GUEST as you very well know, I put "country blues" "cajun" etc as samples of what i consider folk music so as the orginal requester could see where I was coming from. It was not an all inclusive list. The fact that I only mentioned Mongolian yak-herders does not mean I do not also include Kurdish sheep-herders. I might have been quite inclined to include "urban blues" or "blues from those funny areas round towns where they have Walmarts and drive-in ice-cream parlours" or "blues on the decks of boats while not actually in port" but the list would have got a bit unwieldy.
   I also see that the original message was querying whether Brits and Yanks have differing ideas of the "meaning of folk", so I'll just classify myself as Brit.
    A number of people on these topic seem to confuse the question of "whether you like something or not" with "whether you think it's folk or not". It's a reasonable bet that Mudcatters like what they think is folk, as that's what this forum is for. It's not a reasonable bet that if Mudcatters like it, they think it's folk.