Chronicles: Volume One

Folk music is a genre generally passed down orally and has cultural significance for a particular group of people. Cultures around the world have distinct folk music traditions. In the United States, folk music spans a wide range of genres and styles, from bluegrass and Appalachian folk music to African American spirituals and gospel music. Traditionally folk songs are not copyrighted, and artists are free to interpret them as they see fit.

A protest song is a category of topical song whose lyrics speak out for social change. Many of these songs might not have been written with a particular movement in mind, but the become associated with a cause via context and circumstance. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” are some of the most widely recognized examples of protest songs, even though Dylan never intended them as such.

The term singer-songwriter emerged in the 1960s to describe musical artists who wrote and performed their own songs, generally acoustically, without additional accompaniment. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were early examples of singer-songwriters, and the term gained popularity as the folk music revival of the 1960s gathered steam.