Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Music

Pennsylvania Dutch folk music is the song tradition of the Pennsylvania Germans, the German-speaking settlers of southeastern Pennsylvania and their descendants. Sung in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect and in English, it comprises broadside ballads, hymns and chorales, love and comic songs, children's rhymes and the verses sung at Fersammlinge, the groundhog-lodge gatherings, carried by voices with fiddle, dulcimer, guitar or the plain unaccompanied singing of the Amish and Mennonite communities. It is at once a German survival and an American regional music, maintained by churches, festivals and dialect societies.