Great subject and good suggestions so far, and I mean to give this some thought, but here are just a few problems that would have to be overcome, which I have thought about a lot:

-"Folk" music, whatever the hell that means, is by definition handed down, up, and sideways by the oral tradition, so I'm not sure if there is a mass media way to popularize it without changing it a lot.

-Oral traditions are passed around in communities, which is one thing that is very rare, at least in a geographic sense, in the US anymore.

-And, (I think this may be relevant), what was always called "country" music in the past (I still claim that word, despite its current misuse) was made to some extent by and for people with some agricultural or at least rural background. The same would be true of any kind of traditional music you could name; it developed and prospered (or not) in a community, in the sense of a village or a neighborhood or at least a region or a small country. Now that we create our own communities, I'm not sure that it still has the sort of "heritage" kind of feel that it used to have.

These may have been three ways of saying the same thing, and I'm not just trying to be negative, but these are things that I think we have to consider. I'll be back with constructive ideas. I really like the one about volunteering to play in the schools.

Chet