Whoops - too fast on the posting finger.
CS
"So I'm not so sure that the 60's revival really was much more than a brief generationally isolated flowering"
The revival kicked off in the 1950s and right up to the 90s it was still possible to select a club and go and listen to a night of folk music and song well performed in most parts of Britain - hardly a brief generationally isolated flowering.
Nowadays the choice of what you listen to has been all but surgically removed - but it's still very much a part of the original revival; a handful of the people who were in at or relatively near the beginning; Killen, Reg Hall, Anne Briggs, Carthy, Peggy Seeger..... are still very much with us.
Jim Carroll