Folk

Folk, used without a national modifier, is an umbrella category for music rooted in non-literate oral tradition and the various twentieth-century revival movements built on top of those traditions. The label covers everything from Appalachian ballad singing to British club revivalism to the singer-songwriter movement of the 1960s that grew out of the American folk revival (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs). Instrumentation is typically acoustic — guitar, banjo, fiddle, voice — and lyrics tend toward narrative, social commentary or autobiography.

The modern English-language use of folk in the music sense crystallised in the early twentieth century with the work of song collectors like Cecil Sharp in England and the Lomax family in the United States. The mid-twentieth-century revival, centred on coffeehouses in New York's Greenwich Village (Café Wha?, Gerde's Folk City) and on the Newport Folk Festival from 1959, fed directly into the broader 1960s singer-songwriter movement. The label has remained loose and is used today as much for marketing as for genre description.

Because the label covers so much, listening points depend on the specific sub-genre. Common threads across most uses include acoustic instrumentation, foregrounded lyrics, modal or simple harmonic structures, and a vocal aesthetic that prizes plainness over technical polish.

Bob Dylan's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) is the canonical American singer-songwriter folk document. For the British equivalent, Bert Jansch's debut (1965) covers the acoustic club scene.

The 1965 Newport Folk Festival, at which Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, is conventionally treated as the moment the folk-purist consensus broke open and the singer-songwriter wave fully separated from traditional revivalism.