People sang for many reasons...
to pass the time until radio was invented

That's about the right answer... the main reason ordinary people people sang in the past was that it was the only way most of us got to hear any music at all from one month to the next.

If anything is "killing folk music" it's the easy availability of far more music that we've ever been able to hear before, combined with public brainwashing by "The Music Industry" buying advertising time to coerce millions into buying whatever it wants to sell this week.

Fortunately that product has become so diluted and mechanized that increasing numbers of people are relearning the value of real music made by real people. We now see school kids wide-eyed in astonishment at ordinary people singing and making music with actual instruments and without a microphone or sound system in sight, and wanting to learn how to do that.

In other words, I don't think folk music, or any other kind of music, can be killed. It may often be a minority interest in purely commercial terms, but commercial isn't really what it's about.

Elitism plays no part whatsoever in all of this.

Anahata