"I sing "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" as "Black Girl" which sometimes gets me stares when I'm busking but i don't see it as that bad. "

"I sing "The Flying Cloud" which has the line "we had the niggers up on deck and we hauled them in the tide". I've thought long and hard about whether I should replace "the niggers" with "their bodies" or whether they would prefer me to refer to them by the nword to hauling them in the tide."

Thing is, would either of you sing those words to a room with black audience members inches away from you in the front row? Would you not feel a tiny bit self-concious singing "black girl, black girl, don' lie to me" to a black girl? (You should!) I'd put money on you either not singing those particular songs or changing a lyric. Even if you thought it was fine in principal, I bet you'd wimp out in practice.

I play more open-mic nights and singer-songwriter nights than I do folk nights. At the folk nights the audience is almost always entirely white people. At the open-mic/singer-songwriter nights it's a lot more mixed, especially in the South London pubs I frequent (I live in Brixton).

When I introduce "In The Pines" I sometimes talk about how Leadbelly's song is "black girl" but how people might just think I'm a little bit racialist to sing it that way. The anachronistic use of the archaic term "racialist" usually gets a laugh from the older ladies and gents in the audience - black or white - who remember the term from the Alf Garnett bad old days.

I've played some calypso and mento songs in a few Brixton pubs and it's actually really liberating. Doing stuff like "Iron Bar" or "Monkey's Wedding" , singing in a straightforward English London accent, not attempting any West Indian twang or anything, you get a massively warm response from the older guys there.