This talk of floor singers and residents and audiences and guests was all very fine, but it wasn't like that everywhere.

I belonged for a while to a folk club in a remote part of the UK. The local population was small so the membership was small, about 15 - 20 I would think. There was no way we could have guests, we were too far from anywhere and the cost would have been prohibitive. I don't think we even thought about it. There were no residents as such and no floor singers or audience in the way it is described elsewhere. We were all residents/floor singers and we were all audience. Essentially we entertained each other and had great fun doing it.

When I started going to folk clubs again recently, what I came across was mainly singarounds and it was not that different from what I knew back in the 1960's. Most clubs locally seem to be a mixture of singarounds with periodic guest nights, some on alternate weeks others have a guest less frequently, typically once a month. There are plenty of clubs locally and I could certainly be somewhere every night.

Festivals are something I hadn't come across and there are certainly plenty of them and I know people who seem to spend the summer in their campervans going from festival to festival. It seems that, as others have said, that it's the festivals rather than the clubs where a lot of the younger folk musicians "cut their teeth". With the number of festivals around, it should be possible for newcomers to get gigs at the smaller festivals if they are sufficiently determined and develop their skills and build their name from there. There are clubs that book younger performers, so it's probably a mix. Something else that needs to be recognised is that it's not only folk musicians that struggle to make a living from performing. It's true in all musical genres. The daughter of a friend of ours is a cellist and has been through the music school system, but she still has to make her living by a bit of this and a bit of that. She once said to me that she has to "sell her soul" to earn a living.

Overall, although folk music does not have the high profile it had in the 1960's, there is certainly plenty of activity. Yes things have changed and you have to accept that. Not all changes are necessarily for the better, but neither are they necessarily for the worse. Change happens and things move on and we cannot bring back the past. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people playing traditional tunes and singing traditional songs and that can only be a good thing.