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The term American folk music encompasses numerous music genres, variously known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music, vernacular music, or roots music.
- Overview
- The concept of folk music
folk music, type of traditional and generally rural music that originally was passed down through families and other small social groups. Typically, folk music, like folk literature, lives in oral tradition; it is learned through hearing rather than reading. It is functional in the sense that it is associated with other activities, and it is primar...
The term folk music and its equivalents in other languages denote many different kinds of music; the meaning of the term varies according to the part of the world, social class, and period of history. In determining whether a song or piece of music is folk music, most performers, participants, and enthusiasts would probably agree on certain criteria derived from patterns of transmission, social function, origins, and performance.
The central traditions of folk music are transmitted orally or aurally, that is, they are learned through hearing rather than the reading of words or music, ordinarily in informal, small social networks of relatives or friends rather than in institutions such as school or church. In the 20th century, transmission through recordings and mass media began to replace much of the face-to-face learning. In comparison with art music, which brings aesthetic enjoyment, and popular music, which (often along with social dancing) functions as entertainment, folk music is more often associated with other activities, such as calendric or life-cycle rituals, work, games, enculturation, and folk religion; folk music is also more likely to be participatory than presentational.
The concept applies to cultures in which there is also an urban, technically more sophisticated musical tradition maintained by and for a smaller social, economic, and intellectual elite in cities, courts, or urbanized cultures. Generally, “folk music” refers to music that broad segments of the population—particularly the lower socioeconomic classes—understand, and with which they identify. In this respect it is the rural counterpart to urban popular music, although that music depends mainly on the mass media—recordings, radio, television, and to some degree the Internet—for dissemination.
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Traditionally, folk music performers were amateurs, and some folk songs were literally known to all members of a community; but specialists—instrumentalists and singers of narratives—were important to folk communities. In the 20th century, the role of professionals as performers and carriers of folk traditions expanded dramatically. Folk music as it is believed to have existed in earlier times may be discussed separately from periods of revival such as that of 19th-century European nationalism and the 20th-century revivals, shortly before and after World War II, that were motivated by political agendas. In the context of popular music, performances of “folk music” may be distinguished by the use of songs with political agendas and the use of traditional instruments and acoustic guitars. On the other side of the musical spectrum, lines between folk music and art music were blurred beginning in the 19th century, when art music composers introduced songs from folklore into urban musical culture.
During the 1950s, the growing folk-music crowd that had developed in the United States began to buy records by older, traditional musicians from the Southeastern hill country and from urban inner-cities.
The United States experienced two waves of folk-song revival activity a little more than twenty years apart, between the late 1930s and the early 1960s. In each case, what could be called traditional American music was reinterpreted and transformed with the help of the sort of "urban elite or priviledged class" mentioned by Ralph Rinzler above.
- National Museum of American History American Folk Fiddle.
- National Portrait Gallery Bob Dylan.
- National Museum of American History American Five-String Fretless Banjo.
- National Museum of American History Doc Watson and Merle Watson.
Folk music, folk songs, and ballads are nested categories of traditional expression: folk songs are folk music that has words, and ballads are folk songs that tell stories. These genres are universal; all people make music, and almost all start with what scholars would call “folk music.”
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Each innovation in African American popular music has been influenced by what came before. The rise of rhythm and blues in the 1950s was directly influenced by early gospel music and urban blues, particularly a style of music popularized by Louis Jordan (1908-1979) called "jump blues.
