Folk once meant anonymous songs; then Dylan shared the name
Folk music covers both traditional songs passed by ear and the twentieth-century revival that turned “folk” into a popular genre. Definitions stress oral transmission, unknown authors, community remaking, or national identity—yet scholars still argue the border with art and commercial song.
The label grew from folklore, coined in 1846 by English antiquarian William Thoms for “uncultured” customs, itself echoing German Volk via Johann Gottfried Herder and the Romantics. Cecil Sharp, Béla Bartók, and Percy Scholes heard countryside authenticity against town and print; A. L. Lloyd preferred class lines, placing folk among tribal, art, folk, and popular types. The International Folk Music Council allowed individually composed pieces only once absorbed into living unwritten tradition—not songs taken ready-made and left unchanged.
Traditional traits include oral learning before widespread literacy, ties to regional or immigrant identity, calendrical and life-cycle songs, and multigenerational custom. Copyright often dissolved for nineteenth-century pieces still circulating orally, though since the 1940s recordings usually credit arrangers. Tunes are short, often AABB binary forms grouped in tune-families; performers once improvised chords from sparse broadsides. Work songs timed planting and milling; narrative verse kept heroes such as John Henry and Robin Hood, victory hymns like Deborah’s song, and laments. Immigrant communities from Greek Australians to Punjabi Canadians still learn ancestral songs as social glue across generations.
Mid-century’s second folk revival peaked in the 1960s as contemporary folk—fixed songs by known writers imitating traditional styles, plus fusions such as folk rock and folk metal. Grammy categories tracked the split: a Folk award in 1959, later Traditional versus Contemporary labels, while names like Bob Dylan and Donovan stretched “folk” beyond anonymous heritage.
By the twenty-first century the word could mean singer-songwriters as readily as village repertories.
Source: Folk music
