   #copyright

Folk music

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Musical genres, styles,
eras and events

   Folk music, in the original sense of the term, is music by and for the
   common people.

   Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by
   mass communication and the commercialization of culture. It normally
   was shared by the entire community (and its performance not strictly
   limited to a special class of expert performers), and was transmitted
   by word of mouth.

   During the 20th and 21st centuries, folk music took on a second
   meaning: it describes a particular kind of popular music which is
   culturally descended from or otherwise influenced by traditional folk
   music. Like other popular music, this kind of folk music is most often
   performed by experts and is transmitted in organized performances and
   commercially distributed recordings. However, popular music has filled
   some of the roles and purposes of the folk music it has replaced.

   Folk music is somewhat synonymous with traditional music. Both terms
   are used semi-interchangeably amongst the general population; however,
   some musical communities that actively play living folkloric musics
   (see Irish traditional music and Traditional Filipino music for
   specific examples), have adopted the term traditional music as a means
   of distinguishing their music from the popular music called "folk
   music," especially the post-1960s " singer-songwriter" genre. See also:
   World music.

Defining folk song

   Armenian folk musicians
   Enlarge
   Armenian folk musicians

   "Folk song is usually seen as the authentic expression of a way of life
   now, past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or
   somehow revived). Unfortunately, despite the assembly of an enormous
   body of work over some two centuries, there is still no unanimity on
   what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) 'is'" (p.127).

   Gene Shay, co-founder and host of the Philadelphia Folk Festival,
   defined folk music in an April 2003 interview by saying: "In the
   strictest sense, it's music that is rarely written for profit. It's
   music that has endured and been passed down by oral tradition. [...]
   And folk music is participatory—you don't have to be a great musician
   to be a folk singer. [...] And finally, it brings a sense of community.
   It's the people's music."

   The English term folk, which gained usage in the 18th century (during
   the Romantic period) to refer to peasants or non-literate peoples, is
   related to the German word Volk (meaning people or nation). The term is
   used to emphasize that folk music emerges spontaneously from
   communities of ordinary people. "As the complexity of social
   stratification and interaction became clearer and increased, various
   conditioning criteria, such as 'continuity', 'tradition', 'oral
   transmission', 'anonymity' and uncommercial origins, became more
   important than simple social categories themselves."

   Charles Seeger (1980) describes three contemporary defining criteria of
   folk music (Middleton 1990, p.127-8):
    1. A "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal';
       'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'. Usually...folk music is
       associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and
       socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and
       possibly also a popular, musical culture." Cecil Sharp (1972), A.L.
       Lloyd ().
    2. "Cultural processes rather than abstract musical types...continuity
       and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a
       cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in
       the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies
       but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular
       cultures'." Redfield (1947) and Dundes (1965).
    3. Less prominent, "a rejection of rigid boundaries, preferring a
       conception, simply of varying practice within one field, that of
       'music'."

   David Harker (1985) argues that "folk music" is, in Peter van der
   Merwe's words, "a meaningless term invented by 'bourgeois'
   commentators". Jazz musician Louis Armstrong and blues musician Big
   Bill Broonzy have both been attributed the remark "All music is folk
   music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."

Subjects of folk music

   Apart from instrumental music that forms a part of folk music,
   especially dance music traditions, much folk music is vocal music,
   since the instrument that makes such music is usually handy. As such,
   most folk music has lyrics, and is about something.

   Narrative verse looms large in the folk music of many cultures. This
   encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry, much of which was
   meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by
   instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together
   from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains
   their episodic structure and often their in medias res plot
   developments. Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate the
   outcomes of battles and other tragedies or natural disasters.
   Sometimes, as in the triumphant Song of Deborah found in the Biblical
   Book of Judges, these songs celebrate victory. Laments for lost battles
   and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many
   folk traditions; these laments keep alive the cause for which the
   battle was fought. The narratives of folk songs often also remember
   folk heroes such as John Henry to Robin Hood. Some folk song narratives
   recall supernatural events or mysterious deaths.

   Hymns and other forms of religious music are often of traditional and
   unknown origin. Western musical notation was originally created to
   preserve the lines of Gregorian chant, which before its invention was
   taught as an oral tradition in monastic communities. Folk songs such as
   Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in a mnemonic form. In
   the Western world, Christmas carols and other traditional songs
   preserve religious lore in song form.

   Other sorts of folk songs are less exalted. Work songs are composed;
   they frequently feature call and response structures, and are designed
   to enable the labourers who sing them to coordinate their efforts in
   accordance with the rhythms of the songs. In the American armed forces,
   a lively tradition of jody calls ("Duckworth chants") are sung while
   soldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made use of a large
   body of sea shanties. Love poetry, often of a tragic or regretful
   nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. Nursery rhymes and
   nonsense verse also are frequent subjects of folk songs.

Variation in folk music

   Music transmitted by word of mouth though a community will, in time,
   develop many variants, because this kind of transmission cannot produce
   word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy. Indeed, many traditional folk
   singers are quite creative and deliberately modify the material they
   learn.

   Because variants proliferate naturally, it is naïve to believe that
   there is such a thing as the single "authentic" version of a ballad
   such as " Barbara Allen." Field researchers in folk song (see below)
   have encountered countless versions of this ballad throughout the
   English-speaking world, and these versions often differ greatly from
   each other. None can reliably claim to be the original, and it is quite
   possible that whatever the "original" was, it ceased to be sung
   centuries ago. Any version can lay an equal claim to authenticity, so
   long as it is truly from a traditional folksinging community and not
   the work of an outside editor.

   Cecil Sharp had an influential idea about the process of folk
   variation: he felt that the competing variants of a folk song would
   undergo a process akin to biological natural selection: only those new
   variants that were the most appealing to ordinary singers would be
   picked up by others and transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time we
   would expect each folksong to become esthetically ever more appealing —
   it would be collectively composed to perfection, as it were, by the
   community.

   On the other hand, there is also evidence to support the view that
   transmission of folk songs can be rather sloppy. Occasionally,
   collected folk song versions include material or verses incorporated
   from different songs that makes little sense in its context.

The decline of folk traditions in modern societies

   Folk music seems to reflect a universal impulse of humanity. No
   fieldwork expedition by cultural anthropologists has yet discovered a
   preindustrial people that did not have its own folk music. It seems
   safe to infer that folk music was a property of all people starting
   from the dawn of the species.

   However, the development of modern society--first literacy, then the
   conversion of culture into a salable commodity--created a new form of
   transmission of music that first influenced, then in some societies
   essentially eliminated the original folk tradition. The decline of folk
   music in a culture can be followed through three stages.

Stage I: Urban influence

   One of the first folk traditions impacted by modern society was the
   folksong of rural England. Starting in Elizabethan times, urban poets
   wrote broadsheet ballads that (thanks to printing) could be sold
   widely. The ballads probably didn't need musical notation, since they
   would have been sung to tunes that everybody knew, the folk tradition
   being very much alive at the time. These ballads heavily influenced the
   folk tradition, but did not override it. In fact, the folk tradition
   showed great resilience. Through the process of folk transmission, the
   urban ballads were modified, keeping the more vivid content and ironing
   out the less "citified" material. The resulting body of folk lyrics is
   widely considered to be a very appealing blend. Thus, the printing
   press and widespread literacy did not suffice to destroy the English
   folk tradition, but in some ways enriched it.

   The English folk song legacy was probably affected by urban melodies as
   well as words. The clue here is that folk music in remote rural areas
   of the English-speaking world, such as Highland Scotland or the
   Appalachian mountains, abounds in tunes that employ the pentatonic
   scale, a scale widely used for folk music around the world. However,
   pentatonic music was rare among the rural English villagers who first
   volunteered their tunes to researchers in the late 19th century. A
   plausible explanation is that life in rural England was far more
   closely affected by the proximity to the urban centers. Music in the
   standard major and minor scales evidently penetrated to the nearby
   rural areas, where it was converted to folk idiom, but nevertheless
   succeeded in displacing the old pentatonic music.

Stage II: Replacement of folk music by popular music

   The pattern of urban influence on folk music was intensified to
   outright destruction as soon as the capitalist economic system had
   developed to the point that music could be packaged and distributed for
   the purpose of earning a profit--in other words, when popular music was
   born. It was around Victorian times that ordinary people of the Western
   world were first offered music as a mass commodity, for example, in the
   phenomenon of music hall.

   The introduction of popular music was simultaneous with the latter part
   of the Industrial Revolution. This was a time of great change in
   lifestyle for the great body of the people, notably the migration of
   the old agrarian communities to the new industrial ones. It is likely
   that the resulting social disruption helped cut people's emotional
   bonds to their old folk music, and thereby helped the shift in taste
   toward popular music.

   As technology advanced, succeeding generations became enticed with
   popular music in ever more accessible and desirable forms. Gramophone
   records became LPs and then CDs; the music hall gave way to radio,
   followed by television. With the ever-increasing success of popular
   music, the musical life of many individuals eventually ceased to
   include any folk music at all. Moreover, since popular music for most
   people is passive music (that is, listened to, but not created or
   performed), the overwhelming success of popular music also entailed a
   sharp decline of music as an active, participatory activity.

Stage III: Loss of musical ability in the community

   The terminal state of the loss of folk music can be seen in the United
   States, as well as across the globe thanks to the digital revolution
   where even in "isolated" indigenous communities traditional folk music
   is now threatened. Inability to sing is apparently unusual in so called
   traditional societies, such as the Urarina of the Peruvian Amazon.
   Among the Urarina, one notes that the customary practice of singing
   folk songs, shamanic chants and myths begins in early childhood .
   Urarina shaman, 1988
   Enlarge
   Urarina shaman, 1988

   This in turn democratizes musical expression, and as such everyone gets
   the practice needed to be able to sing at least reasonably well. In the
   absence of traditional or folk music, many indigenous individuals do
   not sing.

   In some instances, it is possible that non-singers feel intimidated by
   their widespread exposure to recordings and broadcasting of singing by
   skilled experts. Another possibility is that they simply cannot sing,
   because they did not learn to sing when they were small children, the
   time that learning of cultral orality takes place most effectively.

   As recently as the 1960s audiences at U.S. sporting events collectively
   sang the American national anthem before a game; the anthem is now
   typically performed by a recording or a soloist.

Regional variation

   The loss of folk music is occurring at different rates in different
   regions of the world. Naturally, where industrialization and
   commercialization of culture are most advanced, so tends to be the loss
   of folk music. Yet in nations or regions where folk music is a badge of
   cultural or national identity, the loss of folk music can be slowed;
   this is held to be true, for instance in the case of Bangladesh,
   Hungary, India, Ireland, Turkey, Brittany, and Galicia, Greece and
   Crete all of which retain their traditional music to some degree, in
   some such areas the decline of folk music and loss of traditions has
   been reversed such as Cornwall.

Fieldwork and scholarship on folk music

   Starting in the 19th century, interested people - academics and amateur
   scholars - started to take note of what was being lost, and there grew
   various efforts aimed at preserving the music of the people. One such
   effort was the collection by Francis James Child in the late 19th
   century of the texts of over three hundred ballads in the English and
   Scots traditions (called the Child Ballads). Contemporaneously came the
   Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, and later and more significantly Cecil
   Sharp who worked in the early 20th century to preserve a great body of
   English rural folk song, music and dance, under the aegis of what
   became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS).
   Sharp also worked in America, recording the folk songs of the
   Appalachian Mountains in 1916-1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles
   and Olive Dame Campbell.

   Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong
   interest in folk song collecting, and a number of outstanding composers
   carried out their own field work on folk song. These included Percy
   Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in
   Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, incorporated
   folk material into their classical compositions.

   In America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked
   through the offices of musicologist Alan Lomax and others to capture as
   much American field material as possible.

   People who studied folk song sometimes hoped that their work would
   restore folk music to the people. For instance, Cecil Sharp campaigned,
   with some success, to have English folk songs (in his own heavily
   edited and expurgated versions) to be taught to schoolchildren.

   One theme that runs through the great period of scholarly folk song
   collection is the tendency of certain members of the "folk", who were
   supposed to be the object of study, to become scholars and advocates
   themselves. For example, Jean Ritchie was the youngest child of a large
   family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old
   Appalachian folk songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians
   had opened up to outside influence, was university educated and
   ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic
   recordings of the family repertoire and published an important
   compilation of these songs. (See also Hedy West.)

Folk revivals

   As folk traditions decline, there is often a conscious effort to
   resuscitate them. Such efforts are often exerted by bridge figures such
   as Jean Ritchie, described above. Folk revivals also involve
   collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants
   (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults.

   The folk revival of the 1950s in Britain and America had something of
   this character. In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Britain, where at a Working
   Men's Club in the remote County Durham mining village of Tow Law he met
   two other seminal figures: A.L.'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who were
   performing folk music to the locals there. Lloyd was a colourful figure
   who had travelled the world and worked at such varied occupations as
   sheep-shearer in Australia and shanty-man on a whaling ship. MacColl,
   born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and
   songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life.
   MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs
   from his mother. The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is
   credited with being the point at which the British roots revival began.
   The two colleagues went back to London where they formed the Ballads
   and Blues Club which eventually became renamed the Singers' Club and
   was the first, as well as the most enduring, of what became known as
   folk clubs. As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival
   movement built up in both Britain and America.

   We must mention too Brittany's Folk revival beginning in the 50s with
   the "bagadoù" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame
   through Alan Stivell 's work since the mid 60s.

   Another example is the Hungarian model, the tanchaz movement. This
   model involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and
   enthusiastic amateurs, resulting in a strong vocational foundation and
   a very high professional level. They also had the advantage that rich,
   living traditions of Hungarian folk music and folk culture still
   survived in rural areas, especially in Transylvania. The involvement of
   experts meant an effort to understand and revive folk traditions in
   their full complexity. Music, dance, and costumes remained together as
   they once had been in the rural communities: rather than merely
   reviving folk music, the movement revived broader folk traditions.
   Started in the 1970s, tanchaz soon became a massive movement creating
   an alternative leisure activity for youths apart from discos and music
   clubs—or one could say that it created a new kind of music club. The
   tanchaz movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities around the
   world. Today, almost every major city in the U.S. and Australia has its
   own Hungarian folk music and folk dance group; there are also groups in
   Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina and Western Europe.

   See also: blues, Harry Everett Smith.

The emergence of popular folk artists

   During the twentieth century, a crucial change in the history of folk
   music began. Folk material came to be adopted by talented performers,
   performed by them in concerts, and disseminated by recordings and
   broadcasting. In other words, a new genre of popular music had arisen.
   This genre was linked by nostalgia and imitation to the original
   traditions of folk music as it was sung by ordinary people. However, as
   a popular genre it quickly evolved to be quite different from its
   original roots.

   The rise of folk music as a popular genre began with performers whose
   own lives were rooted in the authentic folk tradition. Thus, for
   example, Woody Guthrie began by singing songs he remembered his mother
   singing to him as a child. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Guthrie both
   collected folk music and also composed his own songs, as did Pete
   Seeger, who was the son of a professional musicologist. Through
   dissemination on commercial recordings, this vein of music became
   popular in the United States during the 1950s, through singers like the
   Weavers (Seeger's group), Burl Ives, The Limeliters, Harry Belafonte
   and the Kingston Trio, who tried to reproduce and honour the work that
   had been collected in preceding decades. The commercial popularity of
   such performers probably peaked in the U.S. with the ABC Hootenanny
   television series in 1963, 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.

   Many of this group of popular folk singers maintained an idealistic,
   leftist/progressive political orientation. This is perhaps not
   surprising. 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, 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 Britain, 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.

   However, it wasn’t until the second half of the 1990s that folk music
   began to make even a small impact on mainstream music. A new generation
   had emerged, 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, and the skill level of players and
   singers extremely high. 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 The English Patient 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.

   As less traditional forms of folk music gain popularity, one often
   observes tension between so-called "purists" or "traditionalists" and
   the innovators. For example, traditionalists were indignant when Bob
   Dylan began to use an electric guitar. His electrified performance at
   the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was to prove to be an early focal point
   for this controversy.

   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, The Mamas and the Papas.

   Outside the English-speaking world, the Breton artist Alan Stivell (a
   Celtic harpist, multi-instrumentist 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", fuelled 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 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 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, Ani
   DiFranco, 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.

   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.

   One of the more unusual offshoots of modern folk music is the genre now
   known as filk, a form of music defined primarily by who its audience
   is.

   Another trend is "antifolk," begun in New York City in the 1980s by
   Lach in response to the confines 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 's, Roger Manning, Royal Pine , Matt Singer , Phoebe
   Kreutz and Curtis Eller continue to push the envelope of "folk."

   Folk music is still extremely 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 fifteen
   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 A Mighty Wind by Christopher Guest
   and Eugene Levy.

   In the magazine fRoots 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 Gilligan's Island (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 as
   parodies of folk songs, 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.

   Folkies 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.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_music"
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