Folk

Folk is the umbrella genre for music rooted in the traditional songs, dances and storytelling of a community, transmitted orally and reshaped by each generation of performers. Its core practice pairs the unamplified voice with acoustic instruments — guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, pipes and hand percussion — in verse forms built for narrative: ballads, work songs, laments, broadsides and children's songs. As a named commercial genre it also covers the singer-songwriter and revival traditions that grew from those sources, in which traditional material and newly written songs in the same idiom stand side by side.