"That's what many of us posting in this thread care about. I have some involvement with genres classed as "world music" but I don't give a flying fuck whether country and "acoustic" music in the UK curls up and dies, it's completely alien to me.
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I think that this is exactly the attitude which puts off so many people, young and old, from wanting to get involved in folk. It's certainly one of the reasons I've become less and less interested in going to folk clubs etc. Much too fundamentalist for me!