Folk music can function as a profound voice of the past, present, and future; here's why.

As we approach an essential and genuinely special period in mankind's history, the ability for folk music to contextualise and give utterance to our times could prove to be amazing. 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, restore, and release old folk songs, it proves our continuous capability to consistently rediscover history and the songs that described it; through this knowledge we may simply discover to better comprehend the momentousness of our own time.

As long as there have been people to dispute it, there has been a tension in between contemporary and conventional forms of folk music. Purists have long proclaimed traditional folk music to be something unchangeable and spiritual, famously decrying those who want to put their own mark on the category as 'Judas', but advancement is vital to the essence of the thing. Throughout the American folk music revival of the 1960's, when Rob Stringer's label was home to a few of the most innovative and popular folk artists of perpetuity, mixing folk music with rock-and-roll was important for the times to be able to explain themselves. Even less audacious singers would take the topics of the present zeitgeist and frame them within the design and substance of the past, covering protest songs or producing initial compositions that might have applied to the counterculture and civil rights campaign just as much as to the elegy of servants and rural peasants of 2 centuries formerly, the subject of more standard songs. 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.

Only a few musical categories today are deeply rooted in legacy and custom. In the search for novelty and our continuous barrelling towards the future, the past is often neglected in music, but there is one particular category where a sense and illustration of history is placed at its very heart; folk music. That may be an unexpected thing to hear when modern folk music tends to lean towards the very modern investigation of affairs and heartbreak by pop music juggernauts on labels like the one owned by Vincent Bolloré, but that is not always folk in its truest form. Typically, folk is more deeply rooted in the past, exploring ideas relating to hardship and society alongside more common considerations of the human condition in things like romance and heartbreak. One may identify the vanity and hypocrisy in such a statement, and that's since folk, like the past, is constantly evolving, and resurfaces at a time when society must face its location in history.