"Jim, Dick says "the club scene changed", not sank."
No it did not "change" - it was taken over my a music that had nothing to do with folk
The clubs that had been set up to present one type of music were taken over by people who wanted to listen to another - thye no longer were putting on folk songs
That is not change - it is the usurping of a name and venue
You could have got your own clubs and called them something else - you chose to take over our description
That is what makes what happened a hostile takeover
It's not as if you were successul at what you did - your clubs bombed just as ours did
Ours had a good reason - people couldn't find folk music in folk clubs - your's bombed because you couldn't make up your mind what you were trying to sell - you tried to please all of the people all of the time and ended up pleasing nobody
That's what ****** up the folk scene
The fact that you allowed standards to drop as you did meant that what you put on was a badly performed unidentifiable mish-mash
Your music has no future because it has no definable identity
Ours will at least survive in the collections collections and the archived
Can your point out one single publication containing your 'folk song' - no you can't
Can you provide a track record - a genealogy - a history... of your folk song - of course you can't - it would be like trying to bottle fog

THe predatory behaviour of peole who neither liked nor understood folk song has succeeded in killing off the real thing
Here in Ireland, it took only the effort to understand what folk songs means and build a foundation for it
Now thousands of kids are pouring in and taking our folk music up - it has a guaranteed at least two generation future

Hand on heart - can you say thay?
Of course you can't - you can't even describe what you represent as folk music
You're like these big Multinationals (except you're not big) who moved into the East Anglian farms, tore down all the hedgerows, farmed the land bith their monster machines, until, after a few years the East Wind blew off all the topsoil and made the land a desert
Jim Carroll