The Deadly Gentlemen: bluegrass rap
www.myspace.com/deadlygentlemen

On the whole though, I can't really think of any rapping in folk beyond the aforementioned Jim Moray song.

For me though, when rap was localized, for most of the 1980s, it had a hell of a lot in common with folk music. The rappers in Harlem, the Bronx and in LA were a lot like topical broadsheets were. They referenced very localised characters and localised stories that often mean little or nothing to those outside their constituency.

Obviously, US rap got huge and lost that.

But you can still hear it in, say, the UK's Grime scene. I was listening to some CDs by Trim yesterday, who is my favourite British rapper at the moment. (He picks some genuinely unusual music to rap over - a good case in point being a sample of Mudhoney's 'Touch Me I'm Sick') His lyrics, and those of many of his peers, do for Hackney, Clapton and Tower Hamlets what 1980s US rappers like KRS 1 did for New York City.

In early American hip-hop, and in the UK's Grime scene, there is the sense of a community addressing itself through music, which is one of many things I get from old traditional folksongs (though it's by no means the only thing). There isn't a genuine community addressed by folksong today - there's only "people who like folk music", which isn't the same thing.