| One of the original strands
of American and British popular music, the notion of "folk music" evoked a pre-industrial age of relative innocence and harmonious community. The concept itself
represented a popular conceit among both scholars and lay people as a means of
describing the music of they associated with rural culture. In general,
they intended that it should include music that performers did not conceive
as art, but rather, as commonplace expressions. Also inherent in this
perception was the precognition that it was pure and untainted by industrial
urban life. Of course, this highly romanticized view of rural culture
has its roots in the pastoral depictions of previous ages and associates
purity and naïveté with a life that was often rugged and impoverished. |
| British and American popular
artists had long tapped into this popular middle-class notion, composing
songs that claimed to represent the plights and joys of living in rural
poverty. Artists such as Henry Russell (an Englishman who introduced Americans
to the idea of songs as vehicles of social complaint in the 1830s) and
Stephen Foster (who made the art form American) were the ancestors of
people like Woody Guthrie (who saw his songs as tools against fascism).
Bob Dylan is a direct link in this chain. British and American musicians
in the 1960s took an interest in "folk" and "folk rock" with elements
of American social commentary and British traditionalism. |
| The influence
of "psychedelic" culture transformed British interest in arcane ballads
into a celebration of an Arthurian world, with a heavy emphasis on the
mystical. After the initial wave of folk revivalists and transformers (e.g., John Renbourne) the notion of the folk musician took some unusual and rather unfolklike twists. |