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.

Browse featured Folk artists

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

Folk articles

Guy Clark's Old No. 1 Treats Ordinary Memory as a Moral Act

Guy Clark's 1975 debut Old No. 1, produced by Neil Wilburn at RCA Studios Nashville, is remembered as a great debut. Its true power is in how it treats memory as a moral act, rendering specific, ordinary people with precision and grief before they are lost. A fiftieth-anniversary tribute album and companion book arrived in 2026.

The Song Joni Mitchell Recorded Twice, Thirty-One Years Apart

"Both Sides, Now" is the rare song that contains two distinct versions of itself — Joni Mitchell's spare 1969 recording on Clouds and her orchestral 2000 re-recording — each true to a different age, with the distance between them carrying the song's deepest meaning.

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.

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.