Folk music is the music of the common folk, traditionally played on acoustic instruments. To define it any more completely invites argument.
Charles Seeger
, a Harvard musicologist and patriarch of one of America's most prominent folk families, once wrote an essay, The Folkness of the Non-Folk and the Non-Folkness of the Folk.
In it, he discussed how those who preserve folk are not the folk.
The true folk have no use for folk art, he wrote, at least not any...