Folk Music

“Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Waltzing with Bears” are just two songs that come to my mind when I think of folk music. Folk music can sometimes be hard to define, because like many different music genres, it has a history in which it developed and changed over time. For me, I am able to identify a couple of the different folk movements. When I think of traditional folk music, musicians like Greg Brown, Priscilla Herdman, Anne Hills, Woody Guthrie, and the Carter Family come to mind. Names like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger come to mind when I think of the folk revival that took place in the 1960’s.
Like all music genres, folk music has a heritage and a culture. It takes more than just an acoustic guitar to classify a piece of music as folk. A lot of folk music originated from a way of life. Folk music was the basis that helped to inspire other musical movements including rock and roll and jazz.
Folk music is very interesting to me, and while I know a little about different folk musicians there are a lot that I do not know. I am looking forward to learning more about folk music this semester. I hope to gain an even broader understanding of how folk music came to be and the role it has played in peoples lives over the years.