"I just feel somehow the folksong movement has never truly connected with anybody except those on the fringes of society. In the way that earlier folksong writers did seemingly effortlessly - somehow they wrote about the joys and sorrows of their lives."

I thought that, with the possible exception of two sort of extreme periods in the 1930's and late 1950's-early 1960's, this had pretty much always been the case. How popular has folk music ever been, at least in the decades since there have been mass-produced alternatives?