You mean you... had a point? What was it?

With all due respect, Comrade Easby, you were agreeing with my point a couple of posts back & now you're asking what it was!

In brief - I see no problem with the session scene; I never have seen a problem with the session scene; all my life (48 ever accelerating years & counting) I've known hundreds of great traditional players & hundreds of great traditional sessions and long may it thrive - which it will do anyway, regardless, but, saving the occasional song sung with due all-due-respect, it doesn't cross over (much) (if at all) into the Song Scene. My Post-Revival Polemic back there is to do with redetermining the aesthetical mire into which Traditional Song has fallen and taking a fresh look in the light of The Actual Tradition rather than the increasingly wearying orthodoxies of The Revival.

The other point is that age doesn't come into it, and neither does so-called musicianship; drooling over youth & increasingly slick musical vituosity obfuscates the essential beauty of what The Tradition was all about. What matters is passion and a long-term commitment to the essential humanity of the craft which might allow some of the hitherto marked eccentricity, inventiveness & idiosyncasy (factors which determined The Tradition just as The Tradition determined them) to flourish and shine through. This has nothing to do with your pet GEFFs by the way, perish the thought, just placing a little value on the noise aesthetic which seems to have all but vanished from the music.

I write this whilst listening to Leadbelly singing John Hardy on repeat play, very loud indeed.