Regarding ethnically diverse audiences at festivals... the Lowell Folk Festival in Massachusetts, which is a 100% traditional festival that every year presents a wide variety of music from numerous cultures and traditions, draws an enormous audience that is representative of the greater Lowell community -- lots of Southeast Asians and Latinos in addition to us middle-aged Euro-American folkies. The trick is that after 27 or so years the LFF has been promoted as and has become a major community event, a big happy block party that lots of people who won't go another "folk" event the rest of the year attend regularly. Plus, people have been drawn in by the fact that most of the food stands are run by local churches and social clubs, which automatically brings in non-folkies though those affilliations. And results in the sight of, say, little Cambodian-American kids dancing to a band from Quebec, which is pretty neat.

Whether you could ever get the same mix at a singer/songwriter festival is another question.