Sessions and singarounds serve an essential function in keeping this music alive - they are a place where newcomers can get a feel for what it might be like to perform the stuff. That means guitarists who have previously got no nearer to traditional music than the acoustic end of pop; classically trained fiddlers who have at most a handful of tunes memorized; and singers who can do two or three familiar cliche songs while looking at their lyric sheet. If you tell all those people to bugger off and take lessons for a couple of years before coming back, they not only won't come back, they'll tell their friends to stay away as well.

Most of the time this sort of newcomer - new to the folk/trad idiom but not new to musical performance - will see quite quickly what they need to learn (and the people in the session will probably have useful pointers on how to go about it). But they need a chance to try first.

I think Jim is old enough to have told Kevin Burke to fuck off and come back when he wasn't still wet behind the ears. And he probably did exactly that to people of the same generation who might by now have been just as good if they hadn't despaired of ever being accepted.