Folk (1930–2026)

In the 1920s and 1930s American record companies recorded rural music: Appalachian singers, fiddlers, singing families like the Carter Family, bluesmen. Collectors such as John and Alan Lomax crossed the country for the Library of Congress. This heritage became the foundation of folk.

During the Great Depression, Woody Guthrie travelled America with his guitar, singing about the lives of poor people and migrant workers; in 1940 he wrote This Land Is Your Land. Pete Seeger carried on and got audiences singing. In the 1950s and 1960s the folk revival filled the coffee houses of Greenwich Village: Joan Baez, then Bob Dylan, who wrote protest songs before switching to electric guitar in 1965.

On acoustic guitar, folk developed valuable techniques: accompaniment in open chords, fingerpicking where the thumb alternates bass notes while the fingers play the melody (“Travis picking”), open tunings. John Fahey and his successors turned this into a personal instrumental music, “American primitive guitar”.

The word folk also covers revivals in other countries: British and Irish folk, French chanson with a focus on lyrics, nueva canción in Latin America. What they share: one voice, one instrument, words that matter.