Yes, it's surely understood that enormous anmounts of "country" is meretricious rubbish (if you feel like being flattering about it), and the same goes for "rock". Any time that the music industry has been interested then it has managed to produce plenty of "folk" of which the same could be said.

But what is surely more interesting is to focus on the stuff thta we agree is good, and work out why it is that some of it gets classified as folk, and some as country, when it is essentially the same music.

I'm not talking about the old stuff, which is really by now a kind of folk music. (I think the defining characteristic of the folk music culture is that it holds on to pretty well any good music which is discarded by an industry that is obsessed with novelty, and keeps it alive.)

I'm talking about new stuff, which has recognisable roots in the country/American folk shared tradition, but has moved away from it in some ways. Stuff like the Pancho and Lefty song that startd this thread off. We're agreed that it's a good song, but apart from that, what are the criteria by which it should be counted as "folk" rather than country?