>> what the hell is wrong with anti-Vietnam war polemics? <<

Nothing at all, I'm all for anti-war polemics. I was objecting to a previous contributor's inaccurate generalisations, which suggested that "working class" audiences were turned off as a whole by traditional music or songs, and implied that this kind of audience was more sympathetic to something different. I wasn't involved during the sixties, but there was still a lot of political energy around folk clubs in the mid-seventies when I started going. It just seemed to me that a lot of this political energy was coming from (to use a generalisation of my own) former student radicals, i.e. the middle classes.

>> Energy and passion is what young audiences like <<

Couldn't agree more. It's what I like too. And I'm very happy to see that much of that energy and passion is coming from young artists playing traditional stuff.