Jerry's talking about what folk music is to him. Granted, it's an opportunity for another argument about you-know-what, but I'll just let people talk about their own experiences. I will say that dance music has a great deal of 'beat' - it has to!

Before there were jump rope rhymes and clapping rhymes, there was my mom's record collection. I don't even think I was aware of what were then modern hits, until I was perhaps 10 or so. I litstened to my mom's 78 records (some of which had probably belonged to her mom). There was Spike Jones, Bing Crosby, Harry Belafonte, Doris Day, Billie Holiday, various "big band" orchestras with or without singers. My mom baked bread, and she would whistle or hum while she worked. Occasionally, she'd sing the words too - sometimes because I asked her. "Beat Me Daddy, 8 to the Bar" and "Minnie the Moocher." My mom had sung with a local big band when she was younger.

When I "found" folk music, it was after the "folk scare." (Granted, I heard a good deal of that on the radio, but was classified in my brain at the time as "stuff you heard on the radio.") It was John Roberts & Tony Barrand, Boys of the Lough, Sandy & Caroline Paton, Gordon Bok and Michael Cooney...but it was also the Georgia Sea Island singers. It was blues and ragtime and come-to-Jesus, hand-clappin', foot-stompin' gospel, and boogie-woogie.

Everything sounded good. Why the latter stuff, with its syncopation and blues scales, made sense to me, someone who grew up as a small white child surrounded by white people, it had to have been my mom and her record collection.