Fascism in the UK is a shadow of what it was in the 1970s. The sky is not falling (well, not because of anything the BNP's doing, anyway).

The "Celtic" label has been very effective at creating a whites-only genre. There are less black faces on the covers of "Celtic" recordings than any other musical genre. Not just jazz and blues: there are far more non-white performers on the opera stage. I suspect that most of the people who describe what they're doing as "Celtic" *want* it that way.

The same goes for singer-songwriter music in the US. In the UK we have a few exceptions - Joan Armatrading, Tanita Tikaram, Sheila Chandra, and perhaps we can call Benjamin Zephaniah an honorary folkie - but not many. In the US, *everybody* doing music in the tradition Dylan started is white. Not a great start if you're claiming to be anti-racist.

Traditional folk is not so compromised, and some people are doing a damn good job of making it unacceptable to fascists. In the US, Bruce Molsky has been insistent that the African component in old-time music is absolutely central to its vitality and power. In the UK, much of the material people sing and play today has come through the Gypsies, in very recent times (i.e through people who would have been murdered if the Nazis had won). Traveller tradition-bearers are still enormously influential in Scotland, and in England we have Eliza Carthy stating her Gypsy heritage up-front. As somebody else said in this thread, racists can listen to music from the minorities they despise, but Molsky and Carthy's attitude goes deeper - saying that American and English tradtion is Black and Gypsy at its core, there is no ethnically pure part of it the racists can keep for themselves.