What is Folk Guitar, Anyway?

Description

Folk music is music "of the folks". In other words, traditional folk songs have evolved over time and throughout cultures. There is generally no one known author for a traditional folk song. These songs frequently tell a story or address a community purpose.

The main role of the guitar in traditional folk songs is to support the song harmonically and rhythmically. Therefore, the guitar parts may remain rather simple while the "star" of the song is the lyrics and the singing.

As a guitar learner, sometimes what you want to do is to practice hard and hone your guitar skills so you can become a more advanced player and play fancier stuff. But sometimes you just want to keep it simple, and allow the guitar to be a support and a vehicle for making music, but not necessarily the main point of focus.

This is especially true when your main objective is to enjoy singing songs, by yourself, or with your friends, your kids, your family.

In this series, we're going to learn to play a whole collection of traditional folk songs, using just three chords – the chords G, C, and D. We'll also learn a simple single-note melody solo for each song. These can be fun to use if you play the song with another musician, as a duet.

Now these are simplified versions, to be sure, and more advanced players will definitely want to embellish these arrangements with more developed chord progressions and other fancy stuff.

But the main point of this series is to invite beginning guitar players to enjoy playing and singing a whole repertoire of traditional folk songs, without becoming discouraged by guitar arrangements that are too challenging for them.

In the next 2 lessons, we'll do a quick crash course in the basic skills you will need to be able to play these songs. Then we'll get right into the songs, with chords, rhythms, and melody solos.

Enjoy!