How folk music records everyday life

Folk music includes traditional songs and a contemporary genre that developed from traditional folk music starting in the mid-20th century. What can folk songs help us understand about everyday life and the people who lived it. The lessons consider how music reflects work, community, and people's experiences.

2 articles, 1 video, 1 book · about 1 hr 40 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   the influence of folk music · Wikipedia · 60+ min read

   Folk music was made by common people during work, leisure, and religious activities. During manual labor, workers often sang to reduce boredom, keep rhythm during synchronized pushes and pulls, and set the pace of activities such as planting, weeding, reaping, threshing, weaving, and milling. Bush ballads, a form of Australian folk song, often relate to the itinerant and rebellious spirit of Australia in The Bush. The songs tell personal stories of life in the wide open country of Australia. Carl Sandburg often traveled the U.S. as a writer and a poet, collected songs in his travels and, in 1927, published them in The American Songbag. Historian Rachel Donaldson stated that Sandburg's collections added a class dynamic to popular understandings of American folk music.

2. Read
   

   "The rise of Folk Music (Ala the '40s and '50s)" · goldminemag.com · 17 min read

   Folk songs often covered love as well as hobos, unions, murder, heartbreak, civil rights, railroads, protests, economic hardship, patriotism, other people's cultures and customs, the sea and war. They put life as people had lived it, or wanted it to be, into song.

3. Watch
   

   Why this instrument explains Black American folk music · YouTube · 9 min watch

   Jake Blount, a banjo scholar, traces the banjo's history from West Africa through enslavement in the US and the early record industry. His account shows how Black musicians shaped folk music while recording categories and the folklore canon left their contributions out.

4. Book
   

   Our Singing Country · Bookshop.org

   Our Singing Country tells the story of American culture and identity through its music, showing how folk music serves as a living history.

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