I know that Ewan wound a lot of people up with his notion of singing songs from your own culture. It's very easy to cut large holes in the theory, and I've done it myself (what is a middle class southerner like myself to sing? Copper family rubbish? Rural shepherdesses? How is this stuff closer to me than a) Durham mining songs or b) picking bales of cotton? NONE of it is relevant to me in the sense that it's my own culture: these three above named are all equally foreign.

BUT, that said, does anyone want to argue that there'd be any British folk song at all if someone like Ewan hadn't DEMANDED that Brits make and reflect on their own culture? I'm speaking from the perspective of Canada, which never made its own such demands in the 60's and is now left with either a spurious "Celtic" culture or Stan Rogers fan clubs.

Ewan took up the challenge of thinking through the relevancy of rural-based folk song and searching, with others, for the industrial parallels. I don't think he found much, but he made valiant attempts to fill the lacunae he found, with his own and others' songs, in the pages of New City Songster.

Please excuse the rant and interpret my words broadly. I sing Copper family songs myself but only for personal pleasure. I do draw the line at Celtic twilight and S. Rogers, both for me unbearably sentimental.

By the by, can anyone place the tune of Dirty Old Town? I've found a possible source - a US version of "Lady Gay" (i.e. "The Wife of Usher's Well", Child 79).