"However for folk to survive it is the audience that is crucial."
Of course it has, but to put one above the other just doesn't work, especially when you are talking about the survival of a genre that is rapidly disappearing from the public memory.
I doubt if anybody ever did just "wander in" to the music - song as apparently alien as for song needs to be promoted
The interest of our generation came mainly through a process - a rejection of what the machine had to offer, Jazz, Blues, Country and Western, American folk then finally tour home grown product - each shift was a conscious one
That just doesn't happen now, an extremely aggressive and all-pervading music industry gets to decide what is readily available - anything has either to be sought for or stumbled across
When our County Library put our Clare Collection on line it was a lifelong ambition realised, but the most important outcome was when the Council appointed two singers in residence to take the songs around local schools - last year the kids produced a CD of their singing.
All this took research and hard work - from the collecting, indexing, assembling and finally annotating the material.
I must have have given talks to around a dozen schools - it was common in London to here Joe Heaney's and Ewan's singing being described as sounding like 'Paki music"
It has to be far more abut winning hearts and minds than about just bunging it up for passers by to find.
Then there are the further implications, social national and historical aspects of the songs being made and passed on in the first place - all in need of reasearch
One of the hardest jobs in promoting our music lies in raising funds in order to do so - a group of us from different sections of the arts fought for years to try and get funding - it ended in dismal failure because neither the authorities not the established arts were interested - most were actively hostile to folk music.
When we moved to Ireland (in the middle of the 'Celtic Tiger' period, asking for funding was pushing on an open door, but even then you had to prove your interest went beyond having a good night out - you had to show you knew what you are talking about
You'll never get that in a thousand years if you can't even agree on what you mean about "folk"
Jim Carroll
Incidentally - U-tube audiences fill me with horror
Folk music and song is a manifestation of social interaction and the clubs were a suitable compromise on that
Once you remove that social aspect, you drain it of its life-blood