Oral Roots
Folk music predates the concept of a composer. Its defining mechanism is oral transmission: songs passed from parent to child, worker to worker, congregation to congregation, changing with each singer. The term “folk song” entered English in 1871 as a translation of the German “Volkslied,” coined a century earlier by Johann Gottfried Herder, who argued that the truest expression of a nation lived in its common people’s songs. But the music itself is far older. The manuscript for the English ballad “Judas” dates to the thirteenth century. A printed “Gest of Robyn Hode” appeared in the late fifteenth century. These are written traces of a tradition that existed entirely in memory long before anyone set it down.
Francis James Child, Harvard’s first Professor of English from 1876, catalogued 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland. His collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, was published between 1882 and 1898. The “Child Ballads” remain a foundational reference, their subjects ranging from the supernatural to murder, feuds, and historical events. In the early 1900s, the English collector Cecil Sharp traveled to Appalachia and found many of these same ballads still being sung, carried across the Atlantic by settlers centuries earlier. Between 1916 and 1918, Sharp collected 1,612 songs from 281 singers in five states.
Guthrie, Seeger, and the Political Song
Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, released by Victor Records in 1940, is often cited as the first folk concept album. Recorded at Victor’s studios in Camden, New Jersey, the album chronicles the Dust Bowl disaster through talking blues and narrative balladry. Every song addresses the same subject: dispossessed farmers, dust storms, migration westward. Guthrie wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar. His approach treated melody as a vehicle for reportage, and that equation between folk form and political content would define the genre for decades.
Pete Seeger carried the principle into collective action. He co-founded the Almanac Singers in 1941 with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, a group that functioned as a singing newspaper for labor unions. In 1948, Seeger and Hays formed the Weavers, whose recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” topped the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks in 1950. At the height of their popularity, McCarthyist blacklisting ended their bookings and radio play.
The Revival
In 1952, the filmmaker Harry Smith assembled the Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways Records: eighty-four recordings from the 1920s and 1930s organized into three volumes titled “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs.” By 1953, Folkways had sold only fifty copies, forty-seven to libraries. But those copies reached the right hands. The Anthology became the shared curriculum of the folk revival, teaching young musicians a repertoire buried in out-of-print 78s.
The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” hit number one in 1958, signaling commercial appetite for folk on college campuses. Joan Baez’s self-titled debut, recorded at Manhattan Towers Hotel in July 1960 for Vanguard Records, contained thirteen traditional songs. It went gold and stayed on the charts over two years. Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, shifted the genre from traditional material to original composition. His debut had contained only two originals; Freewheelin’ had eleven of thirteen. “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” used the cadences of traditional balladry to address the civil rights movement and nuclear anxiety with nothing but voice, guitar, and harmonica.
Across the Atlantic
The British folk revival ran on a parallel track with distinct source material. Shirley Collins worked directly from the English traditional repertoire. Her 1969 album Anthems in Eden, made with her sister Dolly Collins and David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London, paired folk songs with viols, sackbuts, and crumhorns. The suite on Side A arranged traditional songs into a narrative of rural English life before the First World War.
Anne Briggs carried the unaccompanied ballad tradition into the 1960s folk club circuit. She taught Bert Jansch “Blackwater Side,” which Jansch recorded and which later became the template for Jimmy Page’s “Black Mountain Side” on Led Zeppelin’s debut. Jansch’s self-titled 1965 album, recorded in a London flat on a borrowed guitar with a portable tape recorder, sold 150,000 copies and fused British folk with blues and jazz fingerpicking.
Fairport Convention started playing American folk rock covers but changed course in 1969. Liege and Lief, their fourth album, applied electric instruments to traditional English and Celtic material. Sandy Denny sang lead on Child Ballads like “Matty Groves” and “Tam Lin,” while Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle connected the arrangements to the dance music tradition. The album set a template for British folk rock that Steeleye Span and others built on through the 1970s.
The Solo Voice
Folk keeps returning to the near-unaccompanied voice. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, released in February 1972, is Drake on vocals and acoustic guitar across eleven songs, with a single piano overdub on the title track. The album runs twenty-eight minutes and sold negligibly during his lifetime. John Fahey’s 1959 debut Blind Joe Death, pressed in a run of one hundred copies on his own Takoma label, presented steel-string guitar instrumentals drawing equally on Delta blues and twentieth-century classical dissonance. Fahey called the approach “American Primitive Guitar” and sold copies at the gas station where he worked.
Gillian Welch’s Revival, produced by T Bone Burnett in 1996, demonstrated that folk’s formal structures could still produce new music indistinguishable in feel from its sources. Welch and guitarist David Rawlings built most arrangements from two acoustic guitars and two voices, drawing on Appalachian balladry and Depression-era country. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Essential Listening
- Woody Guthrie – Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)
- Joan Baez – Joan Baez (1960)
- Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)
- Bert Jansch – Bert Jansch (1965)
- Shirley and Dolly Collins – Anthems in Eden (1969)
- Fairport Convention – Liege and Lief (1969)
- Pentangle – Basket of Light (1969)
- Vashti Bunyan – Just Another Diamond Day (1970)
- Joni Mitchell – Blue (1971)
- Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)
- Richard and Linda Thompson – Shoot Out the Lights (1982)
- Gillian Welch – Revival (1996)