"There are separate audiences and communities that pay attention to old-time stringbands, fiddle music, singer-songwriters, traditional singers, blues, bluegrass and several varieties of ethnic and "world music." Each of these groups has their own concerts, parties, dances and so forth, but there's practically no overlap."

That could descibe the scene in Boston too. There is a huge Celtic music community that includes a lot of great young instrumentalists and singers, a revived American roots music community that took root at a couple Cambridge bars, and lots of young singer-songwriters. There is a lot of fragmentation between genres that wasn't present forty or fifty years ago, but on the whole there are a lot of people around here playing and listening to noncommercial music, and an awful lot of them are under 30. And as someone wrote way above, the crowd at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival is about as generationally diverse as you'd ever want to see.

At the same time, I've been to plenty of folkish concerts where the average age was 50-something, usually listening to a performer of the same vintage. That's not necessarily a good thing, but I am also aware that the younger generation populates acoustic/roots shows that I don't go to because either I'm unfamiliar with the performers or they start too late at night for an old guy. So it goes.