Folk music is irrevocably bound up with histories of racial thinking, from Atlantic slavery and the Middle Passage to W. E. B. Du Bois and beyond. In North America, Black folk music emerged as a vital expression of identity, resilience, and community amidst centuries of oppression. The most popular Black music sounds from spirituals and blues to rap music served as artistic outlets to retain African cultural continuances and navigate and resist racial discrimination, while also confronting colonial histories and the complexities of diasporic experience. This chapter illuminates how folk music reflects and shapes racial dynamics, offering insights into the broader cultural conversations surrounding race, identity, and resistance in North America and Britain. Further, it underscores the importance of understanding these musical traditions not just as artifacts of the past but as living expressions of ongoing struggles and resilience within Black communities.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.

The chapter summarizes the way in which the history of the French language has shaped representations and conceptions of literature, and how it has shaped its musical settings. France has had a unique relationship with language, based on centralism, equipping itself with tools to make the French language a tool for standardizing and homogenizing the country. The French mélodie thus takes shape within a specific framework. The mélodie emerged in the crucible of Romanticism, which continually invented new forms and genres capable of reflecting the new sensitivity of the individual. With Hector Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été to poems by Théophile Gautier, the mélodie escaped drama, pathos, and narration. Thereafter, it retained this characteristic of paying attention, first and foremost, to language and poetic text.

The book’s Introduction begins by considering definitions of folk music, specifically that developed by the International Folk Music Council during the 1950s. I point out that Cecil Sharp’s work had a profound influence on this conception. The underlying logic behind such definitions is a habit of opposition in which folk music is situated as a paradigm of authenticity in contrast to something else tainted with commerce, frivolity, or bourgeois individualism. I show that folk music has most often been understood through a characteristic form of Marxist nostalgia surrounding older forms of culture opposed to modernity, capitalism, mass media, and the culture industry. The appeal of the folk, I suggest, has chiefly been as a vehicle of critique – a way of identifying alternative ways of being. As illustrations, I turn to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anti-colonial vision of Indian nationalism as well as the recent ‘ShantyTok’ trend on TikTok. Ultimately, folk music and song are inextricable from the social communities they have brought to life.

Co-written with Hala Jaber, John Nutekpor, and Ewa Żak-Dyndał, this chapter explores the concept of folk music within the framework of migration and discourses of belonging. It takes as its point of departure the experiences of the author, a child of Irish migrants to America, now working in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, and three of her doctoral students from Palestine, Ghana, and Poland. The paradoxes often inherent in the concept of folk music are further complicated by the experience of migration in the twenty-first century. An exploration of recent scholarship on music and diaspora, migration, and social inclusion demonstrates the power of ‘folk music’ as a fluid, imagined concept within which identity and belonging can be negotiated. The chapter includes three case studies related to performance research with new migrant communities in Ireland. It concludes that migration fosters the need to create new imaginaries of belonging and that music is a primary strategic resource in this endeavour.

During the First World War, musical aesthetics in France changed decisively from fin de siècle Symbolism to Modernism. The style quotidien, articulated by Jean Cocteau in his polemic Le coq et l’arlequin, and exemplified by Satie’s concise mélodies, celebrated everyday musical materials, including popular music, and transformed them in a manner analogous to the cubism of Picasso and the surrealism of Apollinaire. Avant-garde composers such as Tailleferre and and Poulenc, both of whom were members of the composers’ collective ‘Les Six’, responded enthusiastically to these new aesthetic currents. Poulenc in particular extended these post-war developments into a body of mélodies that have become part of the international repertory. This chapter begins with a survey of works by some of Poulenc’s contemporaries. It concludes with a discussion of Poulenc’s place as a composer of mélodies and song cycles such as Banalités, Fiançailles pour rire, and most importantly, Tel jour telle nuit.

This chapter uncovers the emergence and early history of the terms folk song and folk music in English during the nineteenth century as they circulated across the Atlantic and around the globe. One person in particular was responsible for this discourse: the prolific author and translator Mary Howitt. I show that these terms initially emerged in direct reference to the German Volkslieder, though they were not associated explicitly with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder nor with any particular nation or region. I use this material to argue that folk music was neither a repertoire nor an idiom, but rather an idea conditioned by Romantic thought. Indeed, it was the concept of folk music that most enchanted writers during this period – writers who were never of the folk they depicted. These terms are a nostalgic reply or retort to the interlaced revolutions and encounters that have defined modernity. Ultimately, this history exemplifies a long intellectual struggle in the West over the meaning and musical significance of working-class culture, nature, time, and colonial alterity.

This chapter outlines distinctions between national and nationalist uses of folk music as a frame for discussing its slipperiness as a concept and the political and identitarian implications of its performance, its collection and publication, its use in education and in religion, and its adoption into works of art music. Consideration of folk practices in Britain, France, Spain, and the USA from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is combined with special attention to expressions of Celtic otherness within nation states. The chapter also addresses the manner in which sub-national musical nationalisms (or ethnic nationalisms), operate as positive symbols of subaltern resistance and celebration when folk or folk-like material is imported into the art music of late nineteenth-century concert halls. At the same time, the chapter addresses the ‘primitivism’ of folk music and the connections nineteenth-century thinkers made between national folk musics and the precepts of social Darwinism.

The French attitude about what is called the performing arts, since at least Verlaine, has been to consider that the formal aspect has to do with the meaning of a text, or a situation, and that nothing can be taken as accessory. For performers, the mélodie is, in that sense, at the heart of this concern. Henri Duparc’s celebrated setting of Baudelaire’ “La vie antérieure” provides a case study for the importance of a sensitive, careful, understanding of the poetic text in interpreting French song. Deepening work both on the form and meaning of all songs, whatever the language, without fabricating the sound, is the goal to achieve. The unspoken, the undetermined, in a word, the mystery of the world is what counts; the expression is neither a definition nor an explanation, but a quest. Recitalists are explorers of the unknown!

The entanglement of genre and gender in the theories and practice of French art song shaped women’s creative engagement with the mélodie. They were active as composers and poets, as well as performers, hostesses, singing teachers, and muse; yet they faced gendered prejudice. Closer examination of songs by Pauline Viardot and Augusta Holmès reveals markedly different strategies by female composers when addressing gender in their settings. Some female poets (such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anna de Noailles, and Renée Vivien) gained visibility in French art song. One poet is particularly notable: Cécile Sauvage whose poetry was set both by her son, Olivier Messiaen, and by his wife, Claire Delbos. Patrons like Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, and Marie Vasnier proved equally as important to the genre as such professional musicians as Jane Bathori and Claire Croiza. In effect, salon and concert hall overlapped in repertoire and audience.