We’re getting on in our look back at seminal songs from the 1970s (a tongue twister if ever there was one). We’ve been going by genre and have considered rock, glam, funk, punk, and country to this point. But we still have a few ways to go to really capture the decade. Today, we slide over from country to its first cousin – folk. And folk rock. And maybe a little bit a country too.
That’s because I did something a tiny bit different with the country list. Rather than discussing the entire decade, I focused on one year. 1973 was so significant in the evolution of modern country music that it merited an article all to itself.
That meant I had to leave some crucial country numbers out. I don’t exactly see today’s list as a way to rectify that, but I will admit I will be slipping in a few songs that might be better called “country” or “country rock” than “folk.” Fortunately, the genres share enough DNA to make any complaints negligible. All of today’s songs have at least one foot in the folk tradition.
15 excellent folk songs from the 1970s
In the ‘70s, folk and folk rock didn’t need one big bang moment like country had in 1973. The genres had already experienced an evolution in the mid-‘60s. Though country had giants like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, it didn’t have Bob Dylan. He belonged to the folk music team.
Dylan, alongside Elvis Presley and the Beatles, is one of the few truly transformative artists in modern Western popular music. He had his antecedents, to be sure. And there were contemporaries who helped move the ball down the field. (Side note: if this period of music interests you and you have yet to see the Coen Brothers Being Llewyn Davis, I think you would like it very much. It shows what it was like to almost be Bob Dylan in the early ‘60s.)
Dylan made folk rock a legit genre in the mid-‘60s. It wasn’t easy. But it happened nonetheless. (Movie suggestion #2 – it hasn’t been released yet, but I suspect that James Mangold’s The Complete Unknown, with Timothee Chalamet as Dylan, will be excellent.) In fact, Dylanesque folk-rock grew so pervasive by 1970 that every major label was scooping up every scruffy-looking guy with an acoustic guitar to be “the next Dylan.” Loudon Wainwright commemorated this in 1992 in “Talking New Bob Dylan Blues,” namedropping himself, along with John Prine, Steve Forbert, and Bruce Springsteen, as just a few of the “next Bob Dylans.”
Teaser: one of the aforementioned singer/songwriters will be showing up on the following list.
Anyway, today, we look at fifteen folk-rock songs from the 1970s that extended what Dylan and others had begun in the ‘60s. The songs may lean toward country, with fiddles and banjos, or toward rock, with electric guitar and an emphasis on bass and drums, but I think all can safely be considered at least partly folk. There is a lot of finger-picking, an elevation of melody over beat, and a narrative interest in stories over seduction. Basically, these songs all just kind of sound folky to me.
And as with so many of the ‘70s genres we have talked about, there is a peak in the early part of the decade. Popular music would undergo something of a renewal in the second half of the ‘70s, as rock & roll and its offshoots would begin showing signs of age. Disco would provide a brief interregnum, clear-cutting the field to allow for newer, more energetic forms of music to arise. We can look at this if we ever get to the 1980s. But for now, we’ve still got lots of great ‘70s tunes to acknowledge.