Songs from the wood

I don’t know what is going on with me recently, the musical need for dealing with more core and mellow materials, the intensive work that I have with singers and acoustic guitars… anyway, one of the genres that always caught my attention is Folk. As you might know, the word is coming from the term folklore – popular tradition. I must make here a definite diagnosis, maybe for ones that are not familiar with the musical terms – there is Folklore that resembles tradition for certain people or nations, and there is Folk. When today people mention Folk, they relate it to the Folk Revival movement that started initially in the early 20th century in the USA. It resembled the people story textually. Practically, the singers that performed the songs of this movement were usually accompanying themselves with an acoustic guitar. And I want to focus on this matter – at least when it concerns to me when people mention the word Folk I have immediately the association of acoustic guitar with steel strings (and not the nylon strings that Spanish classical guitar has). In the 1950s there was a progression of this movement, and the artists start to perform their own materials rather than the popular, sometimes anonymous texts, and from there comes the term Singer-songwriter. As a musician, composer, arranger and soundman I always paid attention to the music and only much much later I started to pay attention to the words too. In this mixtape, the ‘advenced’ listeners could catch the mixture of genres that you can’t always relate to Folk. The important thing for me here is to glorify this beautiful instrument, the acoustic guitar. I think it is the most important instrument among the modern pop music genres. This day I can say sweepingly, if I could have the option as a kid, I’d rather take the energy to learn to play the guitar and not the piano, which has, of course, its advantages especially for composers and arrangers. But if I can compare I’ll say that the acoustic guitar is always combined, in my opinion, in a perfect way with a singer’s voice. It is always gentle but could be very rhythmical when needed like a percussion. Always when someone starts to have some interest in playing on a musical instrument and ask for my advice, I will always recommend on the guitar. As always like in previous nuggets, I tried to combine excellent tracks that resemble the right vibe of the subject: