LowProfile
I am the very quiet and now very middle-aged person sitting in the corner, usually with a recorder or a mandolin. I play mostly English and Scottish, but also some Irish.
My father bought me my first mandolin - a battered, guitar-shaped thing - for my ninth birthday as a consolation prize for having confiscated, yet again, the recorder I had taught myself to play. I had stolen the recorder from my mother anyway. I used to pretend I was the wind in the chimney and I did the old-style police siren very nicely, so you can't really blame him.
My parents were lovers of classical music. I was a throwback. I had taught myself to read music, but, instead of reading it in a proper manner, I used to play the tunes of old songs by ear and make up melancholy dirges of my own and play them to myself with the tears rolling down my cheeks. I was a weird child.
The moral is that if you want your child to play folk music then punish their playing and confiscate any instruments they lay their hands on. Only the forbidden is really cool. When totally deprived of instruments as a teenager I bought myself a Chinese harmonica and played it in the outside toilet and a dissident great uncle taught me how to play a comb and tissue paper.
Then I grew up and discovered music sessions.
Tunes in LowProfile's tunebook: 18