American folk music is a musical term that encompasses numerous genres, many of which are known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music or roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz.
Read more about American Folk Music: Roots Music, Regional Forms, Other American Folk Music, Books, Artists and Musicians, Film and TV
Famous quotes containing the words american, folk and/or music:
“In Africa I had indeed found a sufficiently frightful kind of loneliness but the isolation of this American ant heap was even more shattering.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“In the past, the English tried to impose a system wherever they went. They destroyed the nation’s culture and one of the by- products of their systemisation was that they destroyed their own folk culture.”
—Martin Carthy (b. 1941)
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)