Miejski folk

Miejski folk, Polish urban folk, is the street music of Poland's cities — above all Warsaw — played by courtyard bands (kapele podwórkowe) of fiddle, accordion, clarinet, banjo and guitar. Its repertory mixes pre-war cabaret and dance-hall hits, tangos and foxtrots with anonymous street ballads in local dialect: songs about dandies and thieves, fairs, prisons, lost loves and named neighbourhoods such as Czerniaków and Praga. Sung and played for tips in courtyards, markets and taverns, it is the plebeian counterpart to rural folk music, later revived by folk-rock and punk groups who treat its texts as a chronicle of working-class city life.