Never met her. No idea if she has ilk or not. I know she talks sense and with a sense of history.

So laissez-faire music venues = 60's folk clubs?

I can only assume the folk clubs you went to were very different to the dozens (yes dozens) I went to in the 60's. Read my thread about the two in Hull I wrote about. As it happens I went to both, but I was unusual. And I had a clear preference of the two.

Open mike = folk clubs? I went to one, once. It was full of all the people who had succeeded in closing folk clubs by singing songs about their teenage diaries (as I characterise it), people love it - it gives them chance to sing in front of their mates. But someone with a guitar singing self-penned songs does not = folk music. There were that many people in the audience who wanted to perform that they got two songs each.

Virtually everyone in the audience sang their own songs to all the other people in the audience. There were forty people in the audience and (I counted) 29 guitars.

It may be what people want, it may be popular, it may even be the future, but it ain't really folk music.