Disappearing Britain

I don't think traditional folk music has ever really competed with popular music. It's always been a much smaller constituency. What has happened is that from time to time an individual folk song or performer in the folk tradition has caught the mood of the age or merely of the moment and come briefly to the mainstream surface. The most dramatic example was probably Bob Dylan, who in his early days was firmly located in the Woody Gutherie American country tradition. At Woodstock there was really only one folk singer, Joan Baez, who sang a completely traditional folk song from the turn of the 20th Century, The Ballad of Joe Hill. Contemporary folk song had a spell of popularity both in the UK and the US between about 1965 and 1975, with singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Don McClean, Ralph McTell, Pete and Peggy Seeger, Janis Ian, Martin Carthy, Dori Previn and groups like The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers, The Carter Family, Simon and Garfunkel and The Corrie Trio occasionally hitting the big time. Of course the black tradition in the US has also surfaced from time to time in mainstream music, in the hands of such performers as Billie Holliday, Harry Belafonte and Paul Robeson. Right now there isn't really a prominent folk singer making big waves in popular music. There are excellent contemporary singer/songwriters like Suzanne Vega, Emiliana Torrini, Richard Thompson, Tom Wait, Dave Carter & Tracey Grammer
and many more, but pop music has become a TV fuelled manufactured commodity and is now largely unreactive to what's going on in any other kind of music. It's in a little world of its own disconnected from everything else. But the folk tradition continues in clubs and pubs both here in London and throughout the whole of Britain, much the same as it always has, and will no doubt surface again in the mainstream when people get tired of manufactured boy bands and plastic TV "personalities" from "reality shows".