My first love have always been traditional folk music, song and dance. Throughout the decades that I ran a weekly folk club, the tradition was at the heart of what I wanted to present, though I never wanted to exclude the songwriters who were inspired by the tradition, those who were skilled in monologues and others who enriched the diversity of what was on offer
Having said that, I must say that Howard's summary of what - in general - he found in folk clubs concurs with my own memories of what they were like in the 60's/70's. It seems to me that to regard these years as a glorious halcyon era where the mass of those attending were seeking the true 'voice of the people' sounds like an attempt to rewrite the history of these years as a Golden Era, because that is not the way it was.
I wonder if there are any people who have been to (or compered) as many folk club evenings and concerts between 1962 and 2019 as I have - perhaps the likes of Carthy and Kirkpatrick who have been career folk singers. Certainly, there are fewer clubs and the average age of those attending has risen but overall - and this is only an impression - I would say that you are more likely to hear traditional song and tunes in the folk clubs that I still attend regularly now than in the days when the folk comedians, the music hall aficionados and the introspective singer/songwriters held sway.
The reasons for the decline in the number of folk clubs are complex and include a mass of inter-related socio-economic, political and societal reasons. The world has changed a great deal in my lifetime - probably more than in any other period of history.”

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This, this, THIS!!

Jim, your posts come over very London-centric and Ireland-centric, and you seem to be making your judgments based on those scenes. Those of us who live far away from those idylls don’t have the luxury of being able to choose from numerous clubs and venues, every night of the week, each presenting its own Individual style of music - we may have a couple, maybe three, sometimes only once a fortnight or even monthly, and often with an hour’s drive at each end of the evening. Those clubs have found that, in order to survive, they have to cater for a range of styles falling within the broad church of folk- and folk-styled music, and that insistence on adherence to one style only would soon sound their death-knell.

Those of us who attend and still perform in those clubs understand that, and we accept that during an evening we may hear songs in styles we’re not especially enamoured of, but we make an allowance for that because, otherwise, if we insisted on ‘our preferred style’ only, we’d soon be singing to an almost empty room.

Even in the one fairly-local club which had a strong reputation for being ‘Strictly Trad’, there has had to be a change of policy, because the Traddies either died off or buggered off. This one is now highly successful and is packed every week.

I can’t imagine anything worse than having to sit through an entire evening of Jolly Plough Boys, except having to sit through an evening of Teenage-Angst sung from an iPhone. But an evening of varied styles, including Trad and ‘Contemporary’ (for want of a better word) is perfectly acceptable for me and the many others who attend the clubs I frequent.

You may not like it, but that’s the way it is. As the Brexit-Bunch are wont to say, “Get over it”.

I repeat Vic’s final sentence - the world has changed a great deal in my lifetime, probably more than in any other period of history.

The usual disclaimers apply......IMHO, YMMV etc.