Charmain,

The definition of folk means it has to be around awhile and picked up. It has to be accepted and recognized. Just someone writing a song doesn't make it a folk song. Some day many popular songs will become folk songs as people accept them and make them their own.
Remember that a lot of popular songs require a production value from a recording. Earlier show songs or movie songs are too complicated to really be folk for the most part. Some songs like "Over the Rainbow" or "Blue Skies" are good candidates for future folk songs.
You draw the line when people pick up the songs in a couple of decades or more. It has to be mellowed by time. And usually there are different versions of the song called "variants".
But to say just because someone composes a song, it automatically becomes a "folk song" is silly.

Don Firth,

There is a rural peasant class and a working class today. As you say, it does exist in America and people are aware of it. This is supposed to be a democracy but we know that there are class lines and distinctions based on economics and education.

Big Bill's simplistic comment has confused people. i think when nailed to the wall, people would agree that contemporary pop songs or show, opera, etc. are not folk songs.

Some songs really reach large audiences and have gone into the area of folk songs. This Land Is Your Land is known throughout the world by schoolchildren of all ages. Country Roads was popular in many countries and might qualify easilly.

Greensleeves was essentially a show song in the time of Shakespeare. Was it sung by a peasant class? Could have been as many of the early songs the troubadors from Europe were picked up by rural classes. Greensleeves actually has variants. It was repopularized by Ralph Vaughan Williams but it remains in various tunes.

Dylan, Paxton don't yet qualify. Guthrie, maybe now since "This Land". Popularity of a song for a brief time doesn't give it folk status. Years from now, inconceivable as it may sound to wild-eyed officianados, Dylan's songs might be forgotten or place on an epochal back burner. Then again, "Imagine" might just take off and be remembered eras from now.Who can predict?   Not me.

One thing though, a folk song defies copyright. Why? Because one of the definitions is that it gets changed and reworked. It gets played and replayed and people who play it change it when it becomes relevant to do so.

I think that the reason it is defined at all is that people recognize it for being a folk song or at least a song written in a folk-style. In order to write convincingly in a folk-style, you have to know what a folk song is, sung them and lived with them. As great songwriters as Dylan or Paxton are, there is considerable doubt in my mind that they have written folk songs that stand the test of time. All you can say it we'll see.

But Barbara Allen is a folk song. It has many variants and has changed hands so many times that you can pick it up in different parts of the country or world.

I care about what folk songs are because I recognized the difference between them and art songs, show songs, recently composed songs and if you care to pin me down, I can tell you the difference in terms of music and lyric.

I think the closest to folk music maybe dirty street rhymes, schoolyard chants..."There's a place in France....", "glory Hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler" etc. and stuff associated with work or "Sound Off" from the army. Sometimes sayings get incorporated into songs.

In time, maybe the garage band tunes can become folk tunes. Is the style of playing "folk"? Well, when you get into the subject of what is a "folk performance"...now the waters become muddied. When Doc Watson does "Over The Rainbow", is it a folk song because he does it? I don't think so. (Yip Harburg would raise hell if you thought so.)
Most of the garage band doggerel isn't folk doggerel yet. Why? Because not enough people recognize those tunes and haven't assimilated them completely into their cultures.

So what are the lyrical and musical characteristics of a folk song? The lyrics are in process. They change. The tunes are messed with and sometimes messed up but change.
A song from the British Isles can wind up as an African-American work chant. Ex. Lowlands.

Sam Hinton put it best. A folk song in print or on a record is like a picture of a bird in flight.

Also, watch it when someone claims authorship of a folk song. That's really easy to do and they can clamp a copyright on it. John Jacob Niles apparently delighted in suing those who thought his songs were trad. On the other hand, he re-wrote some of those songs and claimed a copyright.

The Lomaxes copyrighted a lot of the songs they collected. Alan's rationale was that he was keeping the songs from being appropriated by folk-style songwriters looking for copyrights. He said he wanted to "protect" them.

"Streets of Laredo"/"St. James Hospital"/"St. James Infirmary"

"Rockin' The Cradle"/"Whoopee Ti Yi Yo

"Robert Kidd"/"Sam Hall"/"What Wondrous Love is This"

Others with many variants such as "Springfield Mountain"
"Ten Nights Drunk", "Katy Cruel", "Edward", "Geordie"......all defy copyrights and don't count as Art Songs, Pop Songs, Show Songs, Movie Songs...etc.

If Bing Crosby or Elvis sing a folk song, is it still a folk song? I think so.

If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, I say it's still a folk song.

Frank Hamilton




















I find myself interested in many discussions of "folk music," including the contributions of folks whose definition is very much different from my own, because I can apply their insights to the often-very-different traditions in which I am most interested. My understanding of what some such people have to say may be entirely different from what they had intended to communicate, in cases where their idea of "folk music" is nothing at all like my own, but it often leads to extremely interesting and valid conclusions.

As a New Orleanian, I have a number of favorite grassroots musical traditions. Some involve brass instruments; others are built around electric guitars and drums, and still others feature dissonant vocal chants accompanied only by the simplest percussion instruments. And, oh yeah, then there's the sound of huge gospel choirs accompanied by pipe organs, electric pianos, and rock-style rhythm sections.

As an Irish-American, I have a degree of interest (if not expertise) in deeply "traditional" Irish folk music, where songs are unaccompanied and instrumental tunes are never sung; also in more modernized versions of music from the same tradition, often performed along with contemporaray compositions in similar styles; and even in the most vilified, commercial, Americanized, sentimentally Irish songs like those popularized by, say, Bing Crosby. And just as I entertain an interest in this very broad spectrum of Irish music, I enjoy at least as wide a variety of American folk and popular song.

Years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I applied for a position at Rolling Stone magazine as a very simon-pure enthusiast of traditional blues music. The editor who interviewed me suggested I contact one of their freelance "stringers" who fairly regularly published articles about his own various quirky musical interests; maybe I would get a better idea of how to put together something I might be able to sell to the magazine. (An actual salaried position was obviously out of the question, at least for the moment.) The guy was very friendly and very interesting, but at the time I just couldn't accept the premise for his latest project: he was intent upon promoting the idea that Dick Dale's electric "surfer" guitar sound was a valid, genuine, American folk-music genre.

Even though I had long been willing to accept electric blues guitar as part of a genuine "folk" tradition, I was unable to buy into electric surf music as anything remotely comparable.

Now that I'm much older and hopefully at least a little bit wiser, I've come to believe that my would-be writing mentor was exactly correct: for my money, now, surfer-style rock ~ and indeed all forms of live "garage-band" rock 'n' roll ~ does indeed belong to a living musical tradition. And any insights that might apply to one tradition can validly ~ and quite interestingly ~ be applied to another tradition, even one that very few people would characterize as "folk." Hell, it's usually especially interesting to apply the insights of a "folk-music" discussion to an upstart or unconventional musical tradition.