I agree wholeheartedly with the GUEST,SteveT 19 Mar 14 - 10:07 AM post.

Something touched on there is the crucial difference between getting together to sing and listen and performing for an audience. It is the difference between, on the one hand, the clubs as they were, some as they still are, and "singarounds", and on the other hand concerts, festivals and recordings. A hundred-odd years ago there was surely a similar split between home-grown entertainment in homes, pubs and bothies and commercial entertainment in music halls.

Yes of course there is some interchange between those worlds, but there is an essential difference between commercial and DIY;
perhaps a more important difference even than the trad v. contemporary one.

The commercial music "industry" (well named) moves on, churning out thousands of recordings in umpteen supposedly distinct genres which to me all sound equally dire, with percussion dominant and the time signature always 4/4.

Meanwhile some of us get on with singing and playing the stuff that we happen to like, in small gatherings or at home on our own. For some it may be exclusively "traditional". Most of us are happy to include modern songs that are more or less in the same mould (or perhaps I should say in one of the same moulds, there being big differences of character within the tradition). Other people play jazz, sing in choirs or whatever. Good luck to one and all.

Even at the height of the revival, folk music and song was a minority interest. Nowadays it's a smaller minority, with an aging demographic, but there ARE younger people involved, and they're not all going overboard with weird and wonderful cross-cultural stuff.

Time to stop rambling!