DMcG: I agree with you and Eliza entirely, except for the one point - fairly clearly some (only some) people are saying that you do HAVE to - and it is nothing to do with learning to perform per se. Criticism was expressed of someone (implicitly young? newcomer, anyway) hearing a traditional folk song and getting up and singing it themselves without having studied how the traditional folk singers sang it. No, I don't have the programme recorded to pick the bones over, and don't want to make too big a thing of a small piece of the whole - but reread Malcolm and Greg's postings above.

I thought one of Martin Carthy's comments went right to the heart of the matter - that it doesn't matter what people do to the songs, because the songs were still there and couldn't be damaged. So let people come to the songs and sing them - they can discover the joys of the history afterwards.