"Come to Lewes and see for yourself."

I am not arguing for one minute that people are not writing songs Bryan - of course they are. But by and large they are not leaving the greenhouse conditions of the folk club, more often than not they remain unchanged and unadapted (except for a few self-concious tweaks) and there is a whole mass of people out there who never get to hear them. One of the great failures of the revival is that it has failed to engage with the population at large and it has failed to draw the attention of the general public to their own songs - not finger pointing, I was as much a part of that failure as anybody.
The arbitrary abandoning of folk song by many of the clubs and replacing it with 'singing horse music' has exacerbated that situation.
Anybody tempted to dip their toes into folk song for the first time is as likely to find SO'P's rag-bag as they are to find good folk songs and ballads well enough sung to catch their imaginations the way mine was (by the Spinners) in the early sixties.
Unfortunately the Universe doesn't start and end in Lewes.
Jim Carroll