Don't delude yourself that you are 'telling it like it is' either. You are simply one opinion amongst many. One that is, in the main, entirely ignored anyway. Still, I do like the idea of a 'partially active & wholly imperfect Folk Gene' so I will accept that you may be one or two sandwichs short of a picnic:-)

WAY too personal (and potentially insulting) a response to an entirely impersonal discussion, DtG.

My 'opinion' is simply the facts of how folk came into being. You can read all about it Dave Harker's 'Fakesong' and Georgina Boyes' 'The Imagined Village' and elsewhere. That Folk is born of social & cultural apartheid (& must define itself in such a way as to secure its position in what is a terrible case of cultural plunder & misrepresentation in which the working-class are effectively denied their creative heritage and are selectively screened for their potential as genuine authentic pure-blood traditional song-carriers depending on the degree of contamination from less savoury popular influences, like hip-hop) is hardly a secret. You can even read about it in 'The Ladybird Story of Music'; there's even an illustration just to drive the point home:

Cecil Sharp's Folk Epiphany

In 40 years of folkin' I've become aware of the prevailing social, cultural & ethnic demographic of punters & perpetrators alike, which is entirely consistent with its essentially theoretical / visionary / religious / cultist / academic nature. All of which, I have to say, is fine by me because that's what folk is. What isn't fine by me, however, is Folkies assuming that their particular brand of specialised easy-listening revivalism is somehow superior to other living / breathing musical traditions - such as that much maligned 'Rap Music', which, sadly, is a recurring theme here on Mudcat.