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In order to discuss modern revival and fusion processes from a broader perspective, this chapter presents the case study of the New St. George, an American English electric folk band. The interview with band leader Jennifer Cutting adds a relativizing angle to the specific situation of a hybrid music band, such as the musical selection process, the performance situation, and the business side. As the specifically marginal situation of American English bands reveals, hybrid bands often have to work with compromises much stronger than the dominant “Celtic” scenes, which can fall back on a much broader local and global network. While thus appearing as a highly specific genre, English electric folk is nevertheless also being revealed as a highly influential genre — be it with regard to the more successful “Celtic” branch — yet also with regard to folk rock approaches in neighboring countries like Scandinavia.

This chapter provides a definition of folk music. Precise definition of the term folk music has long confounded scholars and been the source of endless debate and controversy; general agreements, either popular or academic are rare, and misunderstandings abound. Folk music in the United States reflects the complex history and diverse ethnic composition of American society. Indeed, academic recognition of these native musical forms preceded the development of the Federal Music Project (FMP); in 1882, Theodore Baker published a scholarly study of American folk music, and in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a preface for John Lomax's groundbreaking Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads publication. Meanwhile, some scholars argue that if a song has a known author, it cannot be classified as folksong “because the original meaning of folk music was something ancient and anonymous.”

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1959 to 1960. Topics covered include Alan Lomax's efforts to capture the complex nature of popular music in 1959; the Kingston Trio's continued popularity; Britain's flourishing folk music scene despite the decline of skiffle; increasing popularity of folk music in America as its boundaries disappeared in the flood of new recordings, books, magazines, newsletters, radio programs, and TV shows; the release of the New Lost City Ramblers's album The New Lost City Ramblers; and the folk revival's musical and activist political connections in the South, personified by Guy Carawan's work at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, and then Knoxville, Tennessee, even before songs became a vital part of the developing civil rights movement.

This chapter chronicles the prominent role played by the Seeger family in contributing to the propagation of American folk music. Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger were both great exponents of the vernacular music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, together and separately, made enormous contributions to the documentation of American folk music. Charles was also a prominent member of the Resettlement Administration during the Depression years, which relocated struggling farmers to better agricultural communities where they could be more productive. Mike Seeger possibly got his love of the banjo from Pete, who had a major impact on the American protest folk music scene. Seeger shared the passion his family had for traditional American folk music, but he was, perhaps, aware that he needed to play a distinct role in order to be set apart from his highly illustrious parents, brother, and sister. To begin with, Seeger rejected the formal music instruction that his mother tried to instil in him.

The American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s stimulated outsider interest in Louisiana French music and culture. This chapter discusses how some revivalists from a hotbed of old-time country music and bluegrass activity in northern California found their way to Louisiana French music. It profiles four individuals—Will Spires, Eric Thompson, Suzy Rothfield Thompson, and Delilah Lee Lewis—for whom the folk revival became their initial frame of reference for Cajun and Creole music and the conduit through which they made contact with musicians from Louisiana.

No other recording artist has tapped into the reimagined roots of the old, millennial America to the extent Bob Dylan (1941- ) has. He represents something unique: a millionaire purveyor of technologized, capitalist popular culture whose work projects a consistent though often subliminal message of the end of the world. Dylan’s songs are also a prime example of the hybridity of American apocalyptic thought. Dylan has invoked millennium throughout his career, including times when he was seen as a nihilistic radical of the counter-culture. Furthermore, the technologies of recording, radio, television, and other media has meant a broader diffusion of this imagery among the general public than at any previous time in history. This chapter shows that each musical idiom that Dylan has chosen to deliver his message, together with his tendency to mix popular culture imagery with that drawn from the Bible, has deflected and obscured this eschatogical message. The very eclecticism of Dylan’s sources acts to distance him from any single tradition, and his career has seen every possible take on the theme of millennium, from postmodern pastiche to sincere gospel.

Throughout the twentieth century, folk music has had many definitions and incarnations in the United States and Great Britain. The public has been most aware of its commercial substance and appeal, with the focus on recording artists and their repertoires, but there has been so much more, including a political agenda, folklore theories, grassroots styles, regional promoters, and discussions on what musical forms—blues, hillbilly, gospel, Anglo-Saxon, pop, singer-songwriters, instrumental and/or vocal, international—should be included. These contrasting and conflicting interpretations were particularly evident during the 1950s. This chapter begins by focusing on Alan Lomax (1915–2002), one of the most active folk music collectors, radio promoters, and organizers during the 1940s. Lomax had a major influence on folk music in both the United States and Great Britain, tying together what had come before and what would follow. The chapter then discusses folk festivals and performers; British folk music, musicians, and trans-Atlantic musical connections; and Carl Sandburg's publication of the The American Songbag in 1927.

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1955 to 1956. It discusses the formation of the Hillbilly-Folk Record Collectors' Club and launching of the quarterly Hillbilly-Folk Record Journal in early 1954, in Britain; how the skiffle provided a dramatic boost to the popularity of folk-style music in Britain; the sudden popularity of a different musical hybrid, calypso, in the U.S.; how folk music was linked with the developing countercultural movement—poetry, films, novels, comic books, jazz, comedy—spreading across the U.S. in the mid-1950s; the emergence of Harry Belafonte; and the rising popularity of international music in the U.S., spurred by people's search for international understanding and world peace during the harsh years of the Cold War.

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1957 to 1958. It discusses the emergence of the Kingston Trio that energized the folk revival; folk festivals and recordings; the continued popularity of skiffle in Great Britain; magazines the covered the folk music scene, including Sing Out! and Caravan; and Alan Lomax's return to the United States after seven years of folk-song collecting across Europe. According to Greenwich Village musician Dave Van Ronk, “the last years of the 1950s were a great time to be in the Village.” “It was not too crazy yet, but there was an exhilarating sense of something big right around the corner. As for the folk scene, it was beginning to look as if it might have a future, and me with it.” What was happening in Greenwich Village was rapidly spreading around the country. Folk music, broadly defined, appeared to have a bright future, while spanning the Atlantic Ocean.

This chapter discusses the work of one of the most famous authorities on American folk music, John Lomax, and in the particular case study of Bradley Kincaid’s telling and retelling of the acquisition of a “hound dog guitar. ” It examines cowboy and mountain songs and their reading by first Lomax and then Kincaid in terms of an “Anglo-Saxon ancestry” that demonstrates the manner in which investments in racial difference structure the way folk music is understood as it is formed and re-formed across the Atlantic at different times.

This chapter examines how race intersects with questions of “realism” and fate in Frederick Delius's Koanga, which features black characters as its protagonists as well as examples of African American folk music. Based on an episode from George Washington Cable's novel The Grandissimes, Koanga is a nineteenth-century story of love, jealousy, and betrayal centered on Koanga, an enslaved West African prince and voudon priest, and Palmyra, a quadroon maidservant. This chapter first provides a background on Koanga's genesis and textual variations before discussing its seeming contradiction: the dramatic portrayal of Koanga and Palmyra as a reflection of period beliefs about the Otherness of blacks; and its treatment of the exoticism of “blackness,” both physical and musical, as an attractive quality integral to achieving its dramatic and musical aims. It argues that Koanga revives many familiar tropes of racial exoticism and manifests troubling new resonances concerning questions of destiny and free will.