Surely it all depends on your audience - regular attendees appreciate hearing new or less familiar material, but occasional attendees like to hear things they know, even though their knowledge of music is limited by their wider interests. There is no crime in that, even if it does make your heart sink at times. There are some venues and events where people will demand to hear things like The Wild Rover, Streets of London, Dirty Old Town, Fields of Athenry, Duelling Banjos, etc if they hear you play something that reminds them of such stuff. Then there are other events where you might get lynched, or at least sneered at, for daring to play any hackneyed material. I prefer to give an audience what they want, rather than compel them to endure your latest self penned dirge that has little resonance for them, and that will mean swallowing your pride some times.

Sneering surely is a form of snobbery, provoked by our over familiarity with a song, when as someone says above, aficionados know there are much better and more important songs out there that deserve to be aired. However, can inverted snobbery be just as irritating, which is prevalent in some singarounds where people seem to go to great lengths to find and deliver some long lost or obscure song? It’s a very important part of the Folk process of course to keep old or forgotten songs alive, and I admire their dedication and respect for this non-commercial end of the spectrum. However, there is often a good reason why such a song has become forgotten and obscure, and that may be that it had very limited appeal or resonance, or despite its important message or historical artifice it just had an uninspiring melody and lyric. No doubt there was another thread on this sometime......