i feel the folk music of today must be out there somewhere - out there on the housing estates, in the workplaces, in the hearts of the people

I think you're wrong there, I'm afraid.

The problem is, people (of all classes) don't like making more effort than they have to. Give them washing machines and they won't wash the sheets by hand*. Give them TVs and they won't go to the pictures twice a week. Give them jukeboxes and they won't sing around the piano in the pub. Give them recorded music and they won't buy sheet music. Make it easy to listen to music and they won't go to the trouble of making music.

And what happens when people stop making music is that they stop passing it on; the folk process stops happening. All of this happened in Britain forty years ago or more - the lid was probably closing on the folk process around the same time the Revival got going. Folk music - music of the people - just isn't out there any more; we traddies are curators of our own little museum. I think it's a fantastic museum, which could give a lot more to a lot more people than it is doing at the moment; if there are cliques, and if there are people getting turned away on the door (or looking in the door and turning away of their own accord), then that needs fixing. But it's still a museum.

(Al - I held back a day on posting this. Hope you had a good 'un.)