THOUSANDS of folk enthusiasts made their way to Otley at the weekend for the 13th annual Black Sheep Folk Festival.

The festival, which started on Thursday and ran throughout the weekend, saw leading folk musicians perform at various venues, from the Civic Centre, Otley Methodist Church and the new Courthouse to the town's pubs.

Organiser Steve Fairholme said: "It was a great weekend. The weather was kind-ish to us and all the performers were very happy.

"We had 17 dance teams representing just about all the English traditions, it was a very successful weekend."

The event, now one of the highlights of the Folk music calendar, was mostly sold out with some of the more popular concerts having to turn people away.

At the newly-refurbished Otley Methodist Church, organisers managed to put up a stage in just 20 minutes after having to borrow it from The Courthouse - also being used for the first time.

John Hepworth of Otley music shop The Music Box in New Market, reviews the weekend's events.

We know Otley's Folk Festivals as a yearly landmark between Last Night of the Proms and Blackpool Illuminations.

They give us permission to have a good time and enjoy a little bit of summer that's been saved and put away for later, and once again Wharfedale's weather tolerated our cheek and let us get away with it most of the time.

One pleasure of the event is finding out - or simply enjoying what we knew already - that festivals, like the folk clubs they grow from, are not just for Folk Music.

It's quite a rarity nowadays to find a description such as the one in this year's official programme, of Mary Humphries who 'sings traditional English and Welsh songs in her powerful expressive voice, and plays banjo and concertina'.

In fact this year concertinas may have been outnumbered by solid-bodied electric guitars, and it is taken for granted that acoustic guitars will be amplified even for use in smallish spaces.

The electric guitars had a good night on Saturday, when the Durbervilles used that range of their kit for a thrilling late-night set at the Grove Hill Club with every player on top form as Lee Walsh's magnificent voice paid due tribute to their well-wrought material.

They did it again, this time acoustic style, at the Rugby Club on Saturday before an audience which tellingly included other noted musicians giving unblinking attention to the Durbervilles.

Part of the character of the sound is Gus Taylor's sensitive and inventive work on the accordion, so this was a good night for squeezeboxes too, when Last Night's Fun completed a hard day's work.

For them it had started - sort of - with a somewhat overslept morning session at the Black Horse before their afternoon concert at the Civic Centre.

Anyone who had been led to expect occasional bouts of perfection in their show was definitely not disappointed.

Nor were lovers of the bluesier end of folk; and indeed downright no-messin' blues, electric and otherwise, got very fair exposure. Jeremy Bradford was giving out some blues-rock at the Courthouse Arts Centre on Thursday night, and on Friday Dave Speight was working the old magic at The Three