At the Old Town School Of Folk Music in it's early days there were beginning classes, intermediate classes and advanced classes. If you were a beginner, it was best that you be in that class until you'd grown too good for that level. Frank Hamilton who looks in here on this forum all the time, was the man who invented this system in Chicago.
After the formal sessions were over, EVERYONE got together in a large main room for what was called "THE SECOND HALF". There everyone would tune up together and "work out" singing and picking together with a leader up front setting the pace. It was a community---a social session out of which much great music came. (Some great marriages came out of it also, and that, in turn, produced some very musical offspring). Some went on to sing mainly traditional music in their own ways---Fred Holstein, Fleming Brown, Bob Gibson, even me. Some played it note for note much like those old-timey string bands that had done it 35 years earlier. Some played Irish and dance music in the various styles. Some made their own songs--Steve Goodman & Jim McGuinn & John Prine & Bonnie Koloc. Others played cajun music ala Dewey Balfa and Nathan Abshire even though many people from France (the country) didn't understand this other New World way of speaking the French language.

What I'm saying, I guess, is, like Bob Dylan said, "You can be in my dream if I can be in yours !"

Art Thieme