>In the end, it's all about tradition. The "New Left"
>musicianship/culture-bearers (Guthrie, Seeger, Leadbelly,
>Lomax, Asche, etc.) used a type of folk music (Mainly
>re-hashed workers songs)

the leftist political thought of the time tended to view any traditional music (as well as new songs written by traditional musicians) as music of downtrodden/underrepresented/minority voices. Hence the willingness to accept brand-new labor songs by writers like Guthrie or Joe Hill as 'folk music' b/c the view of folk as 'music of the people'.

There's a fairly good book that I read many moons since when working on my sr. thesis...

http://www.amazon.com/Fakesong-Manufacture-British-Folksong-Present/dp/0335150667

As I recall it though, the author conflates 'folk song' with 'labor song' to such a great extent that it really winds up deflating his argument. Unsurprisingly he's entirely critical of any commercialization of folk music. *shrug*



>as a tool for social change --- and

The *was* an important part of the vibe; the leftist kumbayah rhetoric of the Almanac Singers persisted into the 1960s, though much of the audience wasn't necessarily engaged in that (esp. the pop-folk audience).


>the Dylan's, Cohen's, Och's & Baez's turned that movement into
>a hugely popular strand of music.

More than that, I think they were able to grasp onto two primary and oft-interwoven strands of the original folk revival writers of the '30s and '40s and '50s:
-first, the quasi-traditional original songs, which drew heavily on trad melodies and lyrical themes (see Dylan songs like Blowin' In the Wind, Farewell, etc.)
-second, the vaguely leftist political ideals, with the hot topic transferred from labor to social justice and peace.

But the real break from (or extension of) the earlier writers' oeuvre was the turn toward the intensely personal and frequently abstract. This move away from the main themes of the last 40 years of folk revival, along with increasingly electric instrumentation, enabled the erstwhile folk singers to reach much broader audiences (although the pop-folk singers of the preceding 5 years had also reached equally broad audiences, albeit briefly; they were radio and TV friendly, unlike those who were launching themselves from the Newport campgrounds.)

>I think people often misconstrue the meaning of folk with the
>general core of the movements of the 60s. Yet, folk music is
>essentially ANY carried-on tradition of music... folk doesn't
>necessarily denote any single musical form.

Yes, and no. I mean, I agree with the 'it's all folk music' idea to an extent, in the sense that EVERYTHING is music of the people, and it's all tied to some traditional forms or others if you can trace it back far enough. But on the other hand, I like to maintain a somewhat practical purpose in my terminology, and while it's flexible esp. in a conversation like this, taking that 'it's all folk' idealism to its logical extreme removes any kind of practicality from the conversation.


>In truth, there's very little music that truly escapes the
>realms of "folk music" as any playing style, lyrical
>manipulation or imagery that is carried down from musical
>tradition. Every music has a precursor.