Now that we've got past the inevitable racist post, it may be time to resume the original discussion.  Given that music works mainly in a social context, I suspect that the marginalisation of traditional musics in England may not be entirely unrelated to the changes that have been imposed on that social context by the increasingly monolithic brewing companies.

When I moved to Sheffield in the early '70s, there was a lot of live, participatory music in the pubs.  Piano-led singsongs in the main -music-hall and old popular songs with a bit of what we'd probably call folkmusic, though there were also instrumental sessions and, a mile or two up the road, traditional singers like Frank Hinchliffe at The Sportsman.  The pubs were mainly composed of clusters of small rooms, so that singing might take place in one room, games in another and so on.  All that changed as the breweries "did up" their tied houses, knocking down internal walls and installing jukeboxes.  The space that had hitherto been available for home-made music disappeared; it wasn't considered profitable.  There were, of course, exceptions: the Carolling tradition survived in spite of these changes, and has been extensively documented by Ian Russell; it survives in good health to this day.  At that time, there was still a discrete Irish community here, and the pubs they used continued to encourage live music, mainly of the "Country & Irish" variety.  Two are still running, and have live music most evenings, though the participants and repertoire are no longer mainly Irish.  In other places, the tradition disappeared; until the mid '70s, the Old Horse still visited pubs in Dore (now a posh, Tory-voting area) at Christmas time -I believe that the Horse itself now languishes, pretty much forgotten, in a garage in Dronfield.

In the last ten years or so, however, there has been a quite surprising expansion of live folkmusic round here, as publicans began to realise that it can boost profits considerably on otherwise quiet nights.  It's a re-invented tradition, of course, but then again most traditions get re-invented on a regular basis.  It's also a mix of English, Irish, Scots and American material; probably most of the participants are very vague about where one ends and the other begins.  We also have a whole bunch of "Irish Theme Pubs", as do most cities in the UK just at present, but these are purely commercial things and will change again when fashion does.  The point I'm trying to make here is that any tradition needs an available shared space in which to function; when that space is removed, the tradition may disappear into hidden areas, or disappear altogether if it is perceived -as it has been all too often- as belonging only to old people and other effectively marginalised groups.

Malcolm