A LIFETIME'S enthusiasm for what wouldn't have been called American roots music when Tom Paley started out on his journey of discovery informed the folk songs, blues, banjo and fiddle tunes and reminiscences that the veteran performer shared on this rare Edinburgh appearance.

And even if his fingers don't always do his memory's bidding now, that enthusiasm, piqued when the octogenarian was 10, shone through with a whole heap of old-time charm as Paley slipped in a few items gleaned from his early 1960s stop-over in Sweden alongside American songs and imports from the old world.

You can tell the Americanised versions of these old songs from their British counterparts, he observed, by the fact that in America, it's okay to sing of murdering a woman but getting her pregnant outside of wedlock first is taboo.

Despite his being around people like Woody Guthrie and influencing a young Bob Dylan, Paley's own songwriting muse has emerged only infrequently and yet when he has put words to melody, as on the mischievously witty Beelzebubbles, which tells the story of the devil's imaginary daughter, he's done so passing well.

His fiddling is limited in scope perhaps and yet it has the sound and function of the Appalachians he learned from, and like the songs, each tune is prefaced with an entertaining tale or theory as to its origins.

Was Croquet Habit a Mississippian misinterpretation of cocaine or censorship? We may never know and while we'll also never hear Paley play Brownie McGhee's Sportin' Life Blues the way he once did, his version here gave an indication of a strong mastery of the guitar style.

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