I think the main worry of the folk-becoming-less-marginalised issue is not one of attitudes but big business. Once anything gets too popular, somebody can - and will - try to sell it. When there's money to be made, it attracts exploiters and the competitive demands of the commercial marketplace kick in. The profit motive will always mean playing it safe and pandering to the lowest-common-denominator element so that you can shift product. In other words, everything that folk is NOT about. It's the equivalent of your favourite secluded nature-reserve turning into a tourist attraction (with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin hot spot). It pollutes and dilutes the real thing.

And when folk is "successful" it's by way of becoming a fad for awhile, getting hyped (or plasticated) out of all proportion, then fading away. And the artists left behind on the beach when the tide has gone out again, taking their big-time careers with it, are inevitably labelled has-beens, though they're no more out of date than they ever were. It's a distorting frame of reference, and it can do damage.

I don't know why certain cultural forms appeal to the mass mind and others don't - perhaps it's the fact that folk, by definition, reaches out across time and place into so many different worlds, while expressing meanings universal to us all. Maybe the mainstream audience simply finds it too obscure, too much work, too disconnected from their everyday life of computers and mobiles and commuter traffic. Too Other.      

The very thing that draws me to it is just this ability to transcend the here and now, which is so often drenched in anxiety or plain dreary. This may underlie both folk's abiding strength and its segregation.