How many are you!?! :D

I am legion.

If you don't believe him just check his post count.

Nea, love the sig, but why?

Folk music is the same as Country in the fact they use a lot of strings. That is my final, uneducated guess.

Everyone is, I believe, aware of the fact that country and folk are the horses of another colour, but concidering the daily capacity of this forum (in comparison with other ones on MB), the connecting of those different music worlds with each other is the most reasonable solution, at least for that moment.

Actually, the truth is nearly the opposite of this. World Music is generally speaking music which is played in a specific part of the world.

Country and Folk were actually considered nearly the same genre for a good amount of time because both were played in rural lands, usually by poor people (though this wasn't always the case obviously) and they had very similar lyrical themes. Hank Williams called himself a folk singer more than he claimed he sang Country. Western, a genre originally considered different from Country, was films created for, well, Western Films. For the better part of the 20th Century Country and Folk were much more similar than Country and Western were.

What caused the change in philosophy to the three genres?

McCarthy more or less.

As you are probably well aware, there was a huge backlash against Communism and most liberal philosophies in the 1950s. Many folk artists were either directly or indirectly linked to the Communist movement (Seeger was a Communist, Guthrie was very obviously a Communist sympathizer) and as more folk artists were being questioned, many members of the Country community didn't want to be seen as questionable to the government, so the genre generally gravitated even more to the Conservative train of thought and culture, allowing the similarities between Country and Western to become so prevelant that they almost no longer existed.

I wanted to start a educational thread on outernational music like Brazilian, Afro-Caribbean, French pop, dub reggae, Italian soundtracks and other more esoteric musical forms but I really don't know where to put it. I was thinking about either the indie music or the general music forum because nobody seems to read anything in this forum.

I really don't think country music belongs in the International music thread. My thought is that country and folk music should be in a single forum. Maybe call it the Americana and Roots Music forum to keep up with contemporary descriptors for the genres. Another name for the forum could be "No Depression" forum which is from an early Wilco song and used by a lot of folks to describe a broader genre that includes Americana, roots music, country, folk blues and traditional folk music.

International music should share a forum with reggae music, along with a group of very specific electronic artists who specialize in dub remixes of third world music. You call the forum "Outernational Music" which is the term Thievery Corporation uses for the new internationalist music movement.

My own broader definition of international music includes outernational electronic groups like Air, Thievery Corporation, Orb (but not Orbital), Bebo Best, Jazzanova, Blank and Jones, Bob Sinclar, Chris Joss, Ursula 1000, Dimitri from Paris, Elizabeth Butterfly and other electronica artists who do a lot of remixing of reggae, Brazilian jazz, European soundtracks, trip hop and French house music.

I don't know why this is such a big deal, that forum has the least amount of traffic on the site. The first page goes back an entire month so there's no real hurry to separate them.

If it becomes popular we'll review it.

^ I think this is clearest answer to the OP question so far.

^ A thread like that would be very welcome, Gavin B, because you are a very knowledgeable poster, but I´m not sure about the last bit that you wrote. Firstly, people do use this forum. Oddly enough, they are people who are interested in country, folk and world music. There may not be many of us, but who is to say if that is a problem or a blessing?


^ Strictly speaking, country music is in a forum called Folk & World Music. I think MB´s world music forum is for music from anywhere in the world that retains some regional element, so that when you initially hear it you think, "Ah! That´s Russian!" before you think, "Ah! that´s jazz!" To me, especially given what Sir Cactoos says, this forum is a logical place for country music. For many of us, country music comes from a foreign country and is immediately identifiable as being American.

Paradoxically, the term "international music", that you use, could be thought of as referring to the very music which is excluded from this particular forum; music that has so little regional content that it could come from/be popular anywhere in the world. In this sense, the other MB forums are full of international music; electronica, pop, even jazz now that it´s broken out of it´s regional cradle.

^ After mentioning how this forum doesn´t get much traffic, it seems a bit unwise to suggest dividing it down even furthur.

^ At last there´s something I agree with! I think there´s a really strong case for including all the Ska and Reggae threads in the world music forum, which might help to boost activity here.

However, although the names "No Depression" and "Outernational" sound really cool, they won´t be as clear to anyone as the present forum title is. It would be like calling the electronica thread "Morganspaziergang" because that´s the name of a Kraftwerk track.

Finally, Gavin B., I´d like to apologize for being so picky about your post. I´ve read with great admiration some of the things you´ve posted in MB and the last thing I want to do is to scare you away from contributing to this section of MB. What I´d love to see is you starting your thread here, and with the reputation that your name carries, anyone who is interested will follow the thread. The bottom line is, as you know, that threads should be located according to topic, not according to how much attention they might receive. :)