"A folk music that alienates about 90% of the poplualtion is a nonsense"(weelittledrummer).

That got me thinking. Clearly, in England (and less so, I think, in Wales and Scotland) we have a comparative break between the majority of the people and the traditional music of the country. While we can point fingers at journalists, radio and TV shows and comedians taking the piss out of Morris dancing or finger-in-the-ear singing, I am not sure they are the cause of the break; they simply perpetuate what already is. The break existed clearly before the 50s revival and even before C.Sharp.

Therefore is makes no sense to blame the revivalists, or the current fans of traditional music, or club organisers, or whoever, for "making traditional music unpalatable to the majority". Neither is calling traditional music "nonsense" helpful. For better or for worse, like it or not, mangled and misrepresented and handed down chinese-whisper-like, traditional music simply IS.

Take for example the romantic songs of the 30s and 40s. Though they have their afficionados today, the majority of the people get bored with them, see no relevance to themselves and simply bypass them. But that does not mean that the music is nonsense, or its afficionados somehow to blame.

No, this break goes deeper than that, and though I don't claim to understand it, I believe many of the causes lie in the past (and not only the recent), the development of society and its tastes, the disappearance of borders and population mobility, the effortless exposure to other cultures and types of music and so on. And the musical break is simply one facet of a wider gap.

The revivalists never mended that break unfortunately, they simply applied a patch, papered over the gap; and the patch is wearing thin. It would take a lot more imaginative (and even near-dictatorial) measures, and a good few generations to mend such a break, to the point where once again children listen to their parents' favourite music, as well as their own - to bridge the gap properly. It may unfortunately never happen.

And I say "unfortunately", because this English society that took me in and that I love, in my eyes suffers sorely because of that break; not only in musical terms, either. It lacks that ease between the generations that you encounter every day in Southern Europe and South America, and Africa. It's a hell of a price to pay for progress.