ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a stylistic study of Swedish artists and groups active from the start of the 1990s, whose common feature is that they all refer to Swedish traditional music. It also focuses on artists and groups in the genres of pop and schlager, which charted on the Swedish popularity-chart radio show Svensktoppen, between 1990 and 2015. The pop-music folk tone is supplemented with more or less direct borrowings from traditional music. These include the use of the instrument nyckelharpa, the fact that some tunes have a metrical structure based on the polska, a traditional tune type, and the use of the characteristic singing technique of herding calls, kulning. In "Stromkarlen" the water sprite's fiddling entices people into the river. The link to the legend of the water sprite is reinforced by the polska meter of the tune and by direct references in the words to enchanting polskas, which make the dancers unable to stop dancing.
