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The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.

The art of the folk singer, like all true art, is essentially un-self-conscious—the artistic result is not openly sought, but comes, as it were, by accident. In the same way the sailor, with the object of improving the quality of his work, has invented the “shanty,” and it is these that Dr Richard Runciman Terry now has collected into a book. Modern developments in machinery have destroyed the original purpose of the shanty, but like the tithe barn, the church, and the castle, they remain for the people as works of art, and it is as works of art, and that only, that one must now judge them. If they are merely of nautical or antiquarian interest, then their proper place is the library of the folklorist or the marine expert.

The Beatles were't likely to be reviewed in “Down Beat” magazine, and after contemplating what a distinct decline this would be to the readers, the author decided to provide impressions of how the next Beatles LP—whatever it might contain and whenever it might appear—might be received elsewhere by other commentators. Many had noticed that, with the rising popularity of coffeehouse “folk” singers, certain of the more established jazz journalists had turned their notice to the trend. Whatever their reviews may have revealed about it, they seemed to reveal something about our jazz writers. This chapter talks about an imaginary review of some of Bob Dylan's previous LPs.

This chapter explores Joni Mitchell's music. After Mitchell played “Both Sides Now” for Neil Young, he offered his coming-of-age tune, “Sugar Mountain,” which inspired her to write “The Circle Game.” She met and married folk singer Chuck Mitchell; they lived in Detroit and played coffeehouses. Tom Rush, a folk singer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, crashed on their couch and left with a song for his next album, Mitchells's “Urge for Going.” Rush titled his album The Circle Game and included a third Mitchell song, “Tin Angel,” alongside original compositions from two other little-known singer-songwriters: James Taylor (“Something in the Way She Moves” and “Sunshine Sunshine”) and Jackson Browne (“Shadow Dream Song”). This new crop of songwriters wrote from personal experience and was as strongly influenced by contemporary music as by traditional folk songs. But to varying degrees Bob Dylan touched them all.

This chapter explores the different meanings and interpretations of one of the most influential American folk singers of the 1930s and 1940s, Woody Guthrie. It implicitly addresses the issue of what “folk” music means and looks particularly at the notion that Guthrie’s music was “proletarian,” reflecting the views of the Okies, Arkies, and trade unionists, or whether it was shaped instead more by middle-class, urban audiences. The chapter also looks at the issue raised in Chapter 1 of the relationship between folk and popular music and the extent to which recorded, as opposed to performed, music also led to different meanings.

This chapter focuses on the legacy of Richard Dyer-Bennet as a minstrel or folk singer. It explains that Dyer-Bennet never considered himself as a folk singer. Some of his contemporaries described him as the most honest artist, and as a unique performer who used folk material and transmuted it into what might be called art songs. The chapter also mentions that while many artists were heavily influenced by Dyer-Bennet, they were not able to establish a lasting presence in the recording industry’s mainstream.

This chapter discusses pulp stories in the repertoire of Egyptian folk singers. In the hands of a master, pulp stories may incorporate characteristic folk themes. The chapter examines the tazhīr or the ‘opening of the flower’, which sets apart pulp stories from other forms of performances. These pulp stories have rhymes that are inflated into multiple and usually polysyllabic paronomasias achieved by extensive distortion of the normal pronunciation of words. This involves omitting, adding, or altering vowels, semi-consonants, glottal stops, retaining only the consonants in their correct order, so that the result may be called a ‘consonantal’ pun. In addition, pulp stories do not twang the deepest nerves in the consciousness of the common folk.

This chapter examines the box office performance of Hal Ashby's film Shampoo. The film earned a total of $22 million and was nominated for four Academy Awards but only won one for actor Lee Grant's performance. This chapter also discusses Ashby's next film Bound for Glory, which was about the life of folk singer Woody Guthrie.

This chapter describes how Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan is a rock star, or a folk singer, or a pop musician. He is not a writer, neither of fiction nor of poetry or drama. Pop music and literature are as different as painting is different from filmmaking. The chapter then considers how Dylan himself takes on the question of his relation to literature in his Nobel Prize lecture, which has been published in the form of a recording. As a young person in grammar school, he read many great books, and some of them impressed him deeply. He asserts that he engages themes from these books in his own songs. Dylan then adds that songs are made for singing the way Shakespeare's lines are made to be performed onstage.