The notion of getting sad because people of common interests are communicating strikes me as completely bass-ackwards.

The more you have to say about purely musical issues, the more threads you can be expected to start on those topics.

When you have something you want your friends to hear -- and I count all of the members of this forum friends -- why woudl you want to feel you could not communicate it here?

You want sad, start a survey of people in the world who have no means of exchanging ideas with many others in a courteous way. Count folks who are confused as hell about something and don't have any way to find out what others think. Count folks whose friends are in the single digits, remote and insulated and only occasional able to get together and share thoughts.

There's sad for you.

And I echo Peter's feeling that folk music divorced from the passions and times of human life is no folk music at all.

Amos