When I was married to wife #1 she took me to Bardstown and My Old Kentucky Home.

Did I do the tour of the house? I have a faint memory of stripey wallpaper and a guide in a crinoline, but that might have been someplace else.

Bardstown also has a brewery and a shop selling toy soldiers. At least it did back in the 70s. Shortly before our visit to the toy soldier shop a sales assistant had been murdered on the premises.

By a discarded lesbian lover. With a sword.

I bought a little chap in a tricorne hat and a green jacket. I always had a slightly creepy feeling about him.

Anyway, having done the Bardstown tour, I have a proprietorial feeling about Stephen Foster.

I think of him as a cross between Edgar Allan Poe and Paul McCartney. Beautiful dead women and beautiful deathless melodies.

He was a Northerner, of course. He only ever visited the South on holiday. For all his romantic feelings about Dixie, he was an abolitionist and a passionate admirer of Lincoln. His recruiting songs are as toe-tappingly compulsive as anything by George M Cohan.

That's what's the matter
The rebels have to scatter.
We'll make them flee by land and sea
And that's what's the matter!

His work is surprising hard to get hold of on CD. You guys take him far too much for granted.

There's a relatively unknown song called "Ah, Let The Red Rose Bloom Alway" which is just about the loveliest thing ever.

And for some reason "Oh Susanna" always brings a lump to my throat. It's like "I am the Walrus"-  a trifling piece of nonsense with a great black  emptiness behind it.

I had a dream the other night
When every thing was still,
I thought I saw Susanna
A comin down the hill;
The buck-wheat cake was in her mouth,
The tear was in her eye;
Says I, "I'm coming from the South
Susanna don't you cry."

When I'm feeling really sentimental (as now, because it's Christmas) I reach for the "Early Music".

Alte Musik (it sounds better in German)- troubadour songs, crusader songs, Carmina Burana- but in the original settings, not Carl Orff's (though I like those too.)

Currently top of my medieval hit parade are.

1. Palastinalied- an ineffably sad song about crusading by Walther von der Vogelweide (d. 1230)

2. Quan Vei La Lauzeta Mover- Benart de Ventadorn's 12th century ballad of lost love.

3. The Wedding of Robin Hood- an English ballad which may or may not have inspired As You Like It. It has such a pretty tune.

4. Ja Nuls Homs Pris- the song Richard Coeur de Lion wrote while banged up in an Austrian prison.

Coeur de Lion was a murderous psychopath and arguably England's worst king ever (all he did was tax us and ignore us) but he can be forgiven much for this lovely little song. I wrote a poem about it a few years back and here it is...

JA NULS HOMS PRIS

Richard the Lionheart sings in his prison
And serve him right.

But the song is lovely.
It potters along the roads of Europe,
Under the poplars, under a sky
Of whisk-tailed cirrus. The killer, the rapist,
The butcher of Acre is feeling so sorry.
It stirs the oak and the beech where peasants
Are herding swine. They suppose that the lack
In their lives is a king who is being kept from them.

I love the middle ages. Maybe I was a crusader in a previous life. Maybe I was an outlaw. Maybe I was a monk.

Maybe I was a lady in a turret room in the Auvergne, waiting for some poet, some singer, to drop by and amuse her.

Talking about ring-tones. I heard a phone playing the signature tune for The Archers yesterday.

For the benefit of all non-Brits, the Archers is a daily radio soap that has been running for over half a century. It used to be billed as "an every day story of country folk". Gaah! I owe my hatred of it to my parents, who listened religiously.

The signature tune is a distinctive piece of mid-century classical-lite- very bouncy and bucolic. Billy Connolly once suggested that we should ditch "God Save the Queen" and adopt it as our new national anthem.

"Da-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da, Da-dee-da-dee-da-da."

Whenever I hear it I make a lunge for the radio in an attempt to switch it off before the dreadful voices kick in.

Simon and Garfunkel have been touring England. A mystery surrounds their relationship; are they talking to one another or do they enter and leave the stage by separate doors?

Art still has that thistledown hairstyle of his. If it looked odd on a man in his twenties, it looks a whole lot odder on a man of sixty two. It's like they put Harpo Marx on the rack and just kept cranking and cranking.

Ah, bedsit days! But I'm not exactly a fan. I think Simon is horribly sentimental. Hearing "America" or "the Boxer" takes me right back to a place I don't want to be.

Paul McCartney is playing Glastonbury this year. I'm in two minds about the guy.

I admire the unrelenting creativity, but so much of what he does is naff. Not so long ago he brought out a book of poems; it was god-awful. More recently he had a one man exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The paintings were big and splashy and amateurish. If he hadn't been who he is, the curators wouldn't have given him the time of day.

There's a freak-show element to his extra-curricular artistic endeavours. He keeps making an ass of himself. It's like no-one at the court of King Paul has the nerve to say, "well, yes, it's very nice, Paul; so why don't we just stick it up on the fridge?"

When the poetry came out, he excused himself with a story about how Allen Ginsburg had said that the Eleanor Rigby lyric was a great poem. Ho hum. Sorry to be brutal, but Ginsburg was a creepy old groupie and it isn't.

Is he still competing with John? John's little books and little drawings had wit and flair. Macca's don't. The only field in which the two men were ever equal is music.

But McCartney's music has never been as good since the Beatles died. I have waited and waited for the great solo album- but all he's given us is lots of pretty little songs.

It happens to a lot of artists. They outlive their greatness. They slough off the cocoon of genius and emerge with talent.

If a folk-song is less than a hundred years old its not going to be a real folk-song (unless it's by Woody Guthrie.) Real folk-song was killed off by the modern mass-media. Cinema, newspapers, commercial pop-music all usurped a function of folk-song and left the form redundant.

The songs of the mid-twentieth century revival are too sentimental to pass as the real thing. Sentimentality is for people with time on their hands. Sentimentality is for aesthetes. Real folk-songs were written by and for people in the grip of economic necessity. They wanted tabloid banner headlines. They wanted to fill their precious down-time with hard, bright emotion. Real folk-song doesn't hang around and mope. It gives us what we really want- fucking and fighting and unquiet graves.

"Where have all the flowers gone?" If you spend your time soldiering or farming or thieving or minding a power loom you don't need to ask that question. You know where all the fucking flowers have gone. No-one picks flowers promiscuously in real folk-song. You pluck a rose and it's a magical act. Out steps Tam Lin and bang goes your maidenhood and the Queen of Faery has got you on her list.

In folk song the weather is always one thing or the other. There's no Celtic twilight, just bright, shiny morning or mirk, mirk night.

I don't get Bach. Maybe it's because he's so mathematical. There was a woman playing the Chaconne last night and it was like being faced with a page of sums.

Mozart, Vivaldi- no problem. Early music- wonderful. The same programme also featured a concert of viols playing Byrd and Taverner and stuff. I was grooving along to them quite happily. It's just Bach. I just don't seem to be able to find a way in. And what makes it so infuriating is that everyone last night was saying how Bach is the greatest and the Chaconne is a pinnacle of western music. There's a line (Matthew Arnold maybe) about how we needs must love the highest when we see it. Well, sorry fella, but it just ain't true.

I was watching a documentary about the roots of the blues. I missed the first half hour- for which I could kick myself- so I only had a hazy idea of what was going on. It was directed and narrated by Martin Scorsese and in the segment I caught we were following this personable young chap in dreds as he went first to Mississippi- where he met this old guy playing a cane flute- and then across the sea to Mali. There was wonderful music every step of the way.

It was a reminder of what a recent thing slavery is. The guy in Mississippi was almost the last exponent of a style called drum and flute- there never were very many of them because the drum was banned (on pain of death) from the old plantations. I say "almost" because his daughter or granddaughter, still only a kid when the film was made, is carrying on the family tradition. Listening to him- and her- you were whisked right back into the 18th century- a matter of (what?) two, three, four generations ago.

The crime of slavery is almost too huge to comprehend. But those who perpetrated it had almost no idea- no idea at all- that they were in the wrong.

How stupid human beings are. How Willfully stupid. The slave-owners had no idea because they wouldn't allow the idea to form. But they weren't all-round stupid. Jefferson was a slave-owner- and one of the most fiercely intelligent (and in certain spheres) noble men who have ever lived.

It wasn't that the idea (that slavery is wrong) was unavailable to them. Other people were perfectly well able to formulate it. Dr Johnson, for example. Johnson the monarchist was against slavery and Jefferson the apostle of liberty was in favour.

The tribal chief in Mali said, "there are no black Americans. There are only black people who happen to live in America." For him the exodus of the slaves to north America is something fresh and new- recent history- a living affront. He and our American guy in dreds sat under a tree and jammed together. They sang alternate verses. They were singing in their two different languages to the same tune.