"...In England at any rate I would guess that the relatively absence of black faces in folk clubs or festivals arises largely from the same factors that mean that most places in England outside largish towns and cities tend not to see that many black people or Asians"

McGrath of Harlow,what are those factors? Are you referring to lack of affordable transportation or racism?

Also, McGrath, I'm sorry that you are uneasy with the statement that I made that there appears to be a strong preferance among Black people for music that we can dance to or otherwise move to. In my opinion, that has nothing at all to do with the racist beliefs that all Black people have "a natural sense of rhythym", and that Black people are "a simple childlike people". Racists are gonna say what they are gonna say and they're gonna believe what they're gonna believe. From what I know of you from this discussion forum, I'm very certain that you don't believe those stereotypical beliefs.

But I also have to say that I absolutely reject the notion that African Americans {or other Black people} are a devalued people. Devalued according to whom? As a matter of fact, I reject the notion that any group of people are devalued.

With regards to my point about the strong connection between music & dance in traditional & modern African cultures and in the African Diaspora, see this excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Africa:

"The treatment of "music" and "dance" as seperate artforms is an European idea. In many African languages there is no concept corresponding exactly to these terms. For example, in many Bantu languages, there is one concept that might be translated as "song" and another that covers both the semantic fields of the European concepts of "music" and "dance". So there is one word for both music and dance (the exact meaning of the concepts may differ from culture to culture).

For example, in Kiswahili, the word "ngoma" may be translated as "drum", "dance", "dance event", "dance celebration" or "music", depending on the context. Each of these translations is incomplete.

Therefore, from an intracultural point of view, African music and African dance must be viewd in very close connection. The classification of the phenomena of this area of culture into "music" and "dance" is forreign to many African cultures.

There is a close connection between the polyrhythmic structure of African music and the polycentric structure of many African dances, in which different parts of the body are moved according to different rhythmical components."