We had some interesting discussions in the song discussion workshops that Johnny Collins ran at Chippenham Festival over this last weekend. One of them was about choice of material. We were discussing songs (especially those from the Coppers) that fall in and out of fashion because they get done to death and have to wait until they come round again, and the perils of doing an interesting version and getting to the chorus and finding out that all your audience are singing the version they know. But today's session was about the influence of families in transmitting songs and tunes, and Tim Laycock told us about Walter Pardon's family. Because singing in the pub had gone out of fashion his uncles used to meet in a shed on Saturday nights and sing. Tim sang a ballad he had learned from Walter Pardon that corresponded in every word with the version that had been published 200 years earlier. The Pardon family had transmitted it orally from generation to generation without changing it.