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Genre guide

Folk music.
The songs a people keep.

Folk music is the music of communities - songs passed from voice to voice, carrying the stories, labor, and memory of ordinary people long before anyone thought to write them down. The twentieth-century folk revival, led by figures like Woody Guthrie and later Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, turned that tradition into a vehicle for protest, poetry, and intimate songwriting. Acoustic, direct, and built on melody and plainspoken words, folk endures wherever musicians value honesty over spectacle.

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From the genre's founders to the names still being discovered.

Folk articles
6 days ago
Alela Diane Made Her Best Album in an Attic, for a Dead Friend
Alela Diane's seventh album "Who's Keeping Time?" — recorded live in the attic of her Portland Victorian home in ten days, and her first release since 2022 — is a quietly extraordinary record born from grief over the death of folk legend Michael Hurley, and one of her finest to date.
6 days ago
Beverly Glenn-Copeland's ‘Laughter in Summer’ Is the Most Tender Album of the Year
Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s ‘Laughter in Summer,’ recorded in single takes at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango with producer and engineer Howard Bilerman, is a spare, luminous collaboration with his wife and co-producer Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland — and a quietly extraordinary document of a life in music made under the shadow of a dementia diagnosis.