Nick
Yes - the song is the thing - every time
The secret is to regard each song as an individual carrier of pleasure and information
Once you lift the corner to see what lies underneath you guarantee that you will never be bored again
Walter sang everything that took his fancy, but he was quite clear and extremely articulate in pointing out that not all of them were the "old folk songs"
He told us that he first took an interest in them when he realised that his cousins and other contemporaries had lost interest in them and were followng the latest musical tends
He set out to write his family's songs in a big notebook (which turned out to be two) and learned the melodeon to memorise the tunes
He relived every one of his songs each time he sang them - the secret for all of us it to treat each song a an individual statement
Eventually, he was persuaded by a relative to put them on tape - a story in itself

"Frances Child, who was really more of a student of the grammar of old forms of English than a student of English Literature"
Child is remembered for his magnificent work on ballads - that work had given us ove a century of pleasure and need to nbe treated with te respect often lacking in today's scene by a tiny handful of researchers who treat research like a pair of old socks, regularly discarded to make room for new ones
That is appalling research
I knw Bert Lloyd and never once heard him utter a 'Marxist' statement - he was, as most Marxists are, a socialist humanist seeking a better world - Sharp was a Fabian socialist who went out to use county songs to creat a new National Music and came home having realised that the People's Voice was far more important in its own right
If it hadn't been for people like Lloyd, MacColl, Gerry Sharp, Bill Leader.... and all those wonderful humanitarians who devoted their lives to gathering and making songs and sharing them and their findings with the rest of us we wouldn't have had a modern scene and people like me wouldn't have had the more than half a century of pleasure and interest that we have been blessed with

I fully accept that not everyone wants to take the songs and music as seriously as some of us do but it would be a very repressive and limited scene that doesn't allow us to do so and to share that with others
That's why it disturbs me when I see people being urded "don't go their" when things like definition raise their head - if you don't want to, don't try to stop others from doing so

They remind me of the story the two schoolkids coming out of a class given by a popular teacher
One says, "You've got to watch that buggger, drop your guard for a minute and you find you've learned something"
Jim Carroll