This is a well-researched and thought provoking piece, which needs more time to formulate a considered response than I have just now.

Joe is right to point out that Northern collections like Flanders have in the past received less attention that Southern ones, though people like Jeff Warner and Jeff Davis have been championing Northern music for years, and it's good to see that Anna & Elizabeth (and others) are now digging into Flanders.

On Garrett-Davis's wider point about non-Anglo-Celtic music, the obvious response is that musics like Cajun, Zydeco, Tex-Mex and polka are very successful in their own regions (and more widely), but they're just not pigeon-holed under 'folk' - although all clearly qualify as such.

There are two points about Southern music which might explain the kind of hegemony that Garrett-Davis complains about. One is the historical view, popular in the early 20th century and beyond, of the US as essentially an Anglo-Celtic culture, of which the purest survivors were to be found in the Southern Mountains. This was obviously an oversimplification even then, and is clearly only a part of the story today.

The other is that Southern music just sounds good. It has a particular quality arising from the collision of Anglo-Celtic and African-American traditions, which lend it the the heady combination of keening vocals, insistent rhythms and immediate story-telling. That doesn't make it better than other folk musics, but it does make it very attractive to an urban audience seeking something different. And then of course there's the banjo!

I hope we get more debate on this topic.