I've a deep fondness for Britten & Pears - much as I have for Alfred Deller and Jack Langstaff. What they did was just as crucial as anything that happened in Revival II; just as artificial and authentic anyway - perhaps even a little less so in terms of the self-conscious folkier-than-thou aesthetic than typifies many Revival II singers even to this day. Of course, orthodoxies are inevitable, but in the end it all comes down how people approach these things & are moved by them without bolstering their efforts with reference to some wholly non-existent Tradition - much less the correctness thereof. The Tradition in that sense is perhaps too convenient a construct, and way too narrow a confine even for the Traditional Singers themselves, for that identity was bestowed upon them by on high, just as their music was defined by an ideology they had little or no understanding of. My main citicism of the revival is, therefore, that it both assumes & insists upon ideological concensus whilst the whole thing is predicated on a class condecension which is further compounded by a reciprocal class deference that results in (among other things) folk's romantic chapter & verse religiosity.

All part of the appeal? Well, I know it is for me, just as I know the results continue to ingrigue and yield great results, but I do wince at the pure-blood implications of the Genuine and the Authentic, thus must I insist that the only true criteria for a Ballad Singer is someone who enjoys singing Ballads. In my experience no one does this lightly, and whatever their abilities as a singer / musician, the quality of their performance is underwritten by a deeper passion which I, for one, am invariably grateful to be in the presence of. There will, of course, always be the nutter who instists on singing along to an inner backing track of Steeleye Span's Thomas the Rhymer whilst reading the lyric sheet, or else passing off a small eternity with Jack Orion as being somehow traditional or else insist that their plagerised rendering of Martin Carthy's masterful Famous Flower is somehow folk in the very strictest sense of the word... But, for the most part, people care very deeply about these things and use them as a means to a deeper communion & creative expression which is what this thing called music is all about.

Me, I tend to love it all anyway.