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Saturday 14 February 2015

Folk Song

In the 18th century folk music started to have an influence on classical music. People from the higher classes started to be interested in folk music because they were conscious of being part of a tradition.

The English term "folklore", to describe traditional folk music and dance was coined in 1846 by the English antiquarian William Thoms.

John Lomax was the first prominent scholar to study distinctly American folk music such as that of cowboys and southern blacks. His first major published work was in 1911, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

John Lomax and his son Alan  begun in 1933 their series of influential folk music recordings for the Library of Congress;. They traveled mostly throughout the south and west of America and with the funding they were given, replaced their old horn-and-cylinder recording machine with a battery powered microphone and disc-cutting machine. Over the years they recorded some 10,000 songs.


The Southern American folk song, "Come By Here", when recorded by academics, was misheard, and was retitled, "Kumbaya".

Starting in the mid-20th century a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This started in 1940 with The Almanac Singers (including the pioneering singer Pete Seeger).
The process and period known as the (second) folk revival reached a zenith in the 1960s.

Pete Seeger's 1955 Bantu Choral Folk Songs was the first recording of black folk by a white artist

The post–World War II folk revival in America and in Britain started a new genre, contemporary folk music and brought an additional meaning to the term folk music. By the start of the 21st century, “folk” could cover singer song-writers, such as Donovan and Bob Dylan, who emerged in the 1960s.

The melody to the medieval English folk song "Nottamun Town" was considered lost to history until musicologists found isolated, illiterate, populations in Appalachia singing the song with a common melody and lyrics.

Narcocorridos, or "drug ballads," are Mexican folk songs that describe real drug smugglers and their activities in a heroic light.

Source Wikipedia

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