Jerry---

You were dead right in your first posting on this--many people--not just bluegrass fans have a wildly distorted picture of folk music.

It is certainly true that bluegrass people want to participate all the time-- not just patiently wait for your turn in a song circle, nor listen to navel-gazers sing about their own angst. Folk is obviously far far more than the navel-gazers, but unfortunately there is some of that. Even more unfortunately, sometimes they sell big, and since it's now so easy for anybody to do a CD, that's what the folk DJ's get flooded with, and they play a distressing amount of it.

It's also really hard to write a song dealing with societal problems without using a sledge-hammer approach, which comes across as (usually leftist) propaganda or the aforementioned whining.

To the degree radio folk DJ's play this sort of thing, traditional or "music in the tradition" is marginalized and folk gets unfairly tarred with the bad singer-songwriter brush. Mudcatters prove constantly that there are still excellent singer-songwriters around, by doing it themselves--I heard a lot of great newly written --(say, in the last 30 years)--songs at the Getaway, for instance.

But the stereotype of a Jewell--- (or whoever the prototype is these days)--- wanna-be is really hard to shake. When the general public (including but not restricted to bluegrassers) think of folk, they either think of Blowing in the Wind folk-scare stuff or whining singer-songwriters.

It's a blatantly unfair and distorted perception, but persistent nonetheless.