If you want to make a living as a folk musician the last thing you want to do is be anywhere near the folk music community.

Ignore what everybody else is doing. Focus on developing your skill, understanding your craft and find a way to inject what you do into your community.

A folk musician is, like it or not, a musician of the people. Our "job" has nothing to do with being on stage or self-promotion. Folk music is personal. It's face to face. It's in living rooms and front porches. Our success is not measured in how many records we sell or any of the other nonsense non-musicians think of in terms of attributes of success. No, our success is measured in how we live and in the lives we touch.

In my case, I ended up making a pretty good living without performing. I gave away my music and, because of the roundabout way folk music works, everything I gave away ended up making me money.

-Patrick