Fascinating discussion.

"I think that what's at the core of the very question -- the question of "where have the American audiences gone?" is flawed to the extent that it accepts a priori that the brief times in folk music when it might have had an audience is the norm, not an anomoly."

I think John Hardly is right on the money there.

When I bought my first guitar back in 1952 or so ($9.95, and the salesman threw in a free pick), if you mentioned you were interested in folk songs, most people, thought you were talking about "Country and Western" or "Modern Western Swing"—a la Sons of the Pioneers or Roy Acuff.

Between when I first started singing for audiences, said audiences were always fairly small, but avid and enthusiastic. I sang for things like the Overlake Library Association annual banquet, and at the Washington State Museum of History and Industry, and did a series entitled "Ballads and Books" on educational television (funded by the Seattle Public Library).

When folk music suddenly became popular music and all the coffeehouses wanted a resident folk singer and student organizations began putting on concerts and "hootenannies," one evening in 1963, I sang for a crowd of 6,000 in front of the Horiuchi mural at the Seattle Center.

Since folk music was now pop music, when The Beatles spearheaded the "British Invasion" and the pop music fad changed (as it always does every few years), the big audiences went elsewhere.

The Northwest Folklife Festival (initiated by the Seattle Folklore Society—see Stewart's posts above) is a huge event every Memorial Day weekend. It doesn't seem to know whether it's fish or fowl. Among the hundreds of thousands who attend and the thousands of performers (heavy in the singer-songwriters), if you creep up into one of the meeting rooms in the northwest corner of the grounds at the right time, you might actually hear a traditional folk song or two.

These days, when someone hears that I used to make my living singing and they ask me what I sang and I respond "Folk songs," often their eyes glaze over and they say, "Oh, you mean like the Kingston Trio. . . ."

That's the older folks. The younger folks sometimes say, "Oh, yeah! I saw 'A Mighty Wind.'"

Sigh. . . .

Don Firth