Ron
One more time:
I have no problem with your first two - have agreed on numerous occasions with you and others but-
"There is a community of people who have created their own tradition in modern times. You can choose not to recognize it, but you just need to get out and look around you to see that "folk music" is a much larger community than you choose to give credit to."
Who are these and what do they have to do with the other two?
I saw very little example of these when I quit the clubs - that's why I quit; the second lot appear to coincide with the people who replaced them and used the clubs as a cultural dustbin.
The question is "Where have all the audiences gone?"
In the eighties the majority of the clubs disappeared and the audiences more than halved.
I would guess that what you are seeing now is the residue dying off (or maybe they can't get their wheelchairs up the stairs).
We pissed off because the clubs failed to live up to their descriptions. The number of people who remained were never really replaced - simple as that.
I went to a club in London last time I was there, that I had frequented on a fairly regular basis. It was almost as if I'd slipped out for a pee and returned a few minutes later - the heads were either grayer or balder, more wrinkles - but the same faces, though much less of them.
The solution so far seems to have been 'let's widen our terms of reference to draw in more people' - stupid, stupid, stupid. People don't go out to listen to a night of 'music' - they go to listen to jazz, or classical, or country-and-western, or garage, or hip-hop.
If I turned up for a night of chamber music at the R.F.H. and found a barbers shop trio - no matter how good they were, I'd be pretty hacked off - I certainly wouldn't go back. The same applies (in my case applied) if I went to a folk club and found a group of tossers mumbling their way (usually badly) through Buddy Holly resurrections.
If folk clubs put on folk music proper, and perform it well - and it still doesn't attract audiences - then the music will have failed and it could be argued that it is no longer relevant as a performed art.
The way things are at present, we'll never know.
If you want to see what can be achieved when you do it properly have a look at the thread on the Irish Trad. Music Archive and see what you'r e missing.
As it is while the folk growth continues to be overrun by th parasite - well - enjoy the funeral.
Jim Carroll