I understand some of the frustration behind this posting.

They say that some of the Weavers found Woody Guthrie rather uncomfortable company - and you can, I think, empathise with him, if you think it through.

Folk music is functional music - designed to help people work and live and cheer up moany kids, and give the old folks a chorus to sing, because the radio has been blasting way all day rap or crap, or punk. Look at Woody's songs and you see such inherent mastery of these situations - and more and poetry. This is REAL folk music. It goes out in the world and connects with real folk.

And yet the younger more attractive kids who could sing complicated harmonies, played guitars that would cost more than a factory worker made in three months, played fancy techniques - they were getting to play better places than Woody and Cisco ever did.

On mudcat you routinely get someone saying several times a day that folk music has to be something that sounds old as Methuselah, can only be appreciated by the initiated who REALLY listen (unlike your average moron), is sung in some arcane weird manner, preferably to a dance rhythm nobody dances any more, using modal scales that can only be found in regular use on the other side of the world.

Look down the lists today and you will find several such threads, and several such people. they want to keep folk music as their exclusive domain.

All I can say is, you're absolutely right Mike Miller. But take heart. these people have only got money and influence and their snobbishness to keep them compnay, Most of them can't even stand to listen to each other.

The music will always belong to the people.