Redirected from Folk song Over time, the meaning of the term
folk music has become confused by misconception and misuse. The
jazz performer Louis Armstrong is famously credited with saying,
"All music is folk music, leastwise I ain't never heard a horse
sing". The misconceptions of the general public have arisen
primarily from the inaccurate portrayal of folk music within the
world of commercial music. As a result, the uninformed man in
the street might say it means either traditional music or
popularizations of traditional music, or works which have some
stylistic similarities to traditional music; and those who
market music make little distinction between these three
possibilities, thus the consumer who opines a preference for
folk music may be referring to any mixture of things. The
English term folk, which gained usage in the 18th century to
refer to peasants or non-literate peoples, derives from the
German term Volk (meaning nation). In truth, the term 'folk
music' should cover only that music which aris