "street cred." More television, concerts and such, followed.

I'll bet that there are a good eleventy-fourteen gazillion singers of traditional songs (but not raised in "the tradition") out there who traveled pretty much the same route I did, each with their own variations and side-trips. Some became well-known, others, not so well-known. Generally referred to as "revival singers."

Tradition? If I (and others like me) followed any tradition, it was the minstrel or troubadour tradition (taking a leaf from Richard Dyer-Bennet's book, who emphatically stated that he was not a "folk singer," he was a "modern-day minstrel"). Minstrelsy was a profession in and of itself, whereas "folk singers" or "traditional singers" were generally not professional singers. When they sang these songs, it was often while they were doing something else:   raising sail on shipboard, following the plow, weaving, rocking the baby to sleep, or singing for fun while sitting around in a pub with friends. But not as professional singers—someone who sings to entertain people and expects to be paid for it.

So—what tradition are we talking about?

Don Firth