Peter Laban wrote:

And I am astounded the Bear Dance is still doing the rounds, more than forty years every aspiring folkgroup in the Netherlands and Flanders took it up.

Sticking to such a limited core repertoire can so easily create a stale atmosphere and it will certainly fuel the argument of those who nurse a perception folk music is basically a bunch of older people playing the same tunes again and again. And there's no need for that at all.

Although I think it's important that session repertoire doesn't get stale, and that it's important to introduce new material, the point about the old favourites like (speaking for England) 'Harpers Frolic', 'Rochdale Coconut Dance', 'Seven Stars' and so on is that they are very inclusive - most players arriving at a session for the first time know that repertoire, and it gives them a way in. As for 'Bear Dance', it's the first minor-key tune that most melodeon players learn, and just about every talented young melodeon player that I've come across will have cut their teeth on it - and probably still enjoy blasting it out once in a while, no matter how far they might have moved on.

I know a young melodeon player who had the choice of two local sessions - a youthful one, where they play all kinds of technically challenging stuff, and the 'old men's session', where they still do all the 1970s favourites. She actually loved both.