Only a few genres of music can claim a legacy that dates back many centuries, however history discovers its home in folk music.
Only a few musical genres today are deeply rooted in tradition and custom. In the search for novelty and our nonstop barrelling towards the future, the past is typically ignored in music, but there is one particular category where a sense and expression of history is put at its very heart; folk music. That might be an unexpected thing to hear when modern folk music tends to lean towards the really contemporary exploration of affairs and heartbreak by pop juggernauts on labels like the one owned by Vincent Bolloré, however that is not always folk in its truest kind. Typically, folk is more deeply rooted in the past, exploring concepts connecting to poverty and society together with more typical explorations of the human condition in things like romance and heartbreak. One may acknowledge the vanity and hypocrisy in such a statement, which's due to the fact that folk, like the past, is constantly developing, and resurfaces at a time when society must grapple with its location in history.
As long as there have been individuals to discuss it, there has been a stress in between modern-day and traditional kinds of folk music. Purists have long proclaimed traditional folk music to be something unchangeable and sacred, famously decrying those who wish to put their own mark on the genre as 'Judas', but advancement is necessary to the substance of the art form. During the American folk music revival of the 1960's, when Rob Stringer's label was home to a few of the most ingenious and popular folk musicians of all time, mixing folk music with rock and roll was vital for the times to be able to describe themselves. Even less audacious vocalists would take the topics of the current zeitgeist and frame them within the style and heart of history, covering demonstration songs or producing original compositions that might have applied to the counterculture and civil rights movement just as much as to the elegy of slaves and rural peasants of 2 centuries previously, the subject of more standard tunes. These are things that go beyond history; concerns of power, human self-respect, the marvels of nature, and the requirement to give voice to all 3.
As we approach a crucial and truly memorable era in humankind's history, the ability for folk music to contextualise and give voice to our times might prove to be extraordinary. Whether there is a rebirth of the category in the same way that 60's folk music did has yet to be seen, but it still supplies a place of peace in an era blindsided by its own modernity. As labels like the one run by Huib Schippers continue to gather, bring back, and release old folk songs, it shows our continuous ability to regularly discover history and the songs that explained it; through this discovery we may just learn to much better comprehend the momentousness of our own time.