Sadly accounting method & theory fails to attribute true worth to many things. It will probably only be too late when they are all gone that the value will be ascertained.
Long ago I stated that traditional & folk music is a heritage bequeathed us from our ancestors. Those who ignore it or wilfully discard it without learning and understanding its meaning and value are fools.

@FrayedBear Well I think that envy was never much of a property of mine but I became acutely aware that I do not have it after losing everything of value in a house fire. That really taught me that there is no value in stuff, any stuff. Here today, could be gone before nightfall.
But we live in a world where stuff is the indication of achievement. This is so sad as really it takes so little for one to have enough.If you need to go to other places for holidays then change your home. Be satisfied with what you have and where you are. Quit being a slave to the elite.

@rogerbenham I will respond privately in the next few days. Please remind me if I haven't done so.

@FrayedBear
To me, it seems that Canada does a wonderful job of promoting traditional music. In the US there is a subculture that supports and encourages this culture - you have to work to find it.

@Haemish1 Ever since that wonderful Canadian TV show of the Mountie living in Chicago I have appreciated the general regard that Canadians have for folk music.

@Haemish1 in the US the only person that I have had great regard for has been the late Utah Phillips.
[thelongmemory.com]

@FrayedBear I often sing this on stage:
I spent my whole life making somebody rich
I busted my ass for that son of a bitch
He left me to die like a dog in a ditch
And told me I'm all used up

@rogerbenham and here is Utah together with the full verses of "All used up":

Did you ever meet Utah?

@FrayedBear No but I saw him at Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 1981. Also Roy Bailey.

@FrayedBear Oh dear! I've rather changed his tune. That happens when one continually makes up new ways to play, which is what I do always. I never play anything the same way because I'm making it up and not playing from printed music, which I can hardly read.

@rogerbenham aha Roy. Saw him once or twice at the Nats in Canberra 20 years or so ago.

@FrayedBear Yes well I sing some of his stuff and Leon Rosselson's. But occasionally Stan Rogers.

@rogerbenham Personalisation & localisation - that's what makes folk music otherwise it is a generic cover. I alsays remember Ewan telling how he proudly introduced in the 1960's or 70's to a Canadian lumberjacking song which turned out to be his Manchester Rambler written in about 1923.

@FrayedBear I was emptying out boxes in my storage building and found my earliest song books with a few glued on scraps from the CND songbook of 1961 when I went on the first of three Aldermaston marches. Oh the glory I remember of 60,000 of us arriving at Trafalgar Square singing The H Bomb's Thunder.

And: When Prince Charles is old enough we'll send him down the mines !!!!

@rogerbenham Pre the cherry brandy incident?

@FrayedBear Improvisation is all I know how to do. Even when I was the 2nd tenor in Vancouver Cathedral Choir, essentially I just made up the harmony. As long as it was Baroque I generally got it right!

@FrayedBear Cherry Brandy? Don't know that one. 40 years before the Tampax scandal.

@rogerbenham Charlie boy was caught drinking cherry brandy in order to hide from the press. He may was underage 14 in 1963. How attitudes in licensing have changed. I started drinking at 14.
[heraldscotland.com]

@FrayedBear in 1963 I went to Plas y Brenin mountaineering school. On the last night three lads took me to the pub and persuaded me to rapidly drink 3 pints of scrumpy. Outside the pub I released much of the third and then 4 hours of my life vanished. I awoke being dressed down by the warden (one of the '52 Everest team) and I just said to him that I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. He looked at me and told me to sit down and the rock climbing teacher explained how I had just been blind drunk.
Charles would have been 15 then as he is a year younger than I am. I wonder how his prostate is working.

@rogerbenham It sounds like the same scrumpy served at the farmyard one room pub down the road from the Brecon army camp stayed at a few times when in CCF. Lol also where I possibly became the only NCO put on jankers for refusing the CO's order to follow 300 other cadets on a 5 mile march over mist clouded moor to supposedly learn how to map read.

@FrayedBear Aye, being unable to see makes map reading a wee bit tricky but the Brecon Beacons aresome of the most delightful walking that I ever did in Britain.
Mind you I cannot comment about your CCF since I was the first boy in the history of my school to refuse to join it.

@rogerbenham lol, we were told, no ifs, buts or conscientious objectors "it's voluntary but you have to join". My other notable achhievement was in leading my squad past the visiting general on the annual parade saluting whilst out of step with the whole company. - I think that I was known as the ugly waddling duck with the broomstick up his arse to his gullet!

@FrayedBear
Utah Phillips was a treasure.