The fact that he and his string players once issued a record for the light-music market consisting of a couple of dozen familiar & popular "folk" tunes (Frere·Jacques, Hava·Nagila, Annie·Laurie), doesn't seem to me to prove anything much either way, Sean.

My argument is that Folk is a bourgeois fantasy so ill-conceived it can be applied to any music - Mantovani included. The fact of him having done a Folk Album back in 1964 is neither here nor there really, just a bit amusing in the light of The Shimster's OP. Rolf Harris, OTOH, is different in that he has an overtly Folk Consciousness in line with the aesthetic of a Revival which is only Folk in terms of genre, rather than the patronising bullshit of the 1954 Definition, which ultimately, only tells us what The Horse Definition does - i.e. all music is human, all music is born of tradition, and the new emerges from the old by dint of a collective process poluated by creative individuals. Harry Cox was one such; Joe Strummer was another. Folk Music is part academic concept and part religious theology; both require a lot of faith, and neither (thank God) effect the supreme beauty of the music they're trying to contain, or exclude, or tell is us is somehow different from other musics because it suits their nefarious purposes to do so. Forgive me, I'm still a little paranoid after reading The Imagined Village a few months back - so much so a borrowed copy of Fake Song remains unread, though A Song for Every Season is shining like the newly re-born sun right now.   

The Exotica of Lounge is another issue - Rolf touched upon it with the brilliant Fijian Girl but the master was Les Baxter who served up his savage orchestral soundscapes which Martin Denny reduced with his small Exotic Sounds ensemble that went on to inspire Sun Ra's Nubian grooves. Ennio Morricone was in there too of course - I still find his Western scores supremely inspirational, not least because as a child he was the first to make the name SEAN seriously cool (and be sure to click that link there because that's still some of the best music you'll ever hear anywhere on the planet).