"traditional music merely stopped being so popular."
Couldn't agree less.
The clubs emptied when they stopped presenting what it said on the label.
My last visit to a club I hadn't scrupulously checked out first was the night I returned home from a folk club without hearing a song that didn't remotely resemble a folk song.
Many of us stayed with the songs, but on a different level; some of the best researchers and writers on the subject are refugees from a folk scene that abandoned its roots.
Jim Carroll