In my opinion, folk music may become commercial. But that's not it's intent. Commerciality has nothing to do with folk music. It's not music made for the charts. That doesn't preclude it's getting there. The idea of prettifying folk music to make it more accessible and popular is almost self defeating. Elitist may also be a view that somehow folk music isn't good enough on it's own but it has to be sold to a large public to validate it. For example, Joan Baez popularized many Appalachian folk songs. If Almeda Riddle singings any of them for the public, she is up for comparison to Joan's singing. Joan is a fine singer with a polished singing style that is more accessible to the public. The proof of this is that when folk music is talked about, Joan Baez name will come up. Few know about Almeda Riddle or Jean Ritchie. Both Almeda Riddle and Jean Ritchie as traditional American folk singers employ certain vocal ornamentations such as the raising of the seventh degree of the scale in an Ionian modal framework or bending notes, not arbitrarilly, but because this was a part of the cultural musical style of mountain singing. Joan doesn't do this. Joan as a "polished" popularizer of these songs rounds off the "rough edges". Her musicality is more informed by the popular and classical music of her day. The lush chord structures in her guitar dictate which way her voice will go. Nowadays, she isn't singing folk songs much at all but has gone the way of the singer/songwriter. Jean Ritchie by contrast has a lovely album called Mountain Born whereby she incorporates her traditional style with non-traditional elements of music but it works just fine. We don't lose sight of the "tradition" in her singing. The same can be said for Tommy Makem, the Bard of Armagh. There is a traditional "integrity" here that adheres to the respective cultures from where these artists came.

Frank Hamilton