Conrad, everything you say contradicts itself. You claim you want to spread folk music, but your actions would restrict it. You want to reduce the diversity of events, now you want to localise it so that people won't get to hear great singers from outside their area.

If you and your neighbors had the songs in their heads then research would not be necessary. Where are those songs going to come from? I wasn't born knowing the words to 'Tamlin' or 'The Trees They Do Grow Hight'. I had to learn them - I did so from books (written by professionals) and records (made by professionals).

I'm a singer, but I don't want to go to a concert to be taught a song (although if I hear a good one I might then go and learn it). Concerts are not teaching exercises - there are plenty of workshop sessions which are - although a good performer will inform the audience about the songs.

Professionals may not want the competition, but they can't prevent it. Promoters are always on the lookout for new talent. If you're good, if you can attract an audience, you'll get gigs. All it takes is talent and hard work, so I can see why you have a problem with it. As for being unionised, you cannot be serious. Yes, some performers belong to the Musicians Union, but there is no bar on non-members being paid to perform.

Economic discrimination is nonsense. The working classes aren't excluded from folk music by the cost. The working classes can afford to go to ball games, to go drinking, to buy cigarettes and drugs, to buy flat-screen TVs, to take foreign holidays. Few folk events here cost more than the price of a couple of packets of cigarettes. The non-working classes may have more of a problem, but if you spent less on beer and food and cars you'd have no difficulty affording folk events. It's a question of priorities. As I've said before, I'm out of work and I don't have difficulty affording to go to folk events.

You want to turn folk music into a joyless activity where people would be limited to listening whatever performers happened to be in their locality, no matter how crap they were, and where the audience is required to learn songs rather than enjoy themselves. If that's what you want, it should be easy enough to find a few other talentless individuals to sing songs to one another in a cheap bar (come to think of it, there's plenty of that around the folk scene as well). Just leave the rest of us out of it.