Folk music

• 1. Introduction

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  Folk music is what the people sing. That blunt definition, offered by frustrated observers, hints at how slippery the subject becomes the moment you try to pin it down. Some scholars do not even agree the term folk music should be used at all. The word itself is young. It grew from folklore, a term coined in 1846 by the English antiquarian William Thoms to describe the traditions, customs, and superstitions of the uncultured classes. Yet the music it points to is far older than any label. For most of human history, listening to recorded music was simply impossible. Songs lived in memory, in work, in worship, and in the rhythm of synchronized pushes and pulls. So what exactly makes a song folk rather than something else? Who decided to write these songs down, and why did they bother? And how did a body of music with no known composers give birth, in the mid-20th century, to a genre of famous singer-songwriters? The answers reach from a cabinet of folksongs in Riga to a peacock dance in Sri Lanka.

• 2. The Elusive Definition

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  Béla Bartók, Cecil Sharp, and the writer Scholes all shared one instinct: the music of the country was something distinct from that of the town. To them, folk music was the authentic expression of a way of life now past or about to disappear, growing in a community uninfluenced by art music and by commercial printed song. The folklorist Lloyd rejected that romantic frame. He preferred a plain distinction of economic class. In Charles Seeger's words, true folk music was associated with a lower class in culturally and socially stratified societies. From these arguments came a tidy scheme of four musical types: primitive or tribal, elite or art, folk, and popular. The very word carries a buried history. It derives from the German Volk, meaning the people as a whole. Johann Gottfried Herder and the German Romantics applied that idea to popular and national music more than half a century before Thoms ever wrote down folklore. One definition leans on old songs with no known composers. Another leans on a process of oral transmission, the fashioning and re-fashioning of music by the community that gives it its folk character. The Grammy Awards once used the term traditional folk for exactly the music that is not contemporary folk.

• 3. Marks Of The Tradition

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  Before the 20th century, ordinary people were usually illiterate and learned their songs by memory. That single fact shaped everything. Music passed through an oral tradition, not through books or recordings, so each song lived only as long as someone remembered to sing it. The music was culturally particular, tied to a region or a people. In immigrant societies this gains an extra dimension of social cohesion. Greek Australians, Somali Americans, and Punjabi Canadians learn songs and dances that originate in the countries their grandparents came from. On certain days, the songs mark the turning of the year. Holidays such as Christmas, Easter, and May Day carry their own particular songs. Birthdays, weddings, and funerals are noted with songs, dances, and special costumes. Choral music at these gatherings brings children and non-professional singers into a public arena, an emotional bonding unrelated to the aesthetic quality of the music. The songs have been performed by custom over a long period, usually several generations. A few side-effects follow. There is no copyright. Hundreds of folk songs from the 19th century have known authors but drifted so far into oral tradition that publishing treats them as traditional. Since the 1940s that has grown rare. Today almost every recorded folk song is credited with an arranger.

• 4. How A Song Mutates

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  Around 1970, the song Mullā Mohammed Jān spread from Herat to the rest of Afghanistan, and on to Iran, where it was recorded. Its repetitive refrain and the predictability of the second half of each verse let every singer build a personal version, free of worry about melody or restrictive poetic rhythm. That is the folk process in miniature. Transmission by word of mouth cannot produce word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy, so variants multiply naturally. Researchers chasing the Barbara Allen ballad have found countless versions across the English-speaking world, often differing greatly from each other. The original is unknown. Many versions lay an equal claim to authenticity. Cecil Sharp believed these competing variants underwent something like biological natural selection. Only the new variants most appealing to ordinary singers would be picked up and passed onward. Over time, he reasoned, each traditional song should grow more aesthetically appealing through incremental community improvement. The chords and harmonies were improvised too. Broadsheets and song books gave little detail about melody or harmony, so performers composed spontaneous arrangements. This stood in sharp contrast to the detailed, prescriptive sheet music used to transcribe classical compositions of the time. A tune, in this world, is a short instrumental piece, often in AABB form, also known as binary form.

• 5. What The Songs Carry

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  Narrative verse looms large across folk traditions. Traditional epic poetry, much of it meant originally for oral performance, was often pieced together from shorter fragments of narrative verse. That assembly explains the episodic structure, the repetitive elements, and the frequent plunge into the middle of the action. The triumphant Song of Deborah in the Biblical Book of Judges celebrates a victory. Laments for lost battles and the lives spent in them keep alive the cause for which the fight was waged. Other songs remember folk heroes such as John Henry or Robin Hood, or recall supernatural events and mysterious deaths. Work songs frequently use call and response so laborers can coordinate their efforts to the rhythm. In the American armed forces, a living oral tradition preserves jody calls, the Duckworth chants soldiers sing while on the march. Professional sailors built up a large body of sea shanties for the same purpose. Western musical notation itself began as a way to preserve Gregorian chant, which before that invention was taught as an oral tradition in monastic communities. Traditional songs like Green grow the rushes, O hold religious lore in a mnemonic form, much as Western Christmas carols do. Nursery rhymes, children's songs, and nonsense verse round out the repertoire.

• 6. The Collectors

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  Between 1894 and 1915, Krišjānis Barons published six volumes in Riga containing the texts of 217,996 Latvian folk songs, the Latvju dainas, which he kept in the Cabinet of Folksongs. That staggering effort was part of a wider 19th-century scramble to save the music of the people before it vanished. In the late 19th century, Francis James Child gathered the texts of over three hundred ballads from the English and Scots traditions, some predating the 16th century. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould and later Cecil Sharp preserved English rural song, music, and dance under what became the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Sharp even campaigned, with some success, to have his own heavily edited and expurgated versions of English songs taught to schoolchildren. In Norway, the collector Ludvig Mathias Lindeman supplied material that Edvard Grieg drew upon for his Lyric Pieces for piano. Audio recording, arriving in the 19th century, handed folklorists a tool to preserve vanishing forms. In North America during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through collectors like Robert Winslow Gordon and Alan Lomax to capture as much field material as possible. John Lomax, Alan's father, published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1911. Cecil Sharp recorded the songs of the Appalachian Mountains between 1916 and 1918 with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell.

• 7. The American Movement

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  Carl Sandburg traveled the United States as a writer and poet, and in 1927 he published the songs he gathered as The American Songbag. The historian Rachel Donaldson argued that Sandburg added a class dynamic to popular understandings of American folk music, a final element in the foundation the early revivalists built upon. The 1930s turned a scholar's pursuit into a social movement, often bound up with the Great Depression. The U.S. Communist Party saw folk music as a way to reach Americans, and Woody Guthrie embodied the songwriters who shared that outlook. President Franklin Roosevelt was a fan, hosting folk concerts at the White House and patronizing festivals. Sarah Gertrude Knott founded the National Folk Festival in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1934, and under the sponsorship of The Washington Post it ran at Constitution Hall from 1937 to 1942. Three schools of thought divided the revivalists. Traditionalists like Knott and John Lomax preserved songs as artifacts of deceased cultures. Functional folklorists like Alan Lomax held that songs keep relevance only when used by the cultures that birthed them. Left-wing revivalists like Charles Seeger stressed music's role in people's struggles for rights. Jean Ritchie, born in 1922 in Viper, Kentucky, was the youngest of a large family that had kept many old Appalachian songs. In January 2012, the American Folklife Center announced it would release Alan Lomax's archive of 1946 and later recordings in digital form.

• 8. Traditions Of The World

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  Archaeological discoveries date Chinese folk music back 7000 years, built largely on the pentatonic scale. Han weddings and funerals often feature an oboe called a suona, and the sheng, a Chinese pipe, is the ancient ancestor of all Western free reed instruments, including the accordion. The songs of northwest China are known as flower songs, or hua'er, once notorious for their erotic content and now reframed as romantic courtship songs. Sri Lanka tells its stories through movement. The Traditional 18 Dances include the Mayura Wannama, the dance of the peacock, and the Gajaga Wannama, the dance of the elephant. There the Sinhalese dance is not set to music as the Western world knows it. Rhythm is king, and the Gatabera drum is indispensable to the Kandyan dance. In Australia, folk traditions carried by settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland took root in the rural outback as bush ballads, performed by bush bards. The most famous, Waltzing Matilda, has been called the unofficial national anthem of Australia. Across Europe the polka, born in mid-19th-century Bohemia, spread to folk artists from Poland to Russia. In Latin America, the Nueva canción movement first surfaced in the 1960s as The Chilean New Song. With its political lyrics it became a precursor to Rock en español. By the start of the 21st century, the word folk could cover Donovan from Scotland and Bob Dylan from the United States, who emerged in the 1960s. The label no longer meant only the old songs.