Rate each song individually - you can no more make a judgement for "all folk music" as a single entity than you can for "all books", or "all films".

Re Hollowfox's point, some of the most violent stuff I can think of would be children's stories. Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood and all the rest are pure blood and guts - H&G in particular has a child kept to be eaten and the baddie burnt alive. The un-bowdlerised 1001 Nights is sex and violence all the way. And the ones for older children (authors such as RL Stevenson, CS Lewis, Tolkein or JK Rowling) have plenty of violence. Even the Hardy Boys got to fight ppl.

Trouble is that for all their well-meaning attitudes, these ppl get it _so_ wrong. I think the purpose of these kind of stories is to try and prepare kids for the world. They all finish with happy endings for the good guys, and the lesson the kids draw is either "yes, bad stuff does happen sometimes, but when it does you have to be brave and you'll usually come out OK" or "if you do something bad then something nasty will happen to you". However naive this may be, it's not a bad place to start from - it's a lot better than either "the world is all lovely and everyone is nice" or "you can be as nasty as you want to ppl and they can't do anything about it".

Back on the folk music side, the ones that kids wouldn't get would be murder ballads like Pretty Polly - basically any where there's no good reason given for the killing or where there's no resolution. But Frankie and Johnny or Streets of Laredo would probably be OK, for example (although maybe not by these guys' standards).

Graham.