It is to be a musical column, though more Station Pilot than New Musical Express. First, at any rate, to Mark Knopfler. Mr Knopfler, as readers may know, is a world renowned guitar player and Newcastle United fan who began working life in the inky trade, a cub on the Yorkshire Evening Post.

His latest LP, or whatever these days they are labelled, is called Sailing to Philadelphia. His present world tour is the Sailing to Philadelphia tour; the title track will be released on August 12.

The first line - we are getting somewhat arthritically to the point - is "I'm Jeremiah Dixon, a Geordie boy am I."

Geordie boy? Jeremiah Dixon came, in truth, from Cockfield in west Durham. Ian Luck and Eddie Walker aim, as it were, to set the record straight.

Born in 1733, Dixon surveyed with Charles Mason the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, hence the Mason-Dixon line and the term Dixieland.

"He's probably the only person who has given his name to a form of music," says Ian Luck (though others may suggest differently).

Dixon and Mason are said to have endured great hardship and attacks from marauding Indians, something for which childhood in 18th Century Cockfield may suitably have prepared him.

On August 12, anyway, the pair - Eddie familiar on the Teesside folk music circuit since 1967 - release Whistling Dixie, a tribute to Cockfield's finest.

"Whistling Dixie," Ian insists, is a term meaning "plain sailing", and so it was until they tried to find Jeremiah Dixon's grave.

Ian, as Luck would have it, has also written a song - "quite lengthy, most folk songs are" - about West Auckland Football Club's two "World Cup" wins in 1909 and 1911.

There's a copy of the words somewhere, but we appear to have mislaid it - suffice that it includes everything from pawning the workmen's club piano to pay the passage to Italy to Torino's foolish assumption that WAFC on the luggage trunks stood for Woolwich Arsenal and not, of course, for West Auckland.

They may also be the only lyrics in musical history to rhyme foreign languages with black pudding sandwiches.

Ian and Eddie hope to launch the single at West's clubhouse. The club is keen. An echo of that one very shortly.

Though his cards remained close to his pectoral cross, the Bishop of Durham whispered on Sunday evening that the new Bishop of Jarrow - his diocesan right hand man - would be announced at Auckland Castle two days later.

"You may well know him," added the Rt Rev Michael Turnbull mischievously, though the event proved otherwise.

The Ven John Pritchard, now Archdeacon of Canterbury, had eight years in Durham at St John's College and Cranmer Hall but was brought up in Blackpool where in school holidays he rang bells as a tram conductor. He came across as friendly, informed and fresh thinking but what - since there is a chord to strike here - of his tastes in music?

Mozart to Dire Straits, he said - Dire Straits are Mark Knopfler's lot - and then suddenly remembered Dido.

The Bishop of Durham being no wiser, Stephen Conway - his scholarly senior chaplain - was summoned. "Dido, oh you mean the girl friend of Aeneas?" said Stephen, clearly a classicist himself.

Paramour she may have been, but when Aeneas forsook her on the orders of the gods, poor Dido (recounts Virgil) killed herself. The Dido who has a place in the Bishop designate's affections is an English pop singer. It's to be hoped she has a happier end.

Last week's column, perchance, wondered what had become of Doreen Stephens, known otherwise (we said) as the Stockton Sparrow.

Since it aint half a shame that sparrows can't sing, the Stockton Songthrush would have been more ornithologically accurate. Doreen, as we recalled, sang on the radio version of the Billy Cotton Band Show. Owen Willoughby in Trimdon also remembered her appearances with Jack Marwood, Chick Henderson and Charles Amer, later chairman of Middlesbrough FC.

Allen Nixon, the Stokesley Stockbroker, not only recalled seeing the Billy Cotton Band Show live at the Granada in Sutton - "Billy, already well over 60, turned cartwheels across the stage and threw cotton wool 'snowballs' at the audience" - but took it upon himself to hear more of the Songthrush via the wondrous Whirligig website.

We've mentioned it hereabouts before, invaluable on children's television in the 1950s. A chap at the Kirk Inn in Romaldkirk on Saturday night almost fell upon the column's neck in gratitude because we'd not only heard of Billy Bean (who built a Machine) but knew most of the words of the theme tune.

"My granddaughter insists I sing it every week down the telephone," he said.

His granddaughter's in New Zealand. "It gets quite expensive," he added. What goes around come around, as probably they said on Whirligig.

Doreen Stephens, as we were saying, was born in Stockton in 1922, appeared with Jack Hylton's band at the London Palladium when she was still just 15 and during the war toured the Middle East with Maurice Winnick.

After it she worked with the Squadronaires, Ronnie Pleydell, Gelix King and George Crow. A Billy Cotton regular for many years, she died - back in Stockton - from cancer in 1965.

Whilst Backtracking in Murton, near Seaham, we were reminded of an event this Saturday billed as The Two Tenors - a homecoming both for John Upperton and for John Foley, his star pupil.

John Upperton, Murton lad, is founder and director of a London opera company called Sounds Lyrical. We'd seen him in 1994, at a concert promoted by his mum.

Ellen Upperton, we noted, sold tickets, programme adverts and the raffle, baked for the interval, slept on the couch at the family home in Coronation Street so that the night's six-strong company could be more comfortable upstairs.

Then it was the Miners' Welfare; now it's been impressively transformed into the Glebe Centre, opened by Tony Blair earlier this year.

Saturday evening's show will raise money towards play area equipment in memory of Alesha Jane Ord, a four-year-old killed in a road accident in the former colliery village.

It also features American soprano Connie Kunkle, a rock band, a buffet supper and quite possibly the four Franciscan monks who were among the first to ask for tickets. Tickets are £15 on 0191-520 8650, or at the door - and as Welfare chairman Ernie Robinson observes, how often do you get two tenors for fifteen quid?

....and finally to the folk club at The George in Piercebridge, a hotel refurbished for the better.

The headline act was the highly rated John Wright band, admission £7 - which might sound expensive but probably wouldn't buy a programme at the Telewest Arena. We'd really gone to see J B Butterfield, a Hartlepool based singer/composer who arrived in khaki jacket and shorts, dark socks and desert boots, like an extra from It Aint Half Hot Mum.

J B - Jeff to his friends - does a bit of busking, too, reckons that street beggars are not only giving buskers a bad name - silly buskers, perhaps - but pinching their takings.

His music clearly has wider appeal than Middleton Grange shopping centre, however. He's been invited back to Texas, and to Mexico, for a series of gigs to help the World Wildlife Fund and other charities.

Trouble is, his own funds are limited, too. Cap in hand, as a busker might, he'd love a bit of corporate assistance to sail off to Philadelphia, or somewhere pretty near. JB's on (01429) 861041; the column strikes up again next week.