I have found myself agreeing with much that Crow Sister says, but a few posts back she said
> SO'P is describing the kind of music *amateur musicians* might play when gathered together under the rough tag of 'folk club' but what is more rightly the singaround cum pub session, rather than the type of professional performer/performance that a proper folk club might offer up to it's paying audience. <

I have trouble with the notion of the "proper folk club" being one that offers "professional performer/performance" as contrasted with the "singaround" where anyone can turn up and sing anything.

I am in no position to generalise about folk clubs / singarounds / any-other-name nowadays, because in the last decade or so I have visited only one such regularly and a few others a very few times. My regular is Sharp's Folk Club (note the name). About one evening a month we have a professional performer, who performs for about 60% of the evening, the other 40% being much the same as the singarounds that we have on the non-guest evenings.

In the singarounds, all performers are made welcome and "anything goes" occasionally, but the preponderance is of traditional material from England and Ireland, with lesser amounts of traditional from other places (Scotland, Sweden, USA, etc) and non-traditional. The performers have various levels of skill (of course) but most are at least competent and some are excellent.

Yes the world has changed; we now have on-line communities (like this one) defined by common interest rather than common location; a folk club, singaround or musicians' session isn't exactly the same as a singing pub of 50 or 100 years ago; but I see these as more-or-less the present-day equivalents. As has already been said on this thread, some of the songs that people are writing nowadays do get picked up and sung by others.

As for the folk process, which is generally reckoned to be an essential part of the tradition: I often notice small but significant changes in songs that either have been recently written (with, therefore, authentic original versions) or have been learnt from well-known recordings. For instance I recently heard someone sing Sally, Free and Easy and change the line "The heart she gave me was not made of stone" to "The heart I gave her was not made of stone".

I have also heard The Galway Shawl with "we kept on talking" changed to "she kept on talking", suggesting why a few hours in the girl's company might have been enough.

If you want instances of complete re-builds of songs, such as the one that some time in the past gave rise to two radically different families of versions of The Two Sisters; how about this modern version of The Frog and the Mouse and Bob Coltman's Son of Child series?

Richard