No, DeG - not folk (more sort of like Presley's Las Vegas years!) and not metal.

There are some excellent performers in folk, but its real force is twofold. It taps a wellspring, the place from where we come: it is the reflection of 600 years of exploitation, infidelity, betrayal murder and even genocide. Secondly it does embrace not only as the subjects of those tales but also as narrators and performers we ordinary people - not superheroes in spandex on stage, but the man and woman offthe street. It is us and our heritage.

It is this linkage that I am finding missing in most of the "folk metal" we have discovered together since I started this thread. The genre seems to start from a mistaken premise - namely that folk is style of performance rather than a body of descended material - and to use that imagined style (as distinct from the imagined village) to modify an existing style or set of styles, the forms of performance called "metal". In a way folk metal (with the fascination in it or in parts of it with trolls and so on) seems to me to be more in touch with "filk" rather than "folk".

Another form I have found referred to is "blackened folk" and maybe that would be another place for me to search, but the voyage of discovery is harder since most of the material that emerges from search engines refers to the emergence of African-Americans from the experience of racism.