YOUNG folk today. We don't know how lucky we are.

The new fruits of folk roots could not be more ripe, what with Eliza Carthy, Kate Rusby and the latest wonderboy, Jim Moray.

The Black Swan Folk Club has played its part in planting this new orchard of talent, not least at its Young Performers' Showcases. Bill Jones, Emily Slade, Ola and The Witches Of Elswick have all climbed the pub's stairs on their rise to folk's higher echelons, and for last night's triple bill, club organiser Roland Walls had picked a cannily diverse hand to represent "the healthy young face of British folk music".

Each act played a couple of 20-minute sets, each time introduced by a newly spun poem by York poet Adrian Spendlow (and we'll forgive him the picture of old rocker Keith Richards on his shirt). Former University of York student Jenny McCormick was the first to settle into the performer's chair. The Black Swan crib sheet says she has "begun a tentative career as a folk musician", and tentative is an apt word. Influenced by Kate Rusby down to her combination of skirt and boots, she performed traditional ballads and her own compositions sweetly if diffidently, her singing as delicate as the first flower of the year. Opening number Edward, with its tale of a young girl defying her father's orders by abseiling out of her window into her lover's arms, was an amusing modern twist on old folk tales and such humour was a counterbalance to the melancholia that is her natural forte.

Jim Causley, a student on the Traditional Music degree course at Newcastle University, is steeped in the folk traditions of his native East Devon (and he is related to the poet Charles Causley to boot). He is cheeky and charming and his a cappella singing is as deep and rich as the best gravy, and fruity too, when the song demands it.

Ballads, lyrical songs, broadsides, Causley could do them all last night, and if he affected a reluctance to play his accordion, it was all part of a relaxed air that affirmed the supreme confidence of this gifted young musician.

A second Newcastle University student, the acoustic guitarist and banjo player Damien O'Kane, forms one half of the duo Pure Chance.

The other is schoolgirl Shona Kipling, a finalist in the 2002 BBC Young Folk Awards. He is from County Derry, she is from County Durham (with an Irish mother from County Kerry), and together they slalomed their way through reels and polkas with intuitive interplay. Watch out Sharon Shannon, here comes the exceedingly good Miss Kipling.

Updated: 09:21 Friday, February 27, 2004