Folk

Folk in the 1920s was not yet a genre you could buy. It was a field of study. John Lomax had published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910 after collecting them on horseback, and spent the 1920s working in a Dallas bank before the Library of Congress work that made him famous. Carl Sandburg, the poet, published The American Songbag in 1927: 280 songs, a hundred never printed before, gathered from hoboes, union men and college students, with piano arrangements so families could sing them. It stayed in print for seventy years.

The irony is that the record companies were doing the same work by accident. Every "hillbilly" and "race" field session captured ballads, hymns and dance tunes that had lived only in memory. When Harry Smith assembled his Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, almost everything on it was a commercial 78 from 1927 to 1932. The folk revival of the 1960s was built on records this decade made to sell, and singers this decade forgot.

Folk music in the 1930s was less a market than a mission. In 1933 John Lomax, a Texas folklorist in his sixties, and his teenage son Alan drove through the South with a disc recorder for the Library of Congress, looking for songs in the places commercial labels ignored: prisons, levee camps, church suppers. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in July they recorded a twelve-string guitarist named Huddie Ledbetter, called Lead Belly, singing a waltz called "Irene." It was the first time the song had been recorded. Within two years he was performing in New York and the Lomaxes had a book about him.

Alan Lomax became the Archive of American Folk Song's assistant in charge in 1937, and in May 1938 he sat Jelly Roll Morton down at a piano in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium and recorded nine hours of him talking and playing through the birth of jazz. It was the first long oral history of a musician ever put on disc, and it set the pattern for how the century would document itself.

The other folk story was on the road. Woody Guthrie left the dust of Pampa, Texas, for California in 1937 and landed a daily show on KFVD in Los Angeles, singing old songs and new ones to the migrant camps. He did not record commercially until 1940, when "Dust Bowl Ballads" put the whole decade on two 78 albums. But the songs were written in the 1930s, and so was the idea that a singer with a guitar could be a reporter.

Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in a cheap New York hotel in February 1940, sick of hearing Kate Smith sing "God Bless America" on the radio. He did not record it until April 1944, in a marathon of sessions for Moses Asch, the engineer whose Folkways label would become the folk revival's library. The verse about the private property sign and the verse about the relief office were left off the famous version; they are the point of the song.

In 1941 Guthrie joined Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell in the Almanac Singers, a loose group living in a Greenwich Village house and singing union songs at strikes and rallies. Seeger's banjo had "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" written around the head; Guthrie's guitar said "This machine kills fascists". The Almanacs broke up when the war came. Lead Belly, the Louisiana twelve-string player Alan Lomax had recorded in prison in the 1930s, spent the decade in New York on radio and on Asch's label, and died in December 1949 of Lou Gehrig's disease, a few months before the Weavers' version of his "Goodnight, Irene" became the biggest record in America.

The Weavers were Seeger and Hays again, with Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, formed in 1948 and struggling until Seeger got them a booking at the Village Vanguard in December 1949. Their success in 1950 and the blacklist that ended it in 1952 are the next chapter. But the folk revival that Bob Dylan walked into in 1961 was built by these people in this decade: Asch's label, Lomax's field recordings, Guthrie's songs and Seeger's insistence that a crowd could sing.

The decade opened with the Weavers at number one. Their 1950 recording of Lead Belly’s "Goodnight, Irene," six months after his death, sold two million copies and put a leftist folk quartet on the pop charts. Then the blacklist caught up with them. Pete Seeger was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and refused to answer. For most of the decade, folk music in America was something you did quietly.

Two records kept the flame. Harry Smith’s "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952) gathered eighty-four commercial 78s from 1927 to 1932 into three double LPs on Folkways, and a generation of city kids learned the old songs from it. Harry Belafonte’s "Calypso" (1956) took Caribbean folk song to the top of the album chart for thirty-one weeks and became the first LP by a single artist to sell a million copies. Odetta’s big voice and Alan Lomax’s field recordings did the rest of the teaching.

The commercial break came in 1958. Three clean-cut college boys from California called the Kingston Trio recorded a two-chord North Carolina murder ballad, "Tom Dooley," as filler for their first album. It went to number one, sold millions and won the first Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording. Every coffeehouse in America suddenly had a banjo. In Britain, Lonnie Donegan’s skiffle version of Lead Belly’s "Rock Island Line" had done the same thing two years earlier, and the teenagers who bought cheap guitars because of it would matter very much in the next chapter.

Folk was not new, but the 1960s politicized it. The revival that had started in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and at the Newport Folk Festival took Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Anthology of American Folk Music as scripture. Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs and Odetta sang at rallies and on the Mall in Washington in August 1963. That same summer Peter, Paul and Mary took "Blowin' in the Wind" into the Top 5 and made a twenty-two-year-old from Minnesota the most important songwriter in America.

Bob Dylan changed songwriting and then changed it again. "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" in 1963 had the protest songs. "Bringing It All Back Home" in early 1965 had an electric side. Then on July 25, 1965, at Newport, he walked out with a Stratocaster and a Chicago blues band and played three songs, and part of the audience booed. "Like a Rolling Stone", released five days earlier, was six minutes long and went to number two. "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde" followed within a year. Poet, prophet, provocateur: he had decided the folk song could be anything.

Folk rock was the fallout. The Byrds took "Mr. Tambourine Man", added a twelve-string Rickenbacker and Beatles harmonies, and had a number one in June 1965. Simon and Garfunkel's producer overdubbed drums and electric guitar onto "The Sound of Silence" without telling them and made it number one in January 1966. Buffalo Springfield wrote "For What It's Worth" about a curfew riot on Sunset Strip. By 1969 Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing three-part harmony about peace, and the singer-songwriters of the next decade, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, were already making their first records.

Folk in the sixties had been about causes. In the seventies it turned inward, and the singer-songwriter became a genre of its own: one voice, one instrument, one life. Carole King had written a decade of hits for other people from a cubicle in the Brill Building. "Tapestry" (February 1971) was her own voice on her own songs, recorded plainly, and it stayed at number one for fifteen weeks and on the chart for six years. It told a whole generation of women, and men, that a confession could be a hit.

Joni Mitchell's "Blue" (June 1971) is the record everyone else in this room measured themselves against. She wrote in open tunings nobody else used, sang about her own affairs and her own given-up child, and left the arrangements almost bare: dulcimer, piano, guitar. James Taylor, who played on it, had already made "Sweet Baby James" (1970), a record about heroin and hospitals delivered so gently it sounded like comfort. Neil Young's "Harvest" (1972) went to number one and he spent the rest of the decade running from it, into the ditch, as he put it, with "Tonight's the Night" and "On the Beach". Jackson Browne wrote "These Days" at sixteen and "Late for the Sky" at twenty-five. Cat Stevens sold millions of songs about searching and then, in 1977, found what he was looking for in Islam and stopped. Paul Simon, on his own, went to Jamaica to cut "Mother and Child Reunion" and to Muscle Shoals for "Kodachrome".

In Britain the folk revival went electric and strange: Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Nick Drake's three quiet albums nobody bought until he was dead, Richard Thompson, John Martyn's echoplexed guitar. And in Latin America a different folk was being murdered for its politics: Víctor Jara, the voice of Chile's Nueva canción, was tortured and shot in a stadium days after the September 1973 coup. The personal and the political had not separated everywhere.

Folk had been out of fashion for a decade when Suzanne Vega's "Luka" (1987), a first-person song about child abuse sung quietly over an acoustic guitar, reached the American top five. The next spring Tracy Chapman, a Cleveland singer discovered at Tufts, released "Fast Car", played it at Nelson Mandela's seventieth-birthday concert at Wembley and sold ten million records. Radio called it "new folk". It was the old thing, done well, at the right moment.

Britain's version was angrier. Billy Bragg toured the miners' strike with an electric guitar and a small amplifier and wrote love songs and union songs with equal seriousness. The Pogues, London Irish, played traditional tunes at punk speed; "Rum Sodomy and the Lash" (1985), produced by Elvis Costello, made Shane MacGowan's writing impossible to ignore. Nanci Griffith, Michelle Shocked, Lucinda Williams and the Indigo Girls, whose debut arrived in 1989, filled out an American circuit of coffeehouses and college towns. By 1989 the singer-songwriter was back on the cover of Rolling Stone, and the 1990s would take it further.

The folk revival of the 1990s was mostly women and mostly done without permission. Ani DiFranco started Righteous Babe Records in Buffalo in 1990, sold her tapes from the trunk of her car and turned down every major label; by 1996 she was selling hundreds of thousands. Tracy Chapman, whose first album had made her famous in 1988, came back in 1995 with "Give Me One Reason", a twelve-bar blues that became her biggest hit. The Indigo Girls sang "Galileo" in harmony. Jewel's "Pieces of You", recorded partly in a coffee shop, took two years to sell twelve million copies. Sarah McLachlan, told that radio would not play two women in a row, put a tour together to prove it wrong: Lilith Fair, in the summer of 1997, was the highest-grossing festival tour in America that year. Dar Williams, Fiona Apple, Iris DeMent and Gillian Welch, whose "Revival" sounded like a 1930s field recording made in 1996, wrote the songs under the noise.

The men whispered. Elliott Smith, from Portland, made "Either/Or" on a four-track and found himself in a white suit at the Oscars in March 1998 singing "Miss Misery" between Celine Dion and Trisha Yearwood. Nick Drake, dead since 1974, was rediscovered when "Pink Moon" scored a Volkswagen advert at the decade's end, and a generation of bedroom songwriters heard him for the first time. Beck put the electronics away for "Mutations" and reached back to the folk and tropicália records his grandfather might have owned. Uncle Tupelo and Wilco kept the Woody Guthrie line alive; Billy Bragg and Wilco set Guthrie's unpublished lyrics to music on "Mermaid Avenue" in 1998. Folk in the 1990s was not a movement. It was a voice and a guitar, and it was everywhere.

Folk came back through the side door. A Volkswagen ad in 2000 put Nick Drake's Pink Moon under a car full of kids driving at night, and a record that had sold almost nothing in 1972 sold more that year than in Drake's lifetime. Vashti Bunyan, whose 1970 album had been a similar ghost, came back in 2005. Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, whose Ys in 2006 was five long songs with Van Dyke Parks orchestrations, and CocoRosie were called freak folk and hated the name. Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, in July 2005, was a fifty-state project that stopped at two, with Chicago as its anthem. Iron and Wine, Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, the Decemberists, Andrew Bird, the Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, Okkervil River and Neutral Milk Hotel's ever-growing afterlife were the indie-folk canon the blogs built.

The end of the decade produced its own myths. Justin Vernon went to his father's hunting cabin in Wisconsin with mono and a broken heart and came back with For Emma, Forever Ago, which Bon Iver self-released in 2007 and Jagjaguwar issued in February 2008. Fleet Foxes' harmonies came out of Seattle the same year. Feist's 1234 sold the iPod nano in 2007 and The Reminder with it. Antony and the Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now won the Mercury Prize in 2005. Jack Johnson, John Mayer's Continuum, Norah Jones, Ray LaMontagne, Amos Lee, Josh Ritter, Damien Rice's O, Regina Spektor, Cat Power's The Greatest and José González's cover of Heartbeats filled coffee shops and film soundtracks.

Britain built a nu-folk scene in a Bosun's Locker basement in London, where Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale, Johnny Flynn and, from 2007, Mumford and Sons played. And the tradition itself was honored: Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) in 2001, Bert Jansch's late records, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand, produced by T Bone Burnett in 2007, which won Album of the Year in February 2009 for a Led Zeppelin singer and a bluegrass fiddler harmonizing on Everly Brothers and Townes Van Zandt songs.

The decade opened with the nu-folk boom, which was in some ways a hangover from the 2000s. Mumford and Sons played waistcoats and kick drums to stadiums and won Album of the Year for Babel in 2013. The Lumineers, the Avett Brothers and First Aid Kit filled the same space. Advertising loved it. By 2015 the banjos had mostly gone back in their cases.

What survived was better and quieter. Bon Iver kept moving, from the choral warmth of his self-titled record in 2011 to the digitally shredded 22, A Million in 2016. Sufjan Stevens made Carrie and Lowell in 2015 about his mother's death, and it is one of the most direct records anyone made in the decade. Gillian Welch, Laura Marling, Bill Callahan, Sarah Jarosz and the Punch Brothers kept the craft alive.

The tradition got re-examined too. Rhiannon Giddens spent the decade proving that the banjo is an African instrument and that American folk music is Black music, on her own records and with Our Native Daughters in 2019, and she won a MacArthur Fellowship for it in 2017. Hurray for the Riff Raff, Valerie June and Yola widened the picture further.

And the elders got their due. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2016, which caused a global argument about whether songs are literature. John Prine made The Tree of Forgiveness in 2018 at seventy-one and had the biggest chart week of his life. Bruce Springsteen sat on a Broadway stage for over a year telling the story behind his own songs. Pete Seeger died in January 2014, which felt like the end of something that had started in 1940.

Folk in the 2020s was where people went to be still. Taylor Swift went there first, in July 2020, with a record made over email with Aaron Dessner of the National, and it changed what a global pop star was allowed to sound like. Noah Kahan turned New England winters into stadium singalongs. Hozier wrote a song about being loved too gently and it went to number one. Sufjan Stevens made "Javelin" after the death of his partner, and Bon Iver made a record in 2025 that was, for the first time in his career, mostly happy.

The elders came back to the campfire. Joni Mitchell, who had a brain aneurysm in 2015 and had to relearn the guitar, walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in July 2022 and sang for two hours. Tracy Chapman, who had not performed on television in years, sat down at the Grammys in February 2024 and played "Fast Car" with a country star who had grown up on it. Both moments went round the world in a day, which is the one thing this decade is genuinely good at.