I am making the supper – last night, last week, any old night. My son Theo, who is 14, comes downstairs to the kitchen with a guitar. I switch off Radio 4 and he starts to play: Martin Simpson's arrangement of Fair Annie, a dark tale of a bartered bride. He plays and sings and I sing with him – and I wonder if life ever gets any better. This feels like a miracle. A little one: but a miracle, all the same.
It seems to me that I recall the very moment when I heard the music that changed my life. I was eight. It was the summer, and I'd gone to stay with my friend Elizabeth at her parents' house in Rhode Island. I'd travelled by myself from Manhattan, an epic journey on a Greyhound bus. It was a week spent running along the rocky beaches of the wild Atlantic. One afternoon – perhaps it was raining, the sky slate grey outside the big living room windows that faced the ocean – Elizabeth's dad put on his favourite record – and that was it. Ten years later, at 18, I left New York for England and have lived here ever since. It's fair to say that the song I heard that afternoon, nearly 40 years ago, is the reason I have an English life, an English husband, an English son. The song? All Around My Hat by Steeleye Span.
I have never been able to explain why 70s English folk-rock – the sound of an imagined ancient greenwood – should sing so clearly to a little girl from New York, a girl who was, in every other respect, a New Yorker. Yet Maddy Prior's pure, clear voice pierced like an arrow and never left. One thing led to another: after Steeleye came Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Martin Carthy, the Watersons. Sure, there was Simon & Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell too, but it was the music of the British Isles that drew me and moved me.
I started to learn the guitar and became good enough to feel frustrated and give up when I discovered it would be useful to read music. But my guitar travelled with me even after I'd really stopped playing. It was part of me, part of the music I loved.
My taste in music made for a lonely existence. When I first heard Steeleye Span in 1976, the folk revival was in full swing … but at eight I didn't have much of a musical social life. By the time I got to college – in England, home of the Child ballad and the Morris dance – in the mid-1980s, it was all Whitney Houston, Madonna or the Smiths, and I resigned myself to the life of a lonely musical outcast. (OK, I had a brief flirtation with Adam Ant. But all that dandy/highwayman stuff seemed to have some connection to balladry. Plus, he was really cute.)
I decided that my taste in music was pretty much a private thing. It belonged to me and me alone. I am an only child. I was fine with that. It was the secret soundtrack to my life; when I dated, I never put on the records I liked. Why even try? When I met my husband, Francis, I was not a little intimidated by what I thought was his cool, eclectic taste in music: the Smiths, Neil Young, Philip Glass. Philip Glass? I bought a CD of Akhnaten and listened to it over and over again until I liked it. Francis did not listen to All Around My Hat over and over again until he liked it, too. As I said, I was fine with that. Really, I was.
We had a son and as he grew up, he showed a talent for music. He learned the clarinet, bassoon and piano, and he started to pick up the guitar. Would he like what I liked? Was there any hope of that? After all, when I was pregnant, I'd gone to interview my great heroine, Maddy Prior, at her home near Carlisle. I'd got some plum assignments over the years (Margaret Atwood, Harrison Ford) but this was the peach of the lot. I couldn't believe it: Maddy and me! Surely this in utero experience would fix itself in my son's DNA? I took him to a Steeleye concert when he was eight, the same age I was when my life changed. He rolled his eyes and begged to leave. Ah well. He listened to the Rolling Stones, Tinie Tempah. He, too, liked Philip Glass. Go figure.
Then, a year ago, I got a new laptop and gave Theo my old one. On it, of course, was all my music – not just Steeleye and Martin Carthy, but Martin Simpson, Chris Wood, Julie Fowlis, Kathryn Tickell: all the artists of the 21st-century folk revival, which has moved the music I've loved for years just that much closer to the mainstream. And so it came to pass that one day Theo put down his electric guitar and picked up my old acoustic that had been gathering dust for so long.
"Wow, really 80s!" said the guy in the guitar shop when we had it reconditioned and a pick-up put in for an amp. Theo became quietly obsessed with fingerstyle guitar. He spent his pocket money on Martin Simpson's tablature; we went to hear Simpson play at Kings Place in London: I'd never seen my son sit so still.
Now the flow began to go the other way. I hadn't heard of the Scottish guitarist Tony McManus until Theo introduced me to his playing. And because Theo's American roots mean more to him than they used to mean to me, it's he who has led me back to bluegrass and banjo and the wonderful musical heritage of the country I left decades ago. I'm astonished. I'm thrilled.
I asked Theo what he loves about the music the other day. He shrugged, embarrassed in the way teenagers are, but also because, well, why should he be able to explain his sense of connection any more than I can explain mine? Playing, he finally said simply, makes him feel more alive. He likes talking to other musicians. "You can learn stuff," he says. If you meet people who like this music, you usually share something with them – that's not necessarily true if you meet another Justin Bieber fan, let's say. To that end, he's off this month to the Folkworks summer school, run by the Sage Gateshead for the past 25 years, a programme that – while you don't need to audition to get in – is largely responsible for the remarkable crop of young musicians coming up through the ranks.
As for the songs he plays, "I like the stories, too," he added. "Pop songs are just about one thing – love, or envy or something – but these are stories. Fair Annie is about someone who's lonely, and what happens to her."
We've talked, too, about the fact that this music isn't something that everyone loves; he knows he's swimming against the tide, but he's watched me do that all his life. We are both only children, after all. We both get what loneliness can mean. But now we both have someone to go to gigs with, too.
