and the associated magazine in 1963–1964, which was cancelled after the arrival of the Beatles, the "British invasion" and the rise of folk rock. The itinerant folksinger lifestyle was exemplified by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, a disciple of Woody Guthrie who in turn influenced Bob Dylan. Sometimes these performers would locate scholarly work in libraries and revive the songs in their recordings, for example, in Joan Baez's rendition of "Henry Martin," which adds a guitar accompaniment to a version collected and edited by Cecil Sharp.
Publications like Sing Out! magazine helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did folk-revival-oriented record companies. Folk music is easily identified with the ordinary working people who created it, and preserving treasured things against the claimed relentless encroachments of capitalism is likewise a goal of many politically progressive people.
Thus, in the 1960s such singers as Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan followed in Guthrie's footsteps and to begin writing "protest music" and topical songs, particularly against the Vietnam War, and likewise expressed in song their support for the American Civil Rights Movement. The influential Welsh-language singer-songwriter, Dafydd Iwan, may also be mentioned as a similar example operating in a different cultural context. Some critics, especially proponents of the ethnocentric Neofolk genre, claim that this type of American 'progressive' folk is not folk music at all, but 'antifolk'.
This is based on the idea that as liberal politics supposedly eschews the importance of ethnicity, it is incompatible with all folkish traditions. Proponents of this view often cite romantic nationalism as the only political tradition that 'fits' with folk music. In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers Tommy Makem (although the members were all Irish born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village, it must be noted), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, Lynched, The Pogues and a variety of other folk bands have done much over recent years to revitalise and repopularise Irish traditional music.
These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a living tradition of Irish music, and they benefitted from collection efforts on the part of the likes of Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy, among others. In the United Kingdom, the folk revival didn’t create any popular stars (although Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” would eventually prove to be a hit for other artists), but it helped raise the profile of the music, and folk clubs sprang up all over, a boon to young artists like Martin Carthy and Roy Bailey who emerged. It also inspired a generation of singer-songwriters, such as Ralph McTell (whose “Streets Of London” would become a hit), Donovan, Roy Harper and many others.
Bob Dylan came to London to check out the growing folk scene of the early 1960s, and Paul Simon spent several months there; his version of “Scarborough Fair” owed a lot to Carthy’s take on the song. Folk didn’t hit any kind of mass popularity until the electric folk movement of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span took old songs and mixed their tunes with rock. Both bands had hit singles and albums that sold well, bringing a new audience to traditional music.
The revival of the fifties and sixies had mostly died out by 1975. There was another revival in the second half of the 1990s. Once more folk music made an impact on mainstream music.
There was a younger generation of artists, in some cases children of revival-inspired artists; (Eliza Carthy, for example, is the daughter of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson). This time, notably, the instrumentation was largely acoustic, rather than electric. The skill level of players and singers was as high as before.
As the number of summer folk festivals increased, so more talented performers have come in, and folk music has found at least a toehold in the mainstream with artists like Kate Rusby and Spiers and Boden featured in the press. In Hungary, the group Muzsikás and the singer Márta Sebestyén became known throughout the world due to their numerous American tours and their participation in the Hollywood movie and Sebestyén's work with the Deep Forest band. The blending of folk and popular genres The experience of the last century suggests that as soon as a folk tradition comes to be marketed as popular music, its musical content will quickly be modified to become more like popular music.
Such modified folk music often incorporates electric guitars, drum kit, or forms of rhythmic syncopation that are characteristic of popular music but were absent in the original. One example of this sort is contemporary country music, which descends ultimately from a rural American folk tradition, but has evolved to become vastly different from its original model. Rap music evolved from an African-American inner-city folk tradition, but is likewise very different nowadays from its folk original.
A third example is contemporary bluegrass, which is a professionalised development of American old time music, intermixed with blues and jazz. Sometimes, however, the exponents of amplified music were bands such as Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Mr. Fox and Steeleye Span who saw the electrification of traditional musical forms as a means to reach a far wider audience, and their efforts have been largely recognised for what they were by even some of the most die-hard of purists.
Traditional folk music forms also merged with rock and roll to form the hybrid generally known as folk rock which evolved through performers such as The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel and The Mamas and the Papas. Outside the English-speaking world, the Breton artist Alan Stivell (a Celtic harpist, multi-instrumentalist and singer) has also fused folk music with rock and other influences. His tours and records since the mid-1960s have also influenced the work of many musicians everywhere.
Since the 1970s a genre of "contemporary folk", fueled by new singer-songwriters, has continued to make the coffee-house circuit and keep the tradition of acoustic non-classical music alive in the United States. Such artists include Dawn Xiana Moon, Chris Castle, Steve Goodman, John Prine, Cheryl Wheeler, Bill Morrissey, and Christine Lavin. Lavin in particular has become prominent as a leading promoter of this musical genre in recent years.
Some, such as Lavin and Wheeler, inject a great deal of humor in their songs and performances, although much of their music is also deeply personal and sometimes satirical. While from Ireland The Pogues and The Corrs brought traditional tunes back into the album charts. In the 1980s a group of artists like Phranc and The Knitters propagated a form of folk music also called country punk, cowpunk or folk punk, which eventually evolved into Alt country.
More recently the same spirit has been embraced and expanded on by performers such as Dave Alvin, Miranda Stone and Steve Earle. At the same time, a line of singers from Baez to Phil Ochs have continued to use traditional forms for original material. The appropriation of folk has even continued into hard rock and heavy metal, with bands such as Skyclad, Waylander and Finntroll melding distinctive elements of folk styles from a wide variety of traditions, including in many cases traditional instruments such as fiddles, tin whistles and bagpipes as an element of their sound.
Unlike other folk-related genres, folk metal shies away from monotheistic religion in favour of more ancient pagan inspired themes. Folk inspirations are a massive part of subgenres of black metal, with genres such as viking metal being defined on their folk stance, and many a band incorporating folk interludes into albums (eg, Bergtatt and Kveldssanger, the first two albums by once-black metal, now-experimental band Ulver). A similar stylistic shift, without using the "folk music" name, has occurred with the phenomenon of Celtic music, which in many cases is based on an amalgamation of Irish traditional music, Scottish traditional music, and other traditional musics associated with lands in which Celtic languages are or were spoken (a significant research showing that the musics have any genuine genetic relationship is still to be done - at this point, only a book in French written by Alan Stivell studies a bit the subject of Celtic Music-); so Breton music and Galician music are often included in the genre).
Neofolk music is a modern form of music that began in the 1980s. Fusing traditional European folk music with post-industrial music forms, historical topics, philosophical commentary, traditional songs and paganism, the genre is largely European. Although it is not uncommon for neofolk artists to be entirely acoustic, playing with entirely traditional instruments.
Another trend is "antifolk," begun in New York City in the 1980s by Lach [1] in response to the confined traditional folk music. It now has a home at the Antihootenany in the East Village, where artists like Beck, the Moldy Peaches and Nellie McKay got their starts, and artists such as Robin Aigner, Roger Manning, Royal Pine[2], Matt Singer[3], Little Glitches [4], Phoebe Kreutz and Curtis Eller[5] continue to push the envelope of "folk." The Contemporary Christian Music scene has also been emerging with its own form of folk singers, including David M.
Bailey, the Smalltown Poets and others. Folk music is still popular among some audiences today, with folk music clubs meeting to share traditional-style songs, and there are major folk music festivals in many countries, eg the Port Fairy Folk Festival is a major annual event in Australia attracting top international folk performers as well as many local artists. Indeed, even for those who consider themselves hip, the arrival of Americana and the music of Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Devendra Banhart and Travis MacRae has shown that folk music can still be cutting edge.
The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is always sold out within days, and is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or 15 minutes each, present their work to the festival audience. Pastiche and parody Popular culture sometimes creates pastiches of folk music for its own ends.
One famous example is the pseudo-ballad sung about brave Sir Robin in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail Enthusiasts for folk music might properly consider this song to be pastiche and not parody, because the tune is pleasant and far from inept, and the topic being lampooned is not balladry but the medieval heroic tradition. The arch-shaped melodic form of this song (first and last lines low in pitch, middle lines high) is characteristic of traditional English folk music. A more recent similarly incisive send-up of folk music, this time American in origin, is the film by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy.
In the magazine there was a long-running parody of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). They were called "Dance Earnestly and Forget About Song Society" (DEAFASS). DEAFASS supporters favored the accordion over the melodeon and the string bass over the electric bass.
Another instance of pastiche is the notoriously well-known theme song for the television show (music by George Wyle, lyrics by Sherwood Schwartz). This tune is also folk-like in character, and in fact is written in a traditional folk mode (modes are a type of musical scale); the mode of "Gilligan's Island" is ambiguous between Dorian and Aeolian. The lyrics begin with the traditional folk device in which the singer invites his hearers to listen to the tale that follows.
Moreover, two of the stanzas repeat the final short line, a common device in English folk stanzas. However, the raising of the key by a semitone with each new verse is an unmistakable trait of commercial music and never occurred in the original folk tradition. Folk music is easy to parody because it is, at present, a popular music genre that relies on a traditional music genre.
As such, it is likely to lack the sophistication and glamour that attach to other forms of popular music. Folk music satire ranges from the worst excesses of Rambling Syd Rumpo and Bill Oddie to the deft and subtle artistry of Sid Kipper, Eric Idle and Tom Lehrer. Even "serious" folk musicians are not averse to poking fun at the form from time to time, for example Martin Carthy's devastating rendition of "All the Hard Cheese of Old England" (written by Les Barker), to the tune of "All the Hard Times of Old England", Robb Johnson's "Lack of Jolly Ploughboy," and more recently "I'm Sending an E-mail to Santa" by the Yorkshire-based harmony group Artisan.
Other musicians have been known to take the tune of a traditional folk song and add their own words, often humorous, or on a similar-sounding yet different subject; these include The Wurzels, The Incredible Dr. Busker and The Mrs Ackroyd Band. Filk music is a closely related musical genre which originated in the science fiction community, and parody remains a dominant theme of the style.
It is evolving into a true folk tradition, however, with songs learned orally that are undergoing the "folk process" of change in melody and text. is the popular term for folk music enthusiasts. While the term itself is neutral and is used by some folk music enthusiasts in an informal and friendly manner, it has at times been used by the popular press at least since the late 1950s, as part of a light-hearted beatnik stereotype.
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