Bill D -- you have a keen logical sense and your point is well made. Given the number of palates out there, which far exceed in complexity the ability of poor categories to serve, it gets a little hazy trying to draw clear liens around something as volatile and embrasive as folk music. As you probably know there have been lots of discussions about how to draw such lines. Can't blame people for throwing up their hands and dismissing the whole question as an academic exercise. One reason is that (I think) the musical experience forms itself along different differentiators than the existing language supports -- so people are drawn into a tug of war between their intellectual analysis using prebuilt categories not very cleanly defined (like "pop", "folk" "jazz" and "rock" all of which have huge arrays of subdivisions) and their hearts which may skip just as lightly for a good Childs Ballad as for a Donovan cut. The ear hears things the label doesn't cover so the whole discussion ends up full of loose ends.

A