There is good evidence that for over ninety-nine per cent of human history, and for ninety-seven per cent of the time since the emergence of our own species (homo sapiens sapiens) approximately 70,000 years ago, all music was popular, in so far as it was shared and enjoyed by all members of a society. If there were distinctions of style within a society's music, they were accepted as sings of functional or social differentiation rather than as barriers to mutual communication. Distinctions between sacred and secular music, between music for young and old or men and women, were generally drawn within the style of each music culture, and, at least in principle, a member of one group could perform and appreciate the music of another group in the same society.

Folklore is the only recognised field of musical creativity on a mass scale. Here, ‘every new variant is an archetype, for there is no authoritative original’, even the same folk musician will not repeat the same melodic line unchanged; what folk singers ‘carried in their memories was not a fixed, memorised series of words and notes, but the fluid idea of a song which so far as they were concerned had never had any other existence than in the fresh evocations it received from singers like themselves’ (Bronson 1969, pp. 102–6).

If the North East is typical of other English regions, then the following propositions will have to be severely modified or given up: that there was a distinct ‘break’ between pre-industrial and industrial workers’ culture; that concert hall was a London phenomenon; that it originated mainly from petit-bourgeois ‘free-and-eases’; and that it reached its peak in Edwardian England, as music hall. Further, I will contend that ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ cannot rationally be separated in the study of workers’ culture, that social historians and students of culture need each other and that the concept of ‘folk song’ does more harm than good.

On the surface, a study of the evolution of a particular regional Afro-American folk-music style does not appear to be directly connected with the development of popular music. Yet, in one way or another since the 1930s, Son House, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, aspects of whose music I discuss here, have all influenced both the development of black blues and, in a much wider context, American and European popular music in general. Johnson and then House became cult figures of the 1960s American folk-music ‘revival’; Waters's Chicago rhythm and blues, which he developed in the late 1940s, have sustained him with black and, subsequently, white audiences since that time, his early commercial recordings being absorbed and sometimes emulated by groups such as the Rolling Stones.

It has become a truism to say that most forms of traditional music in the American South were to some extent ‘commercialised’ by the end of the 1920s: certainly this is true of fiddle and instrumental traditions, country singing, the blues and jazz. By the middle of the Depression most of these musics had gained access to the mass media, either through phonograph records or radio. Throughout the Depression amateur musicians gave way to semi-professional, and then fully professional, musicians who spent most of their time playing music. While these changes meant erosion of regional styles and dilution of tradition, they also meant an improvement in the quality of musicianship, more creativity, more experimentation and an expansion of audience. However, some forms of traditional southern music did not follow this pattern. White gospel music is one. White southern gospel music - and the term here specifically excludes Sacred Harp music, church music, hymns - has for too long been linked to white country music and seen as a sub-category of that music. Yet in many ways, white gospel music had little in common with mainstream country, and when it emerged as a genre of its own in the days before the Second World War, it followed a development pattern that is very distinct from that of country or any of its sub-genres. This becomes even more obvious as we begin to make cautious, tentative inroads into the serious study of this brand of music which has attracted millions of Southerners and Midwesterners. The question that I want to explore is just what happened in the 1940s to cause white gospel suddenly to make serious inroads into American pop music in general.

Since 1945 the musical scene in East Africa has been characterised by a series of important developments which ran parallel to an extensive political–cultural change of consciousness. All the musical forms which arose in this connection were ‘popular’ in the sense that they were appreciated by broad sections of society.

It is inevitable that the first issue of this yearbook will raise questions about the use of the term ‘popular music’. I do not believe that this question is going to be easy to answer and, as a precaution, I think we should regard quick and seemingly clearcut solutions with suspicion. In fact, we may eventually have to operate with intuitive, poorly defined and rather elastic definitions of popular music. Before we resort to that expedient, however, the problem of definition must be considered and discussed from various points of view.

Billy Joel's song ‘It's Still Rock and Roll to Me’, which rose to the top of Billboard magazine's ‘Hot 100’ chart in July of 1980, was intended as entertainment, not criticism. But it makes a more accurate statement about the present state of rock music in the USA than have the writings of certain journalists and critics over the past decade. Against a stripped-down instrumental accompaniment, parodying the ‘minimalism’ of much new wave music, Joel sings,

Everybody's talking about the new sound; funny, But it's still rock and roll to me.

There is an apocryphal legend that when Louis Armstrong was asked whether he considered his music to be folk music he replied: ‘Wal, yeah, I guess so: leastways, I never heard of no horse making it.’ If and when we talk of Bob Dylan as a folk singer, we do so partly of course in this fundamental sense: his music is of, about and for people. But we also mean — as Satchmo's interviewer must have done — that Dylan calls on resources and techniques that pertain to oral cultures rather than ostensibly to our own. Unlike ‘real’ folk song, Dylan's words and music are written down; yet what is notated is no more than an approximation to the sounds heard, which are created empirically for each performance, from verbal inflection and from the body's gestures. Dylan is a ‘folk’ artist in that his sources are absorbed at a more or less pre-conscious level: from the monody and banjo-picking of ‘poor white’ Americans and the traditions of white British folk music behind them; from the black blues and the African heritage it stemmed from; and from some more sophisticated, or at least literate, sources such as white hymn, march and parlour ballad. To these musical roots there are literary parallels: Dylan's verses have been deeply influenced by rural folk ballads, by the poetry of the blues, by the Bible, by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (scarcely less pervasive in the Bible belts than the Good Book itself), by Hymns Ancient and Modern, by children's rhymes and by runic verse of all kinds, including Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are close to the core of Dylan's experience and which, although literary, were sung by the poet himself to improvised, presumably folk-like, tunes. In his early days Dylan operated with his voice — untrained, ‘natural’, veering between speech and song — and his acoustic guitar.

Rock, the saying goes, is ‘the folk music of our time’. Not from a sociological point of view. If ‘folk’ describes pre-capitalist modes of music production, rock is, without a doubt, a mass-produced, mass-consumed, commodity. The rock-folk argument, indeed, is not about how music is made, but about how it works: rock is taken to express (or reflect) a way of life; rock is used by its listeners as a folk music — it articulates communal values, comments on shared social problems. The argument, in other words, is about subcultures rather than musicmaking; the question of how music comes to represent its listeners is begged. (I develop these arguments further in Frith 1978, pp. 191–202, and, with particular reference to punk rock, in Frith 1980.)