folk song definition of folk song in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

folk song, music of anonymous composition, transmitted orally. The theory that folk songs were originally group compositions has been modified in recent studies. These assume that the germ of a folk melody is produced by an individual and altered in transmission into a group-fashioned expression. National and ethnic individuality can be seen in folk music, even in the case of songs transplanted from one country to another. There is scarcely any people whose folk song is wholly indigenous, and among notable cases of transplanting is the English ballad found in various parts of the United States. Many of these were collected in the late 19th cent. by Francis Child Child, Francis James, 1825–96, American scholar, b. Boston, grad. Harvard, 1846. At Harvard he was professor of rhetoric (1851–76) and English literature (1876–96). He greatly influenced modern methods of Chaucer study.
..... Click the link for more information. and in the early 20th cent. by Cecil Sharp Sharp, Cecil James, 1859–1924, English musician, best known for his researches in English folk music. In 1911 he founded the English Folk Dance Society. In the United States he collected (1914–18) folk songs in the Appalachian Mts.
..... Click the link for more information. . In addition, many American folk songs are of other European or African origin. Americans occasionally consider as folk songs certain songs of traceable authorship, e.g., "Dixie."

Interest in folk music grew during the 19th cent., although there were earlier scholars in the field, such as Thomas Percy whose Reliques, a collection of English ballad texts, appeared in 1765. Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 vol., 1803) is a major source on Scottish ballads. Béla Bartók did outstanding work in notating the folk music of central Europe early in the 20th cent., and before him the Russian nationalist composers made use of their country's folk music. Conversely, folk song often shows the influence of formally composed music; this is particularly true of 17th- and 18th-century European folk song.

The collection and transcription of folk music was greatly facilitated by the invention of the phonograph and tape recorder. Using this equipment, John and Alan Lomax Alan Lomax, 1915–2002, b. Austin, Tex. In addition to the Leadbelly collection, father and son collaborated in compiling American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), Our Singing Country (1941), and, with Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Folk Song: U.S.A.
..... Click the link for more information. gathered many varieties of American folk songs from various cultural traditions throughout much of the 20th cent. Since the early 1950s folk music has become an especially significant influence and source for much popular vocal and instrumental music. Folksingers such as Woody Guthrie Arlo Guthrie, 1947–, b. New York City, is also a folk singer and composer. He is best known for "Alice's Restaurant," a rambling, witty song that was the basis of a motion picture in which he starred (1969).
..... Click the link for more information. and Pete Seeger Seeger, Pete, 1919–, American folksinger and composer, b. New York City. Seeger, the son of a musicologist and a musician, left Harvard in 1938 and made a journey through the United States, collecting songs and meeting Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly .
..... Click the link for more information. performed traditional songs and wrote their own songs in the folk idiom, an approach that was later used and modified by Bob Dylan Dylan, Bob (dĭl`ən), 1941–, American singer and composer, b. Duluth, Minn., as Robert Zimmerman.
..... Click the link for more information. , Joan Baez Baez, Joan (bīpstr;ĕz, bä`–), 1941–, American folk singer and political activist, b. New York City.
..... Click the link for more information. , and others.

See also ballad ballad, in literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th cent., and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. ; chantey chantey or shanty (both: shăn`tē)
..... Click the link for more information. ; spiritual spiritual, a religious folk song of American origin, particularly associated with African-American Protestants of the southern United States. The African-American spiritual, characterized by syncopation, polyrhythmic structure, and the pentatonic scale of five whole
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See J. A. Lomax and A. Lomax, Folk Songs, U.S.A. (1948); C. Haywood, ed., Folk Songs of the World (1966); W. R. Trask, ed., The Unwritten Song (1966); E. Martinengo-Cesaresco, Essays in the Study of Folksongs (1976); S. L. Forucci, A Folk Song History of America (1984); P. V. Bohlman, The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988); B. Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (2000).