Folk Music 1960 - 1970

During the 1960s, folk music songs were adopted by artists who marketed themselves more widely alongside other popular artists.

They performed traditional music and songs in amplified concerts, and distributed their work via recordings and broadcasting. Starting accoustic and linked by nostalgia to the traditional folk music as sung by ordinary people, this folk sound evolved to be different from its original roots and more a music of this decade which came to be the more popular meaning for the name folk music.

Folk music is easily identified with the ordinary working people who created it. Preserving treasured things against the relentless encroachments of capitalism is likewise a goal of many politically progressive people.

Thus, in the 1960s, singers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Graeme Nash, Phil Ochs, and Tom Paxton, followed in Guthrie's footsteps to begin writing "protest music" and topical songs, particularly against the Vietnam War. They likewise expressed in song their support for the American Civil Rights Movement. Although forever associated with folk and protest music of the 1960s, Bob Dylan has said he never thought of himself solely as a folk musician, but he sure started that way.

Simultaneous to the American folk movement were Canadian folk artists such as Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, all three of whom would become the only singers to receive an Order of Canada, and all of whom achieved lasting international success.

In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem (members were all Irish-born, although the group became famous in Greenwich Village), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, The Pogues, The Irish Rovers, Silly Wizard and a variety of other folk bands have done much over recent years to revitalise and re-popularise Irish or Scottish traditional music.

These bands continued a living tradition of what we now term Celtic music, and they benefited from the song collection efforts of Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy, among others.

In the United Kingdom, the folk revival helped raise the profile of the music, and folk clubs sprang up all over, a boon to young artists like Martin Carthy and Roy Bailey who emerged.

It also inspired a generation of singer-songwriters, such as Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell (whose “Streets Of London” would become a hit), Donovan, Roy Harper and many others. Bob Dylan came to London to check out the growing folk scene of the early 1960s, Paul Simon spent several months there and Tom Paxton stayed even longer; Simon and Garfunkle's version of Scarborough Fair owed a lot to Carthy's take on the song.

Also in the UK, the electric folk groups of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span took medieval and traditional songs and mixed some of the tunes with rock. Both bands had hit singles and albums that sold well, bringing a new audience to this traditional music. The revival of the fifties and sixties had mostly died out by 1975.

History of European Folk Music