I am interested in the part of the discussion that dealt with Whaling songs. I found myself considering a song that I used to sing in the 1960s but haven't sung much this century. After some consideration I decided that context is everything. The words of The Weary Whaling Grounds make it stand out as one of the finest songs of that era. Few songs set the listener into the heart of the story as well as the first verse of that song: -
If I had the wings of a gull, my boys,
I would spread ’em and fly home.
I’d leave old Greenland’s icy grounds
For of right whales there is none.
And the weather’s rough and the winds do blow
And there’s little comfort her.
I’d sooner be snug in a Deptford pub,
A-drinkin’ of strong beer.
I decided to introduce it by saying that I felt that I was part of the very end of the whaling story in England. I was working on a huge building site in the mid '60s and we were tasked with filling in the Surrey Commercial Docks in Deptford, the very docks that had been the home of a large whaling fleet and was to become a light industies and wharehousing park. I stated my abhorance of whaling but would not want to deny the horrors that that thses wonderful creatures were suffering and the harsh life that the whalers were forced to follow. If we treat it as an historic piece from a misquided past then I felt justified in relating the story and singing the song.

I feel that I was in a very different place when my closest friend sung The Jew's Garden at our folk club where I was the regular compere. Another long term friend, a Jewish man approached me at the end of the club to ask if I was going to allow anti-semitic songs to be sung at my club. I was flummoxed! I told him I would have to get back to him on the matter. At a later meeting, I told him that it would be a virtual imppossibilty for me to vet the repertoire of floor singers. Also that earlier that week, I had seen Al Pacino's wonderful portrayal of Shylock in the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice in which he managed to evince a sympathetic portrayal of that character. We do have a problem with a range of topics in our literature, drama and historic and traditional song concerning our treament of wildlife, misogyny, racism, murder, rape, slavery, sexism - the list seems endless. Contextualising the songs in the way we introduce them would seem to be one way. There is certainly a proportion of folk songs that deserve to be ditched. The question is -"where do we draw the line. "