> As pay-subscriber satellite radio began to show up in cars years ago, folk was revived, if only to increase the number of channels they could brag about. These had goofy and awful playlists put together by some clueless person on loan from the world of rock or pop.

Interesting. I have rarely been in a car (strangely enough) since everything on the driver's side became electronic. Do these radios still have mechanical push buttons? Probably not. I loved those.

When I still lived in the Chicago area (before 1991), there was no folk on any of the commercial stations and very little on the one public stations (WBEZ), which specialized in news, spoken word and jazz. One of the two classical music stations, WFMT, had a weekly show with folk, showtunes, novelty songs, etc., called "The Midnight Special", which I used to listen to, with and without my parents, but I eventually stopped, partly because they tended to play the same things over and over.

When I was younger, there was one folk club in my hometown, Evanston, called Amazingrace, which also booked jazz and blues acts and maybe others. At the time, in Evanston, home of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, you were not allowed to open a bar or a liquor store, so Amazingrace didn't serve alchohol, which made it possible for me to attend concerts there. I saw Steve Goodman and Jim Post there a couple of times and Luther Allison, and in fact saw Pat Metheny opening for Bill Evans (!). Amazingrace closed long before I left the Chicago area.

Somehow, I never got to the folk clubs in Chicago, of which there were several: The Earl of Old Town, Somebody Else's Troubles, etc., even after I reached drinking age. The Gate of Horn was before my time. Old Town wasn't so inviting anymore by that time. I think I was there exactly once, in the car with my Dad, driving through it on the way to somewhere else. The "scene" had moved on by then.

By my time (I was born in 1963), folk was easily accessible there, but mostly recordings and performances of the imitators and popularizers. The older, "authentic" performers who had been found and had become active again were often no longer alive or had stopped performing and actual recordings from collections were much less easily accessible
than the versions by younger, professional "folksingers" which were also more easily digestable.

It seems like the imitation is always more popular than the real thing, the imitators are always rewarded more generously than the originals and that the greater part of the audience doesn't want authenticity but rather an illusion of authenticity; not just with "folk" or musical genres in general, but with everything.

It's very instructive to compare the situation in the English-speaking world (nations divided by a common language) with the one in the German-speaking one, but this post is too long already.

Laurence Finston