I ran a folk concert series at the Stamford Museum, an hour's drive north of New York City. Depending on definition, it was at least one of the longest-running series in New England. We heard an enormous amount of great, traditional or tradition-based music there, including several Mudcatters. Why did I finally stop running it? Not out of a lack of love for the music. And not because I didn't have a wonderful room with great acoustics. And not because the boss wouldn't let me do it any more, because I was the boss. I finally had to give up, because the audience was so small I couldn't justify doing it any more. I went two years without breaking even on a single concert. You reach a point when you can't justify running a series for so few people. So, what changed? First of all, the audience got old. We went from sell-out crowds for years to thirty or forty people, because I didn't book them danged singer/songwriters. Other coffee houses booked mostly twenty-somethings who had never heard of the Carter Family. Traditional Folk music for them was James Taylor. (Who I like.) Some couples used to bring their kids, and a few of them might still like folk music. But, it was a rare night when there were more than two or three people under forty. Forget "What if you gave a war, and nobody came?" What if you have a beautiful space with great acoustics and singers like Dave Van Ronk, Jean Ritchie, Art Thieme, Sandy & Caroline, and you can't draw a big enough audience to cover the costs? All those above used to sell out their concerts in the glory years. By the end, I couldn't sell out a 110 seat room for Dave Van Ronk. He was willing to take considerably less money than he was used to making, and I still lost money. Some times you have to let things go, and wait for the next time around. It will probably come, but not necessarily on the scale of Greenwich Village in the sixties. Even the Greenwich Village I loved, where you could walk down the street and have your pick of a dozen places that had live folk music, and you could hear Reverend Gary Davis at a pass-the-hat little hole really only lasted four or five years. What killed it? When people discovered you could make money out of it. It killed the "scene" but not the music.

Jerry