One of the most embarrassing moments in my life was asking one of the best singers I have ever heard, Davy Stewart, to write his name and address down for me. "You'd better write it doon fir me, laddie' Ah haene' got ma specs wi me" - even though he was wearing them at the time. I realised this giant of traditional song was illiterate and must have learned orally his huge repertoire of traditional ballads, folk songs, bothy ballads, cornkisters, music hall songs from Scotland, art songs, rebel songs from Ireland, songs in Scots traveller cant and funny ditties set to Scots dance tunes which as far as I can work out, he wrote himself. He is oustandingly my favourite male singer of folk songs, though there are a number of women, also Scots travellers, that I hold in equally high esteem. He sang unaccompanied or more often to his own accompaniment of piano accordion and in his later years a melodeon.

Many years ago, I was in a conversation with Brian Pearson and the subject was - as it has been at times here - the nature of the song tradition in the British Isles. Brian said that this tradition was exclusively an unaccompanied one. I replied that I felt that if we were to be accurate, then we needed to say that it was mainly an unaccompanied tradition but that there were important exceptions and I mentioned Davy.
Brian said, "Davy Stewart is irrelevant, an aberration!" I have never been in a fight since I was in junior school but at that statement I felt murderous. I had to walk away immediately. To hear my great hero dismissed in this way was too much for me.

On reflection it seems trivial in the great scheme of things, but at one level it is important. If we are to dismiss evidence of traditional singers accompanying themselves then we are to dismiss Davy Stewart, The McPeakes, Jane Turriff, The Findlaters in Orkney, John MacDonald, Elizabeth Stewart, the singing fiddle players in the Shetlands - and that is just a quick list off the top of my head. We must learn to state what the evidence tells us and not what we would like to be the case. Far too often those in influence in folk song scholarship have approached the subject with their own agenda and have set out to prove their own beliefs. That is why the most recent important researchers are eschewing hard and fast theories in favour of statements of evidence; and when there is no evidence they are honest enough to say so and ask for further research. To me this feels like a breath of fresh air blowing through a subject that I have been concerned with all my adult life.