November 2021: the Salut! Live series on Music from North Eastern England ran over seven instalments starting around a year ago. It attracted a lot of interest and is doing so again as I reproduce those article with updates where necessary. Here is the third edition …

First of all, I owe a big thank you to the many hundreds of people who, in many cases for the first time, have been visiting these pages this month, bringing Salut! Live the nearest thing to Sunlit Uplands we expect to see in Brexit Britain.

It began with Bill Taylor's Cover Story account of a young Bob Dylan's contribution to BBC drama. Largely forgotten more than half a century later,  there was Dylan involvement in a Sunday night play called Madhouse on Castle Street.  The director Philip Saville's original idea was for him to act. This not being to Dylan's taste, he sang instead, as Bill explains in his piece. 

Bill's article was followed by a comparison of different versions of The Testimony of Patience Kershaw and the first two instalments of this series on the Music of North Eastern England.

Becky Unthank, as captured by Roger Liptrot

ALL ITEMS IN THIS SERIES CAN BE SEEN AT THE FOLLOWING LINK: https://www.salutlive.com/music-from-north-eastern-england/

On one day, Dec 11, there were no fewer than 455 visits to Salut! Live, not a figure that would impress those who run properly successful websites but massive by our modest standards. 

For the third instalment of the series, I have gone with what might be called a representational selection. I admire all the artists I feature, and like the choices I have made from their bodies of work, but I do not put any of it forward as the best they have done. 

First the Unthanks.  I thought of presenting their rightly acclaimed Fareweel Regality and the excellent but very different original by its composer, the late Terry Conway.  But that belongs – and will eventually find its home – in Cover Story.

Here's the Tender Coming would have been another decent choice but I posted the Mighty Doonans' version earlier in the series so another outing for the same song might seem premature.

So  I came up with another cracker from Rachel, Becky and their band. Annachie Gordon was not an obvious inclusion in the Unthanks' repertoire, given the undeniably superb interpretations available from more conventionally accomplished singers including Mary Black, Sinead O'Connor and Loreena Mckennitt. Nic Jones also sang it to perfection but I take the unfashionable view that gender matters in song; it simply doesn't feel right for me, and never has felt right, to hear a woman's story told in the first person by a man, or vice versa.

Annachie Gordon is one of numerous ballads telling of the young woman who falls for a man of humble origins and resists her cruel and selfish father's will that she should instead marry a rich suitor. June Tabor once told me it was a song "without a wasted word"; I've done my share of editing  and wouldn't necessarily go that far but I know what she means and share her appreciation of the way the story unfolds.

Becky Unthank takes the lead vocals. Plenty of people will prefer the song on the lips of others but I find this an entirely compelling version, the clip of which I am belatedly adding.

My earlier mention of Brexit was not intended to annoy Ed Pickford, an outstanding songwriter with his heart in the right, by which I mean left, place on most important matters but not on Leave/Remain. It is only slightly reassuring to know this rotten project is not the exclusive preserve of the far right, conventional right or xenophobes (and worse) so I can respect Ed's view, which was after all shared – in whatever massaged form – by Jeremy Corbyn and his key advisers. 

When it comes to Ed's songwriting, I have nothing but praise. He was an important part of the Northern Front, a trio – with Mick Elliott and Nick Fenwick – that combined humour and music in brilliant style and gave folk clubs like those I helped to run some of their best nights.

From a wealth of options, I was initially torn between two great coalfield songs of his, Farewell Johnny Miner and Ee Aye Aa Could Hew, but then decided to explore further. I do not suggest for a second that Durham Big Meeting – describing the annual Miners' Gala, an event my London-born parents never allowed me to attend when I was a lad in Co Durham -  is the finest song Ed has written and performed. It just seems to suit the series.

Similarly, the High Level Ranters did so much more, and in truth much better, than Byker Hill.

But hearing Tom Gilfellon belt out the vocals reminds me of 1) my earliest experiences of folk clubs, where the song was part of the staple diet 2) Tom's disdain, recently recalled by my friends Bill Taylor and Len Skelton,  for the offputting noisiness of our club's audience and 3) the stunning way I remember it being sung by Eileen, youngest sister of another pal, Mike Sheehan, when she cannot have been more than 13.

I believe this series still has legs, so there will be a fourth instalment in which you will encounter a Geordie fiddler, Tom McConville, Kathryn Tickell, the Fettlers of Teesside and others.