I should mention that Americans in general are much more inclusive about folk music than the British seem to be - that's the reverse of what comes across in my reading of the Mudcat, or my experience on the ground.

"World music" is a marketing term, designed to get round the fact that there are people who get turned off by the word "folk", and also as a way of bundling together a lot of different types types of music from all over the world, some of it folk music, but much of it not.

Insofar as some types of folk music, typically Engish, tend not to be accepted as fitting within the term "world music" that is generally a reflection of a certain prejudice against English music. I suppose that kind of prejudice could be called racist, but I rather doubt that was what was being implied by GUEST Date: 23 Jan 05 - 11:27 AM (Incidentally,if you're the same as GUEST Date: 23 Jan 05 - 12:13 PM , why not sign in as GUEST Minnesota in this thread? It's a drag having to chase back and copy and paste entry details, but without doing that for nameless GUESTs, it's tricky indicating which one is being responded to.)