Some time in the early 60s, someone asked Dylan at a press conference how many protest singers there were. He looked fazed for a moment - How many? - then said, with complete confidence, A hundred and twenty.

How many folkies are there in the world? 120,000? Maybe - probably not many more than that. What proportion of the population of England are folkies - one in a thousand? Yes, oral transmission is still going on, and songs are still developing and changing, within a small network of hobbyists. I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of - if anything it's something to be proud of - but it's light-years away from the conditions that produced and preserved the traditional repertoire.