"Unless you include your local folk club as 'a community' (I don't)"

I'm not sure that I accept this without at least some argumentation.
I admit that the folk club is likely to be a smaller and less heterogenous community than the ones which may have held the folk-song at earlier points in history, but do we really believe that for hundreds of years entire villages and even towns went about their daily lives all, to the last man woman and child, gaily singing folk songs. I suspect that in many places the community that held the folksongs were the men (see Ginny Dunn's Fellowship of Song if you think I am being sexist)who sang at the local pub - ok they probably did it more than one night a week, and didn't divide up into a room for the singers and a room for the 'normal' people and I don't suppose they had guest nights, and with any luck they didn't have their damned books of words in front of them: but otherwise were they so much different from the folk club?