"In my community most singers also play an instrument to accompany themselves" and "about every singer I know plays an instrument" - but does that really mean that people who might like to sing, but who don't play an instrument don't feel that they are entitled to do so?

If I think about singarounds I've been in recently, most of the people there probably don't play an instrument.

And the other side of that is, just because people can play an instrument, does that mean that they always feel they need to use it. In another thread Dave Bryant (who is no mean guitar player, and a powerful singer) said how he often prefers to put down the instrument and sing unaccompanied.

Maybe this is a transatlantic difference. Except I know that Pete Seeger was always happy to sing without an instrument when he felt the song worked better that way.

This is thread drift I suppose. But the ability to see singing a song as something you do as part of your life, and not necessarily as any kind of performance is maybe one of the key elements in what can be called the "traditional" approach to the songs. Maybe when we sing in the car as we're travelling along we are in fact very much in the tradition, even irrespective of whatever we might actually be singing.