Conrad, to get a clue as to what it's all about, you might get a copy of The Rainbow Quest, by Ronald D. Cohen, University of Massachusetts Press (2002) and read it.

And here's another clue:   The Hee Haw shows that RFD cable is running are reruns from as far back as nearly forty years ago. The show first aired in 1969.

It was a comedy show and featured "country" music, which is more of a Nashville invention than traditional American folk music, along with a whole bunch of screwin' around in the corn field. Co-hosts were Buck Owens and Roy Clark, and they had a lot of guest stars passing through, such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Merle Haggard, and Dolly Parton, not to mention people like Regis Philbin and Sammy Davis Jr., along with occasional visitations by Loretta Lynn.

It is hardly what much of anybody who is interested in American folk music would think of as "American folk music."

Really!

And, yes, I did watch a lot of the shows back in the early 1970s. Some good country music when they weren't spraying corn out of their ears, but that was pretty funny. The show started as a summer replacement for The Smothers Brothers Show.

I didn't mistake it for "folk music," nor did many other people.

Are you sure you know folk music when you hear it?

And this "easy listening" label that you keep tossing around is a category primarily invented by radio stations that play, essentially, background music, which is to say, music that allows you to have some jolly pleasant noise in the background to drown out the sound of the termites eating away the support beams of your house, but not so obtrusive and you have to pay any attention to it. Also it's usually so bland that it doesn't detract from the four-minute commercial breaks that come every eleven minutes.

I would not like to see folk music be used as "easy listening" music. If you want to spark peoples' interest in folk music, trying to use it for "easy listening" is a completely bass-ackwards way of going about it. Downright counterproductive, in fact!

How do I know this? In the early 1970s, I broke into broadcasting by working for a year as a board announcer in an "easy listening" radio station before I got a job as an announcer at a classic music station. As a result of these broadcasting jobs, I learned quite a bit about categories and genres of music because I had to check the labels on record bins and on the record library shelves to find the music I was looking for to play on the air.

If you want to listen to folk music, you would stand a much greater chance if you turn off Hee Haw and try surfing the various college-sited radio stations and NPR affiliates (often one and the same). You can find them by dial-twisting on your radio, or if that fails, many of them stream live on the internet. Many of them play a fair amount of folk music. Genuine traditional folk music. There is such a station where I live. The station also plays what they refer to as "contemporary folk," which is "singer-songwriter" material. But the announcers usually make it clear which is which.

Don Firth