Introduction

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.