Raymond
I have no doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of families all over Britain who could make similar claims to your own, some performing folk songs, or light or grand opera, Barry Manilow, Louis Armstrong, Beatles, Harry Champion, Gracie Fields songs......... - are they all 'traditional' - by your description they were all 'traditionally received?
If so, we may as well throw in the towel and retreat to our own individual parlours, because we can not offer audiences to the clubs anything cohesively identifiable as 'traditional'.
I, along with thousands more, arrived on the scene because I was attracted by a certain type of music. I became more deeply involved when I discovered that this music had certain characteristics and had arrived here through a certain process, which was, nearly 50 years ago, all but dead. I spent thirty odd years recording people who were, by then, little more than 'rememberers' of that tradition, the act of singing within their communities having died out, mainly in their youth.
I suggest that your family tradition has little to do with the folk song tradition that brought us all together back in the fifties.
Where did Fred Jordan get his 'training'? Where Harry Cox and Sam Larner and Phil Tanner and Tom Lenihan et al got theirs, from the same place they got their songs.
Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll