George Papavgeris wrote:-
Open evening at a folk club. Average age of audience and participants = 45 (with extremes ranging from 35 to 80+). A couple of 18-year olds walk in, ask for a spot, and get it. A further 3-4 of their mates come in also. The couple of youngsters are good (anything from decent to brilliant). The audience looks on admiringly, but also whistfully. For a few minutes there they kid themselves that they have witnessed a sign of revival of the club's (and folk's) fortunes. They ply the youngsters with offers of further spots and even a feature opportunity, if they would come again.

But during the break, the young players and their mates leave. They have better things to do, places to go where more fun is to be found. The club regulars are left with the whistful reminiscences for an evening. Nothing has changed.

Thank you for this reply, George, and I think that it explains your position more clearly. I think it betrays, however, a misunderstanding of some of the sociological changes that our society has undergone - and before that starts to sound offensive, let me assure you that I can be as guilty of that as anyone as I hope this posting goes on to explain. Let me give you an example:-

About five years ago, I was at the Sidmouth Festival and taking an afternoon out from what can be a pretty intensive week; I was sitting outside my tent, trying to read a book. Nearby there was a group of tents in a circle - all occupied by teenagers. They were all laying around doing not very much and a loud ghetto blaster was going THUMPA-THUMPA-THUMPA. Pretty annoying. I looked over at them and thought to myself, "What on earth have this lot doing at a folk festival? Surely they have come to the wrong place?" Then one of them, a girl, switched the ghetto blaster off ("Hooray", says Vic) goes into a tent and emerged with a pair of clogs, a small dancing board and a bodhran. She hands the bodhan to one of the blokes and stoops and puts the clogs on. When she was standing on the board, the young bloke rippled out a complicated four bar pattern on the bodhran, she copied it exactly with her clogs on the board. After a few short copies of the bodhran's pattern, it developed into a complex question and answer pattern. It was brilliant, mesmerising, worthy of a spot at any folk club, concert or festival, but it would probably have a much broader appeal also to a wider audience.
What Vic had misunderstood, and what I think George has misunderstood also, is that, unlike several generations that have gone before including mine, young people no longer define themselves by the genre of music that they listen to. In today's information-rich society when a complex, varied and bafflingly massive mix of sounds are readily available to them as they were not in the past, they mix and match and take a little from everywhere. So they would not call themselves "folkies" ever - but equally they would not want to be "mods" "rockers" or "skinheads" or other groups that were associated with one genre of music, often with pretty anti-social consequences.
Another way in which society has changed is in the way people are starting to view their leisure time. The average folk club evening, let's say it is 8 to 11 - three hours - is too long for many people with the complex demands of modern society. It may be why some of the youngsters that George has observed left the club early, but it is not only the teenagers who behave like this.
In recent times I have noticed a trend of couples coming to our folk club, then at the interval they take their coats, smile and thank me and then leave. "Oh!" thinks Vic, "It's not their sort of thing - they are leaving." but then these people come again in other weeks. A comment made by one of a young couple when they were leaving at the interval for about the fifth time might be quite significant. The woman said, "I hope you don't think that we are rude always leaving at the interval but our neighbour can only babysit of a Thursday, so we like to make the most of it; we come up here until the interval and then we go for a meal."