Folk, Rock & Other Four-Letter Words

THERE HAS BEEN a great increase recently in the number of popular artists whose songs are influenced by or taken from American folk music–both traditional and modern. The paranoiac need of modern man for a label for anything that comes near him resulted, in this case, in the term "folk-rock" to signify pop music with strong folk influences. Originally "folk-rock" meant pop music that used actual folk material; later, anything folk-influenced that retained a heavy beat, and still later, anything having anything to do with folk that happened to sell in the pop market.