Waterson Carthy CDs are (usually) available at my local Borders Books here in the hinterlands, along with MacColl anthologies (with as much English as Scottish stuff on them), along with Fairport, Steeleye, Maddy Prior, and some others.

If it's selling enough to be stocked regularly by big chains, English folk music isn't quite dead even in the U.S.A.

But I don't think any English-language form of traditional song could be said to actually "flourish" until there are variant rap versions of "Sir Patrick Spens" and "Barbara Allen." For good or ill, I think I'll be plowing with a peacock's feather before that happens.

All that's necessary in 2005 to keep a musical genre "alive" -that is, available and inspiring - is a pool of great performers. English folk has some of those. For traditional musical forms to flourish, though, you also need performers who may be less great but who can still produce new or adapted work that, to enough people, is still "true to the tradition."