Well Charles, you have a thooughly incomprehensible way of expressing yourself - but there are some nuggets of insight hidden deep in all those words.

i doubt I could keep up a correspondence with you. (You should work for the tax people - everyone would just see the letter and say - ah fuck it! I'll pay.)

However I think you are in the right - particularly about the standard of entertainment in folk clubs.

This tradition business has been very selective and self important about what it has decided to sustain.

Very recently I watched Josh White Jnr's tuition dvd on his Dad's guitar style. And the strange thing - there was a style of guitar playing, I hadn't really seen ,anything like since Gerry Lockran retired. A style totally gone.

We thought Carthy, Jansch etc were Lords of everything they surveyed - technique wise - and of course they weren't. They were just very talented charismatic individuals.

Nic jones, Carthy, Jansch, Dylan even, were very dangerous people to try and emulate. their earnestness and brilliance at what they did sort of made it work for them. It absolved them from doing anything much in the way of presenting their work and explaining it. The minstrelsy of Seeger, derek Brimstone, Maccoll, Cosmotheka - people working from a more theatrical background are what made people understand and feel that folk music was their friend.

Nowadays every young playeryou see is so damnned earnest. You want to shake them and say - wake up smell the protoplasm! - you are not bringing down thetablets of stone from Mt Sinai. We are of the same flesh as yourself.