Folk Music
Music transmitted by ear, and changed in the process.
Folk music is traditional music transmitted orally within a community rather than through written scores or commercial publication. Its authors are usually unknown, and its songs exist in many versions rather than one authoritative text.
Oral transmission produces variation
Because songs pass by ear, each singer adjusts words, melody and detail. A ballad collected in two valleys may share a plot and differ in almost everything else. That variation is not corruption — it is how the form works, and comparing variants is a central method in folk-song scholarship.
Common features
- Strophic form — the same tune repeated for each verse.
- Narrative content, often a ballad telling a complete story.
- Modal melodies rather than strict major and minor.
- Refrains and repeated lines, which aid memory.
- Instruments that are portable and locally made.
Collectors and revivals
From the late nineteenth century collectors including Cecil Sharp in England and John and Alan Lomax in the United States recorded and transcribed traditional songs, preserving material that was disappearing. The act of collecting also fixed variable songs into single printed versions, which changed the tradition it documented — a tension collectors were often aware of.
The mid-twentieth-century revival brought this repertoire to new audiences and produced a body of new songwriting in the idiom, which raised a durable question about whether composed songs in a traditional style are folk music at all.