These days I avoid Mudcat threads that have more than 100 posts. Their circumlocutive repetition, often from entrenched positions, does not make for engaging reading. However, sometimes I am tempted in as I was today. Sometimes, somethings that are written spark a memory. Today it was the mention of singers who could not hold the tune and that took me back over 40 years and made me remember Adam Young.

Adam was an old bothy singer who appeared at several of the T.M.S.A. festivals in Scotland - notably the one at Kinross.

* Adam could not hold a tune when he sang.
* Adam was a really great performer of the the old bothy songs.

Now, these two statements might seem incompatible. But in spite of his basic difficulty with the melody, he had everything - a great repertoire which he sung with commitment and enthusiasm, superb timing, a great way of putting songs over, humour, a feeling of authenticity, an engaging personality and friendliness towards the much younger singers that surrounded him. All these qualities more than compensated for his basic failing.

He was an old fashioned farm labourer and at the festival he was being feted by the sixties generation and somehow it worked. It still makes me smile when I think of the occasion when Adam sang The Overgate changing just one word as he did so-

Says I: "I've lost my waistcoat,
My watch chain and my purse."
Says she: "I've lost my handbag
And that's a damn sight worse."

I remember the puzzled look on his face as his young audience fell about with laughter at this.

Adam Young - a nearly forgotten hero.