Fair enough, but contrary opinions were not what I was referring to. Comments like, "he is crowd funding a Sam Lee album, for the greater glorification of Sam Lee" strike me as ridiculous. Or is obscurity the goal? Should Steeleye Span not have popularized the genre? While recognizing the importance of preserving a cultural heritage, this music is also entertainment. My 30 year old daughter, who has little interest in traditional music, saw Sam Lee supporting Patty Griffin at the Town Hall in New York, and fell in love with the songs, his singing, the instruments, and him (not necessarily in that order) To a young girl raised on eclectic indie singer-songwriters like Damien Rice and Laura Marling, Sam Lee made perfect sense to her, in a way that Jon Boden and Bellowhead wouldn't (I tried, she hated it).

So "lighten up" I guess was directed at this concept that folk music and commercialism are mutually exclusive, or that an artist has to be anti-market and anti-success and anti-money to be authentic.