Folk music and the guitar

The word folk means "people". In the 20th century it came to mean a music that carries traditional songs forward with simple means: a voice, a guitar (or a banjo, a harmonica), and words that matter. Its history is inseparable from that of records, radio and the great social movements.

The roots: recorded rural music

In the 1920s American record companies discovered that there was an audience for country people's music. In 1927, in Bristol, on the Tennessee–Virginia border, producer Ralph Peer recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers within a few days: these sessions are often seen as the starting point of country music. At the same time, Southern bluesmen were being recorded, along with fiddlers and Appalachian ballad singers, heirs to the old songs of Scotland, Ireland and England. The banjo, whose ancestors are African lutes, was part of this landscape.

John and Alan Lomax criss-crossed the United States for the Library of Congress; in 1933 they met the singer and guitarist Lead Belly in prison. In 1952 the Anthology of American Folk Music, a compilation of old 78s put together by Harry Smith, became the bible of a generation of young musicians.

Woody Guthrie and the protest song

During the Great Depression of the 1930s Woody Guthrie travelled America with his guitar, alongside ruined farmers and migrant workers. He wrote hundreds of songs about their lives, including This Land Is Your Land (1940). Pete Seeger, with his banjo and the group The Weavers, carried on the tradition: get the audience singing, stand up for causes.

The 1960s revival

In the late 1950s young students rediscovered these songs. The coffee houses of Greenwich Village in New York and the Newport Folk Festival (from 1959) became the stages of the folk revival: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, later Simon & Garfunkel. Folk went hand in hand with the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1965 at Newport Dylan played with an electric guitar and a rock band: part of the audience protested, but folk and rock never stopped mixing after that.

It was not only an American phenomenon: in Britain and Ireland guitarists such as Davy Graham and Bert Jansch invented a style mixing folk, blues and jazz (Graham popularised DADGAD tuning); in France the chanson à texte (Brassens, Brel, Barbara) put words first; in Latin America the nueva canción of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara sang of social justice.

Folk guitar: valuable techniques

• Open chords in the first positions, strummed with a pick or the fingers.
• Alternating-bass fingerpicking (popularised by Merle Travis, hence the name Travis picking): the thumb plays steady bass notes on the beats while the fingers add melody and notes between the beats. The guitar becomes a small band.
• Open tunings (open G, open D, DADGAD): the open strings form a chord and ring freely.

Here is the principle of alternating-bass picking in a generic example: the thumb alternates two bass notes on the beats (C and E, then G and D), the fingers play on the off-beats.

M:4/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=90
K:C clef=treble-8
"C" C G E c C G E c | "G7" G, B D f G, B D f | "C" C G E c C G E c | "C" [CEc]8 |]

American primitive guitar

In the late 1950s guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) invented an instrumental music for solo guitar unlike anything else: he mixed 1920s country blues, hymns, classical music and later Indian influences, in open tunings and with a thumb beating like a metronome. He jokingly called this style American primitive guitar, and founded his own label, Takoma, which also released Robbie Basho and Leo Kottke. In the 21st century Jack Rose (1971–2009) and other guitarists brought the tradition back to life with long, hypnotic pieces, sometimes close to ragtime, sometimes to Indian ragas.

What to listen for

• A voice in the foreground, often unpolished, telling a story.
• An acoustic guitar (or a banjo, a harmonica), simple chords.
• Strophic forms: verse, chorus, verse…
• For American primitive: solo guitar, stubborn bass lines, open tunings, long pieces that evolve slowly.

Listening list

• Anthology of American Folk Music (Harry Smith, 1952), the Carter Family, Lead Belly.
• Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, early Bob Dylan.
• John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, Jack Rose.