I started reading this thread interested in it's ostensible topic and then kept reading in much the same way as I watch unfolding natural disasters on rolling news channels.

My impression, for what its worth, is of pots and kettles bristling as they rush to identify each other's blackness.

Anyway, I wonder how much of the 'decline' has to do with a drift away from f*lk as a participative medium to a performance based and thouroughly marketing labelled and sub-genred thing.

For the most part the source singers whose repetoires formed the basis for the booms of the fifties and sixties have passed on and the links in the chain to those sources are also getting longer. The travellers from whom many songs in our modern canon of "traditional" music have their immediate source as part of their traditional existence are urbanised and the agricultural culture which sustained them is mechanised, automated and block-granted out of existence. Similarly seafaring communities/occupations, steel, mining, shipbuilding - all industries and occupations which sustained generations in communities of shared experience in a way that suburbs full of salaried staff do not.   

I suppose that this is a somewhat grandiose way of saying that to the extent that the music and traditions emerged from communities which time has eviscerated it is no surprise that the sustaining force behind the music and traditions has faded leaving only performance and as folk clubs have inexorably become performance venues they have to compete on level terms with other musical genres perceived to be more relevant and - with the exception of those still fighting the Trad/Be-bop wars in jazz - less prone to squabbling.

I exaggerate a little for rhetorical effect I confess.

And yet....

Some of us are trying to revive the tradition of Rapper dancing here in Edinburgh - we're still practicing and haven't yet danced out - but people - mostly young - who have seen us practicing stay and watch: not because we're necessarily any good yet but because for them it's new and different and entertaining and contextualises the music in a way that doesn't carry associations of "Folk Music".

Anyway I'm starting to ramble so I'll stop.

Ian