I know what you mean, alanabit. I'm similarly fortunate. I learned the craft in Chicago before they circled the wagons. If I'm being completely honest I have to admit to a similar lack of quality in my work when I started. The best way I can think of to describe the change is to point out that whenevr my father is in town he makes a point of seeing one of my shows. This is in martked contrast to what he had to say about my music when I was a teenager wwhich was, "Hey! If you going to sit in your room and bang on that stupid guitar for hours at a time could, at least, close the damned door?"
    As has been mentioned, we were working in a very different market place then. The GOOD gigs,the ones that you had to work your way up to, paid fifty dollars a night. If you could book three of those in a month you could pay rent on a studio apartment (in America that means one room, a stove,sink, and refrigerator crammed into a closet, and a bathroom). If you could book four or five in a month you were good for food and gasoline for a while. You could actually make a living playing clubs; not a very good one, but a living nonetheless. That just isn't possible any more. Even if you could get clubs to cough up that much money, these days, you'd still need a straight job just to cover apartment rent. Making any kind of commercial recording was absurdly expensive. You needed to make yourself a good enough musician, performer, songwriter, AND promoter to attract an established record company. Now your guitar is almost less expensive than recording and manufacturing a CD (and you could, without too much strain or expense, do the whole thing in your home). There used to be one or two venues in any given city at which almost all of the folkies gathered to listen, sing, swap songs or guitar licks, and do what is now called networking. For the most part venues like that no longer exist. Whether caused by technology's impact, our ever busier live, the aging of the audience, or all three, there are few, if any, central meeting places anymore. In the two and a half years that I've been running my open mic in Madison, WI I've found that, given the chance, young performers are eager and willing to learn the mechanics of the crafts of performing and songwriting.
That's why, as I mentioned in an earlier post, those of us who know thing need to find ways to make ourselves more available to pass along what we've learned. Think of it as a way to pay back the people who taught us.

Stephen Lee