Passage 1 Folk music is often believed to be so called because it was the music of the common folk, but that is not totally accurate. See, the genre is something of a catchall: it is not a specific style of music so much as a collection of things that sound traditional and were not written by an actual composer. The term, then, is closer in meaning to the term “folklore,” which refers to a collection of tales and stories that are traditionally passed on from generation to generation but without a clear author. Folk music and folklore, then, both are really nothing more than collections of orphaned compositions.

Today, though, most people think they know what folk music is. At least in America, the term usually refers to things that sound older and, thus, more authentic than most recorded music. It is music, they argue, played on traditional instruments like banjos, acoustic guitars, harmonicas, and dobros, and music that sounds like something from the past, something from a simpler time when nothing had to be quite so polished to resonate.

Passage 2

In the early 1960s, the baby boomers looked around and did not like what they saw. The world was dangerous, unjust, and artificial. Everything was made of plastic yet able to be destroyed instantly by nuclear bombs. People were not free, even though they were supposed to be. And the one outlet of the youth, rock and roll, had been commodified. Elvis was in the army, and the rock and roll music being released was sweet and melodic, polished, and no longer a valid avenue of expression because it was designed to turn a profit. It was a bleak time for a teenager or young adult. But instead of creating something new, some sought comfort in the past, because things from the past, by default, had to be more authentic than things in the present.

The result was the urban folk boom, a movement of young people trading electric guitars for acoustic ones and embracing the work songs of the 1930s and 1940s. Singers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, and Tim Buckley gathered in New York’s Washington Square Park and the emerging coffee shop scene surrounding it. There, they donned work-shirts and blue jeans and sang the songs of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Odessa, singing of life in labor camps, hard times, hard traveling, and hard living. There, these mostly middle-class youth seemed to argue that real living could only be expressed through the past struggles of lower class individuals, regardless of how different from those individuals the middle-class youth were. Sure, they might have been complete phonies for singing the songs, but the songs themselves seemed authentic. If nothing else, the music’s nonelectric sound seemed an appropriate way to criticize a plastic and electric world.

Unlike the author of Passage 1, the author of Passage 2 associates folk music with

A. the past

B. finance

C. protest

D. tradition

E. authenticity