i think it would be kind of fun to do a tag like #folk friday but it kind of begs the question of what even is folk music? of course the answer is, it's a fake and arbitrary categorization, oftentimes imposed on to music, at other times self-identified. like here's a incomplete list of things that can be described as "folk music"
- the traditional repertoire of songs of a particular region or cultural group, often of unknown or legendary authorship
- very old popular songs, where the author is a known person in history, the song or tune having now passed into the public domain
- recent original music of known authorship, in the style of the previous two categories
- experimental music ultimately rooted in the previous three categories, often involving significant deviations, subversions, and deconstructions of them, and frequently using unconventional instruments or techniques like synthesizers
- entirely recent music which prominently utilizes or is primarily made with "folk" instruments, but which isn't even particularly strongly connected to any of the first three categories, such as folk punk (and what is a "folk" instrument? is a guitar a folk instrument? is a clarinet? an oboe? is a piano? can a synthesizer be a folk instrument? a gameboy? is music of an entirely different genre, simply played acoustically folk?)
- some people call folk music from some (generally nonwhite) places "world music" and i think that's weird. i guess this bullet point isn't really a type of folk music as much as me complaining about a term being weird and kind of othering and newagey.
- could jazz be folk music? it's kind of its own little culture with its own traditional repertoire, it reminds me of other folk music traditions in a lot of ways.
ultimately i feel like if i made this a tag i regularly posted to so i can share cool music, i would just have to embrace the chaos. mostly i just think it would be fun to share more music that is largely acoustic or else playing with the ideas of traditional folk music in a electronic way. my definition of folk music would just be "whatever album i'm posting about this week".
i just often feel like one of the only people in my friend group who regularly listens to and rights non-electronic music and that's kind of a shame because there's so much to love about folk music and acoustic music.