Rick, apology accepted.

Frank

I had no intention of suggesting that Cohen was 'pertinent to the debate'. My apologies - it was an offhand quotation that simply sprang to mind. My purpose in contributing was simply to draw attention to some material of which people engaged in this debate may not have been aware. However, you may perhaps forgive me for detecting in your response the faint scent of sanctimony.

Art has given the reference for the Rosenberg collection. It contains some very worthwhile material. However, some contributors quickly lose the reader in a mire of conceptualising and doublespeak. Isn't the purpose of writing is to communicate? Some writers do it very well. For example, wonderful books like Tony Russell's 'Blacks, Whites and Blues', Karen Linn's 'That Half-Barbaric Twang', Jeff Titon's 'Early Downhome Blues' or Bill Malone's 'Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers' draw one back to read them again and again. On the other hand, it seems to me that writers like Cantwell get carried away with a sense of their own importance. Greil Marcus is another prime example. In the booklet to the reissued Anthology, I for one derived far more benefit from the pithy contributions of John Fahey and Peter Stamphel than from Marcus' rather abstuse essay. He does the same in the introductory booklet to the great Dock Boggs reissue CD on Fahey's Revenant label - I sometimes think he's on a different planet to the rest of us. With that, Frank, I will take your advice and follow other threads.