Evening all.

I've been lurking on the margins of this thread waiting for a moment when I might have something useful to contribute. I've carried out no extensive surveys, so any evidence here is purely anecdotal, and based on the experiences of a performer who generally inhabits the more traditionally-inclined areas of the folk world.

The distinguished Cajun fiddle player Dewey Balfa – both a ‘traditional musician’ and an active revivalist of his indigenous music – once made a very interesting statement: “A culture is preserved one generation at a time”. I take this to mean that it’s up to the next generation to decide what they do with the old music I’ve loved all my adult life, without people like me telling them what they should and should not be doing. I say this without denying the inspiration and advice I received back in the day from more experienced singers like Harry Boardman and Roy Harris, but my approach is to perform and teach the music as best I can and hope something rubs off on the people who hear it.

Over the last few years I’ve worked with several very talented musicians thirty or more years younger than myself, and it’s been a lot of fun. They are all different in character, and their musical interests have varied from a passionate focus on the old songs, to a talent for new compositions of their own - but all of them have had a huge respect for traditional song and music. As far as I’m concerned, that’s as it should be. The best thing their elders can do is to make the musical resources – song collections, source recordings, anecdotes about singers, etc - available to young singers and players like that, to use in whatever way they might choose. There is no shortage of interest there – one of this year’s festival hot tickets, Granny’s Attic, play a high proportion of the kind of songs Cecil Sharp would have nodded approvingly at, to an extraordinary degree of musical virtuosity – and they’re all in their 20s. If that’s the kind of music that floats your boat, you’ve plenty of reasons to be cheerful.

But all of those young musicians – whether or not they’re trying to base a career on their talents – are well aware that their audiences contain more than a few grey hairs, and that folk clubs are dwindling as their organisers lose some of their youthful energy, and I think there’s a growing awareness that they need to be organising things for themselves. However, much as I’ve always found the folk club format very well-suited to the kind of songs that came to us from the tap room, barn and nursery, we also have to accept that the venues of the future may not tick all the boxes of the upstairs pub room, the two 40-minute guest spots, the floor singers, and the raffle.

While I’m here I can’t resist commenting on a couple of the tangential discussions aired in this thread. I first saw Walter Pardon (yes, I know, sorry...) onstage when I was just over 20, at Whitby Folk Festival. I’d never heard of him, and was certainly unaware of any ‘lionization’, but he completely won over his audiences with a good mix of songs well sung, an entirely unassuming – yet very committed – approach to them, and plain old modesty and warmth. There was nothing of the variety performer about him, even when singing Music Hall – he looked down at his shoes while singing. Forty years later I still listen to his recordings and play them to workshop classes - he didn’t have the flamboyance of a Tanner or a Larner, but was one of the best in my opinion - though of course that doesn’t mean everyone has to like his stuff.

Secondly, although I would always say that folk music should be immediate, and be able to grab an audience from the off without any kind of analysis, the fact is that learning about the history of the music and the way it works is fascinating in itself. I’ve always believed that the old songs are not ‘just songs’. They come from particular historical periods, they tell particular stories, they have interesting melodies, and they were sung by real people whose own stories are often colourful and fascinating. Audiences tell me they like to hear some of that; it really isn’t a binary choice.

I’m sure there was another point I wanted to make, but that’s probably enough for now.