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MD Davey Anderson gives 'Twa Recruiting Sergeants' a raw urgency and savage humour and transforms 'The Gallant Forty Twa', named after the regiment itself, into an elegy for modern day Iraqi warfare.

I confess these are songs I'd heard a hundred times before belted out of some smoky pub corner and I'd never connected with them in any meaningful way.Ìý But they breathe through this play. And anyone who ever thought old songs have nothing to say to new ears should see it.

I felt the same jolt when I first heard Gordeanna McCulloch sing 'The Laird of Warriston', a seventeenth century ballad of domestic abuse and come-uppance, whilst working for national domestic abuse charity Scottish Women's Aid. The essence of the story, four hundred years old, could have been lifted from one of our late twentieth century files.

I love traditional ballads because of their ability to connect human experiences across the details of time and place, and to take on new resonances for new circumstances.Ìý The rich local references and language might vary but the core human emotions and experiences are just the same. They're not museum pieces. And they're not parochial.

So it cheers me that 'Poor Man's Heaven', Seth Lakeman's third album length exploration of his native Devon history and mythology, finds itself nestled between Amy Winehouse and Neil Diamond in the Top Ten album charts this week.Ìý And whilst tedious column inches and web space discuss whether or not Seth is folk enough for folk, to me what betrays his sensibility more than a fiddle ever could is what he chooses to write about. 'Solomon Browne', for example, commemorates the 1981 Penlee Lifeboat disaster, an event in his own lifetime that's still as raw on that coastline as memories of Piper Alpha are in Aberdeen.

Whether it's around in a few hundred years time scarcely matters. But maybe, just maybe, one or two of the tens of thousands or so people who'll buy Seth's album will follow the thread from him to the songs and singers who've inspired him. For when English folk music finally falls out of fashion and favour with the English cultural intelligentsia, as it surely will, mercifully the songs will still be there and they'll still mean something.

Karine x