"I'm afraid in today's club scene, the Walters and Tom Lenihans and Mikeen McCarthy's would find a hearing in very few clubs, thanks to many of "the changes that others have brought."

Perhaps they weren't meant to be heard in the clubs in the first place. Once you take the music out of the environment from which it was spawned and put it on the stage, you are creating a form of entertainment that was not part of the tradition. The reality is, audiences for that style of music are sparse, and probably have always been sparse.

A few years ago we presented the late Mike Seeger at our club, the Hurdy Gurdy.   Only 50 people attended, and were treated to a marvelous program. It was important that the show be presented, and while we lost money it was well worth the investment. We presented a comparatively unknown singer-songwriter the following month and drew 3 times the audience, making up for our loss.   The point is, each has it's own audience and each grows from the same roots.   It's just my opinion, but perhaps the big mistake was trying to force audiences in a pub setting to listen to music that requires a bit more consideration to be appreciated.