ABSTRACT
Folk music literally refers to an early form of popular music whose origins are from a certain community’s orally-transmitted culture. At the same time, the folk music is known as a subgenre of the pop music that shares the genre tradition of orally-transmitted songs. However, we can also define “folk music” as a subgenre of pop music, based on acoustic instruments, which embodies that community’s experiences, interests, and folklore. We can summarize folk music by its three features: its traditional manners in oral song, its simplistic acoustic sounds, and its lyrics that reflect life experiences and introspections (Middleton 1990; Rice and Kim 2007). Acoustic instruments in particular have been considered the apparatuses that carried out the ideology of modern folk music. In the context of the U.S., folk music was used as a form of cultural movement in the 1940s-1950s by figures such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and represented the culture of younger generations once it began to use contemporary sounds and started to carry underlying messages with modern times.
