Electric folk
Electric folk music
Stylistic
origins
Rock music
Traditional music
Folk music
Folk rock
Cultural
origins
1960s: UK
Typical
instruments
Electric or Acoustic versions of
the following Violin, Guitar,
Bass guitar/Double bass,
Appalachian dulcimer,
Mandolin, drums (both as a kit,
and Bodhran-like instruments),
Recorder, Tin whistle
Mainstream
popularity
Mainly in the 1970s, but the
genre continues today as non-
mainstream
Subgenres
Medieval folk rock
Fusion genres
Celtic rock - Folk punk - Folk metal
Electric folk is the name given to the form
of folk rock pioneered in England from the
late 1960s, and most significant in the 1970s,
which then was taken up and developed in
the surrounding Celtic cultures of Brittany,
Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man,
to produce Celtic rock and its derivatives. It
has also been influential in those parts of the
world with close cultural connections to Bri-
tain and gave rise to the genre of folk punk.
By the 1980s the genre was in steep decline
in popularity, but has survived and revived in
significance, partly remerging with the rock
music and folk music cultures from which it
originated. Although in Britain the term folk
rock is often used synonymously with electric
folk, commentators have returned to this
term as a means of distinguishing this as a
clear and distinct category within wider the
wider folk rock genre.
Definition
When English bands of the late 1960s and
early 1970s defined themselves as ’electric
folk’ they were making a distinction with the
already existing ’folk rock’. Folk rock was (to
them) what they had already been producing:
American or American style singer-song-
writer material played on rock instruments,
as undertaken by Dylan and the Byrds from
1965.[1] They drew the distinction because
they were focusing on indigenous (in this
case English) songs and tunes. This is not to
say that all the proponents of electric folk
totally abandoned American material, or that
it would not be represented in their own com-
positions, but their work w