Piers Plowman:

"Oh, and there are quite a few programs about blues on the radio currently, weekly in fact. Is that folk?"

Well, I'd say we'd be opening another can of worms to get into a discussion about whether Blues may or may not be considered Folk. I think that Blues has its roots in the Folk music tradition and that it maintains some of the elements of that tradition even today in some forms of the genre. However, and to its benefit, the Blues genre has not decided to cling so tightly to its past traditions but rather, it has allowed itself the freedom to be transformed and move beyond the past in many ways and in doing so, transformed the greater world of contemporary music like no other genre ever has.