I wonder if in the UK one finds Northern English and Scottish ears are more attuned to 'Slow Airs' and further South in the Midlands down to the South coast Morris tunes are more easily responded to/recognised.

I was talking about Scotland there. I've no idea how the sort of tune I was playing (Nathaniel Gow's "Mr Ronald Crawford", say) would be perceived in England.

But it is absolutely obvious to me thare is no single "tradition". There is a sheaf of them, wending and dividing and rejoining through time. So it would be helpful for the muddy-headed ranters to mention which ones they were ranting about before pounding their chests.

There are roughly three different subcultural traditions I meet with personally here in southern Scotland: the singer-songwriter crowd (on Radio Scotland: Ian Anderson's show), the Scottish revivalist folk scene (Archie Fisher's "Travelling Folk"), and the fiddle and accordion music scene (Robbie Shepherd's "Take the Floor"). They overlap pairwise, and you often get misunderstandings when somebody used to one of them walks into an event that's mainly the other. I use the sort of instruments you might expect to find in the revivalist folk scene, but the music I play is mainly the fiddle-and-accordion-club repertoire, so neither of them quite knows what to make of me. And the singer-songwriter crowd (who dominate the participant music sessions around where I live in Midlothian) really don't know what to make of my tunes - it's very, very rare for any of them to have any idea how to accompany one on their guitar, however good they may be at blues or John Prine songs. (Oh, and a fourth category: the "world music" scene, as represented on Scottish radio by Mary Ann Kennedy's show. My ventures into that cause equal bafflement in all the other three).