| Do you think folk and country music are essentially the same?

Do you think folk and country music are essentially the same?

butchy asked:


I certainly don’t think so, but it seems that a lot of people do. If you look in cd stores, for example, they have all of the folk artists (eg Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie) under country.

Also, on this very site, there is no section for folk music.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Do you think folk and country music are essentially the same?”

  1. Lester G on March 14th, 2011 8:52 pm

    There are clearly some similarities but they are still separate and distinct genres. I don’t even bother with CD stores and get my folk music either directly from the performer’s web site, from Amazon, or from a specialty online store like CD Baby.

  2. isawmarty on March 18th, 2011 5:36 am

    The first “country song” Grammy winner was actually a folk song (”Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio) — a song that never made the country charts.

    There are similarities; however, the major differences are that folk music, going back to Woody Guthrie, had more political messages in the songs, while country music songs tend to eschew politics as a recurring, general theme. There aren’t many country protest songs in country music, while they abound in folk music.

    Another thing that really separates the two is that folk music tends, for the most part, to have solo performers. The obvious exceptions are Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio; however, folk GROUPS aren’t that numerous (and certainly not folk groups that achieved popularity). Groups are a central part of country music, going back to Roy Acuff’s Crazy Tennesseans in the mid-30s.

  3. keeprockin on March 20th, 2011 8:33 pm

    maybe 50-60 yrs since,but not today. Folk is still folk,while country is hardly recognisable, nearly all showbiz pop

  4. Gator Bait on March 24th, 2011 12:36 am

    definitely not the same!