Point taken. But great music - the best music ? - has come out of times and places where the furthest you could get in 28 hours would be the distance you could walk in that time.

The green slogan "think globally, act locally" can apply to music as well.

But the very scale and spread out nature of America is one reason for using the Mudcat as a way of bridging those distances and building community across them. In some places that can be supplemented by people actually being able to meet each other directly, but that's just a bonus. And if anything it makes the Mudcat less important for them - more convenient maybe, as a way of sharing information and so forth, but convenient isn't the same as important.

Good to see some people here whom I hadn't seen posting form some time.

And I quite agree with Azizi about the importance of the Mudcat as a -lace to find out about cultures and folklore, our own and other peoples. For me what is special about the range of music and song that get labelled "folk" is that they all have their roots in that kind of thing, it isn't just about instant entertainment and what's in and what's out.