Gatekeeping Folk Music

First of all, I love traditional music. I love folk music, sea songs, celtic harp music, almost anything in the public domain. I'm a researcher and compiler of these songs. I will say, however, that I haven't found the "folk music community" to be welcoming. There have been some outside the US who have been friendly, but here... not so much.
They said they were starting a new local folk music show on the college station. So, I wrote an email to the host and welcomed her. She asked me to send her some of my folk music. I did. I sent her 200 songs. I never heard from her again. Her local folk music show is chocked full of Arlo Guhrie, Keith Richards and other well known local Delaware artists like these.
I heard a cat on NPR this morning who is a folk singer. The feature was about how this guy gatekeeps folk music. "If I hear someone on the fiddle playing Turkey in the Straw, I go up to them and tell them to stop." He said that because the song has a complicated history, that much later on someone put racist lyrics to it, so now the song has been cancelled. No more Turkey in the Straw. He said that even it's only on fiddle with no lyrics, he'd force them to stop playing it. It's hurtful, he said. 
This cat goes to folk festivals and holds lectures about the racist history of certain songs. This whole speil was broadcast on the same station that still plays Wagner on their classical music programming.
An article on the Library of Congree web site explains the songs roots: The racist associations of the tune are only part of its legacy, though, and are neither the oldest part nor the most recent. The tune has roots in much older music, and has continued in forms largely devoid of racial connotations. The origins of “Turkey in the Straw” hearken back to British and Irish dance music. In her 1939 book Folk Songs of Old New England, Eloise Hubbard Linscott (whose collection of recordings and photographs is part of the AFC archive) identified “Turkey in the Straw” as a variant of the British tune “The Rose Tree,” which is also related to the Irish piece “The Rose Tree in Full Bearing.” You can hear a cylinder recording of William Nathan “Jinky” Wells playing “The Rose Tree” in the player below, from the James Madison Carpenter Collection. The recording is AFC 1972/001 Cylinder 110."

So, here's a very very old tune, that when played on the fiddle is an instrumental that we should never play or stop playing because it was played at minstrel shows 100 years later. Does that sound reasonable to you? I, like many musicians, never knew the words. I never even saw the words until I got a book called "The Best Loved Songs of the American People" twenty years ago. I knew it from cartoons, mostly. Mickey Mouse whistled it. It was in Bugs Bunny cartoons. When I started researching celtic music, like the music of blind harpist Turlough O'Carolan, (1670 – 25 March 1738), I discovered that MANY of the songs in the 1960s came directly from Irish melodies. Most of Bob Dylan's early acoustic albums are well-known folk tunes that he put knew words to. Woody Guthrie did the same thing, although sometimes in reverse. He'd put new music to old words. It's complicated and nowhere near as easy as "that song is hurtful, don't play it." I also question whether it is actually hurtful if you have to hold a seminar to explain to people why it is hurtful. I had close to 250 folk songs, and folk music I performed with my band, that I have removed from sale. All of them. My album of 40 Sea Shanties had songs by Stephen Foster. Foster's music was used in minstrel shows. Therefore, Foster must be cancelled. I've never a big fan of hold people of the past to the standards of today, I know that's a hard thing to hear right now. But if we erase every peice of art done by somebody who is "problematic", what will be left? If we start at Turkey in the Straw, we have to call Dylan "problematic" he said the n-word in two songs. He became a Christian. Lennon said the n-word in one of his songs. He had a "problematic" history with the women in his life. Dr. Dre, Snoop, Ice-Cube they all degrade women in their music. That's problematic. The Hills by TheWeeknd talks about how he "fucked two bitches"—so.. women shouldn't be referred to that way. That's problematic. Actually, if you look at any art you're going to find the warts of the artist. Why? Because man is problematic. We lie and cheat and hate and kill and love and create beautiful things and create art that lasts 500 years. I named one of my albums after a British Admiral and was called racist and forced to change it. Not because the Admiral was racist but because his nick name was "Black" Richard. Like Black Beard. But, I was told it was racist so I did what I always do. I retreat back into sadness and feel pain for a confused world. SFX