How Folk Songs Relate to Other Ethnic Music Categories

Folk music is music that remains in its original, natural form, and its basic characteristics are unattributed authorship, preservation of acoustic sound, free and irregular rhythm, etc. (The irregularity of the rhythm of folk songs is not so much the result of carelessness, lack of training or lack of accompaniment, but rather the result of following the natural rhythms of the mind. Natural singing is spontaneous and free, and there is no need for a strict beat. It is out of the power of this primitive passion that folk songs are sung.) Folk music has a purely instrumental category and a song category. Folk songs belong to the song category. As for folk music, this is a modern concept, only in the modern era when Western capitalism developed and began to expand worldwide, the national question became a worldwide issue and nationalism became an important trend of thought. In modern Western music, nationalism is an important style that bears the brunt of the Russian school, the Hungarian school, and Asian, in short, everything that is non-Western, non-Eurocentric, non-European and American mainstream.

Difference between folk songs and ballads:

Folk songs are traditional music with local and national colors, while the term ballad carries a modern meaning. Since popular music was bred and developed from Britain and America, the folk elements in popular music are directly from the traditional folk songs of European and American history, while the folk songs of other places are excluded from it and given another name - WORLD MUSIC, or called ethnic music. I suggest the use of the term "folk song" to distinguish it from the term "ballad", which refers specifically to Europe and the United States. As a matter of fact, this distinction also exists in the West. There is also a distinction between the traditional folk music of Europe and that of the British Isles and that of continental Europe. British and American traditional folk music (British Isles, including Ireland) is often called FOLK, while the continental traditional folk music is often called BALLAD, both in style, genre and subject matter have obvious differences. And in the United States evolved into the mainstream of modern popular music is still FOLK.