"If you and I had had a conversation about folk music 50 years I would in all probability never set foot in a folk club again."
If you and I had a conversation fifty years ago, it seems to me you would not be the slightest bit interested in the type of folk music that was accepted as such back then
You really are not responding to what I am saying Raggy - my interest is in making sure folk song (as defined and researched) has a future
It has given me a lifetime of pleasure as a performer and an audience member, but its future existence as part of my life is guaranteed by the fact that it has so much more than entertainment to offer
Why should I abandon that in the faint hope that I could fill clubs with people who don't share my tastes and interests?
I'd much rather place my money on the Clare schoolkids who are now listening to and learning the songs of the old crumblies we recorded.
You are talking about drawing people in fro the sake of drawing them in, and in doing so, the music seems to have become lost somewhere
I'm in the process of preparing a talk Pat and I are giving next month at Galway Uni - this is part of an opening to a section of the historical significance of folk song
How does it fit in with your ideas?

"Traditional songs - songs in general for that matter, are regarded largely as entertainment. This is certainly partly true, and has become more so as the tradition of making and singing them has disappeared. Nostalgia, a yearning for a bygone, gentler, more civilised world has done much to create the songs, nurture them and keep them alive, but I believe that it is something more that first breathed life into the songs and inspired the often unnamed song-makers to make these pieces. Many of the songs, I believe, arose from struggle, from anger, frustration, a sense of injustice, bitterness, despair and tragedy, (as for instance, with The Wreck of the Old 97, though I will admit, that that particular rendition sounds more like the celebration of a train crash rather than the lamenting of one). National and local pride also played a part in their making. Others came from whimsical observation, a desire to share something pleasant, humorous, or to express love, affection and a myriad of other reasons.
As a whole, I believe these songs have fulfilled a desire to record or comment on life as seen from the ground up, so to speak, many of them having passed from one generation to another because the subjects they dealt with have been important enough to later generations to keep the memories alive.    Often, though not always, we can go to the history books newspapers and records to research the cold facts of the past, but I believe it is to the songs that we have to go to find out what the ?ordinary? people were thinking, feeling and experiencing and what was important to them. Sometimes they dealt with events that never made the newspapers and history books and were of significance only to the communities in which they were made, and so would have gone otherwise unreported."

You didn't comment on the muscians and singer I put up - obviously not to your taste
Jim Carroll