Hester: I don't believe that what I wrote was "support expressed for Befuddled's perspective". There are more positions on this than yours and his.

There are more important pressures on English folk music than race: the dominance of US culture and the national lack of belief in its very existence - just for two.

If there is any value in English Traditional Folk music as a concept at all, then it is in its roots in English society and history. As such it is necessarily separate from Blues, Klesma or whatever: and still separate (if much more fuzzily so) from American, Scottish, Welsh or Irish music.

I don't believe that it is racist to prefer English Traditional song over Klesma. Or interminable indistinguishable Irish rigs and jeels. Or vice versa, for that matter. But I think it is foolish to imagine that you can somehow separate a musical genre from the people and society that produced it.