What is folk music? It's actually quite a tricky question to answer - that's why writers and academics have spent centuries debating it. That said, we're all aware of the debt that classical music owes to folk. And we all know a good folk singer when we hear one. Here, in no particular order, are ten of the best folk singers ever.
The best folk singers ever
Leonard Cohen
Even if you just know ‘Hallelujah’, you know Leonard Cohen. The poet-novelist-singer-songwriter poured his soul into everything: his beautiful melodies, his haunting lyrics, his many relationships, his Jewish faith.
As a youngster, growing up in an orthodox Jewish family in Montreal, Cohen regularly involved himself in extracurricular activities. He got involved on the yearbook staff, in the arts and current events clubs, in his school’s theatre programme. He even served as president of the Students' Council.
But music occupied a special place in his affections. That was thanks to his mother, who would sing songs around the house. 'I know that those changes, those melodies, touched me very much,'”' he later reminisced. “She would sing with us when I took my guitar to a restaurant with some friends; my mother would come, and we'd often sing all night.”
God, love, loss, death and longing
He came to his singing-songwriting career relatively late - in his mid-thirties, after struggling to make a living as a novelist and poet. But it was quick to take off, thanks to the profoundly haunting yet simple way he dealt with the most fundamental aspects of life: sex, God, love, loss, death and longing. It’s a quality that turned him into an icon, with many hailing him as a literary and musical genius.
Yet Cohen himself always remained remarkably matter of fact about his creative process. ‘I have no idea what I am doing,’ he once said in an interview with the New Yorker. ‘It’s hard to describe. As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one’s life or one’s work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.’
Standout track: 'Hallejuah'
Bob Dylan
Hailed by some as the Shakespeare of his generation, this Nobel-prize-winning singer-songwriter has always had a way of capturing the zeitgeist like few others before or after him. Even the Beatles learnt from him. Paul McCartney once declared: ‘He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further.’ And yet his music is timeless, often reflecting on universal themes and refracting them through poetry and music of immaculate craftsmanship.
Growing up in a small, close-knit Jewish community in Minnesota, Bob Dylan (or Robert Zimmerman as he was then known) grew up on a musical diet of blues, country and rock and roll. He formed several bands in high school, but it was when - as a student at the University of Minnesota - his focus on rock and roll gave way to American folk music, that he found his groove, as he explained in a 1985 interview:
‘The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms. But the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.’
All of which, and more, Dylan poured into his own songs. Now, aged 82, he continues to tour and remains a sight to behold in live performance.
Standout track: 'Like a Rolling Stone'
Woody Guthrie
Perhaps the most significant folk artist in US history, Woody Guthrie inspired generations of singers (not least Bob Dylan himself) thanks to his artistry and political activism.
Brought up in Oklahoma, Guthrie learnt how to do life, and music, the hard way. His mother, an early musical influence, suffered from Huntingdon’s - a disease that would later claim Guthrie too - and was institutionalised when he was still a child.
Aged 14, and left to fend for himself while his father worked in Texas to repay his debts, Guthrie turned to busking in the streets for food or money, developing his skills as a musician. He married at 19 and fathered three children. But, with the arrival of the dust storms of the Dust Bowl period, he had to leave them to seek employment elsewhere. This was how he wound up in California, literally singing for his supper with his guitar and harmonica.
The experience left a deep impression, in the form of a strong social conscience. It also paved the way for a lot of good songs. His iconic 1940s song ‘This Land is Your Land’ is commonly considered to be the USA’s alternative national anthem, and much of his work is focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. Bob Dylan made a great effort to seek out his idol, and visited him in hospital during his final years. He would later say of Guthrie's music, 'The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.'
Standout track: ‘This Land is Your Land’
Joni Mitchell
Celebrating her 80th birthday this year, Joni Mitchell is one of the most venerated folk singers, thanks to the individualism of her music. The Canadian-American singer's songs, frequently confessional in style, have resonated with millions, transcending time, gender and genre. You couldn’t categorise her music even if you wanted to: such is the originality of her style. 'When I play the guitar,' she once explained, “I hear it as an orchestra: the top three strings being the horn section, the bottom three being cello, viola, and double bass — the bass being indicated but not rooted.'
Part of that unconventionality comes down to her earliest experiences: at eight she contracted polio, leaving her left hand weakened. In order to play the guitar, she had to adapt her tunings. This experience lent her a deeper, more playful relationship with her instrument than many a guitarist.
That relationship saw her through several significant life events - not least the trauma of giving up a newborn daughter for adoption. And it was a relationship that evolved over time, increasingly embracing elements of jazz and pop.
But Mitchell has not lost sight of her folk beginnings. In a 2020 interview with The Guardian Mitchell said: 'For so long I rebelled against the term. “I was never a folk singer.” It would piss me off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened, and – it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings. And I had this realisation… Oh God! I was a folk singer!'
Standout track: 'Both Sides, Now'
Joan Baez
Something of an American icon, singer-songwriter Joan Baez has often used her music for social and political ends - she has been an activist and advocate for social justice in all forms, getting involved in the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, and environmental activism.
Born on January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York, Baez emerged in the early 1960s as one of the spearheads of the folk music revival. With music that reflected her commitment to civil rights, social change and non-violence, she quickly became closely associated with the American protest movement.
Musically, Baez's distinctive features include her clear soprano voice and an uncanny ability to convey deep emotion through music. She has also, interestingly, recorded songs in a variety of languages and styles, although the folk music canon is definitely her home turf. She has also covered the songs of other folk music luminaries including Bob Dylan, with whom she had both a professional and a personal relationship.
Throughout her career, Baez has released numerous albums, performed at iconic events like the 1969 Woodstock Festival, and received various honours, including induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. Her legacy as both a musician and an advocate for peace and justice continues to inspire generations.
Standout track: 'Diamonds and Rust'
Five more of the best folk singers of all time
Lead Belly
An interesting one, this, as he also crops up in our list of best blues singers of all time. But Huddie William Leadbetter, aka Lead Belly, effortlessly straddled both genres. Born in 1888 (or 1889?) in Mooringsport, Louisiana, Lead Belly was a huge influence on American music as a whole, with his powerful voice, twelve-string guitar wizardry, and huge repertoire of songs. As such, he played a huge part in ensuring the survival and even prosperity of both the American folk and blues music forms.
Lead Belly's own musical origins were the Southern traditions of blues, folk, and work songs, spanning gospel and spirituals, ballads, prison songs, and even children's songs. Iconic Lead Belly interpretations such as 'Cotton Fields', 'Midnight Special', 'Rock Island Line' and 'Goodnight, Irene' have since been covered many times by other artists and have entered the classic American songbook.
Huddie William Leadbetter led a colourful life, including various stints in prison for violent crimes. It was while he was behind bard, in fact, that the Lead Belly story could be said to have begun: that was when folklorists John and Alan Lomax recorded a wide selection of his songs for the American Library of Congress. That led to relative fame for the singer, particularly among New York's 1930s/40s folk music scene.
That voice and a unique charisma - plus his general musical talent and ability to convey deep and strong emotion - won Lead Belly many admirers among audiences and fellow musicians alike. Some of the other folk icons we're covering here, such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, all owe a huge debt to Lead Belly's trailblazing path through American folk and blues.
Standout track: 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night'
John Denver
The American singer-songwriter, musician, and actor John Denver became one of the most popular and beloved folk and country artists of the 1970s. Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. on December 31, 1943, in Roswell, New Mexico (yes, that Roswell), the singer adopted the stage name 'John Denver' to honour the capital of his favourite state - wild, rugged and rocky Colorado.
The John Denver sound is warm and melodic, and his lyrical universe is full of references to love, personal reflection, and the joy of nature. Tracks like 'Take Me Home, Country Roads', 'Annie's Song', and 'Rocky Mountain High' combine rich arrangements and heartfelt, confessional lyrics, and Denver's warm., engaging music and heart-on-sleeve singing persona was a huge hit with 1970s audiences.
Like Joan Baez above, Denver felt passionately about causes way beyond music. He was a keen environmentalist, with a deep love of the natural world, and lent his support to campaigns around nature conservation, hunger, and peace. Indeed, 'Rocky Mountain High' became an unofficial anthem for his adopted state of Colorado, later becoming one of the state's official songs.
Denver was a busy man. As well as a prolific music career (some 30 albums across a 30-year timespan), he also made several television specials and movies. He was also an eloquent spokesperson for a variety of environmental organisations - and also found the time to promote space exploration in his role as a civilian astronaut!
John Denver's life was cut tragically short when, on October 12, 1997, his experimental aircraft crashed near the Californian coast. However, his music - simple, beautiful, rooted in the American landscape - and his passionate environmentalism still inspire and influence fans and musicians around the world.
Standout track: 'Take Me Home, Country Roads'
Pete Seeger
Folk musician, singer, songwriter, social activist: Pete Seeger played a crucial role in the rebirth of American folk music after World War II. He was born in 1919 in New York City, into a musical family, and felt the strong influence of folk traditions from a very early age. His musical career got going in the 1940s, when he played in folk groups like The Weavers and helped to bring folk music to a wider audience.
If we had to characterise Pete Seeger's music, we'd put it down to simplicity, accessibility, and impact. The singer strongly believed that music could be a powerful tool for driving social change and for bringing people together. He either wrote, or revived, a series of songs that became anthems for various social movements, such as 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' (anti-war), 'If I Had a Hammer', (civil rights) and 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' (anti-war again, though more broadly, a call for social change). Songs like these, with their vivid, immediate messages of peace, justice, and environmental responsibility, have been hugely influential on both folk music and wider social movements.
This unapologetic activism, however, got Seeger into difficulties at times. During the 1950s, his associations and political beliefs got him blacklisted and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Undaunted, Seeger continued to push for change both via his music and in other walks of life. He took an active role in the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, and environmental campaigns. A hugely influential figure, in folk music and far beyond.
Standout track: 'Turn! Turn! Turn!'
Judy Collins
To be honest, Judy Collins - with her crystal-clear soprano voice and her catholic musical repertoire spanning folk, pop, rock, and show tunes - could find a place in quite a few different 'best singers' lists. But it's safe to say that it's within the folk music genre that she is best know and loved.
Born on May 1, 1939, in Seattle, Washington state, USA, Collins later became a leading light in the 1960s folk music revival, with a gift for both her own creations and insightful, captivating cover versions.
Like another musical great, Nina Simone, Collins actually started out as a classical pianist. However, inspired by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, she made the move to folk music in her early twenties. Like Bob Dylan, she started out making recordings of traditional folk standards, before covering contemporaries such as Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell (her 1967 cover of the latter's 'Both Sides, Now' was a career-defining moment), and eventually finding her own voice.
Judy Collins's songs are distinctive for their effortless emotional resonance, and for the singer's beautiful vocal control. Like others on our list, she lent that amazing voice to songs about contemporary social issues, as well as the more universal themes of love and the human experience. And, like Seeger and other folk luminaries, she has walked the walk as well, getting involved in social causes including civil rights, women's rights, and environmental issues.
Standout track: 'Since You've Asked'
Best folk singers: Elizabeth Cotten to Laura Marling
Laura Marling
Ranking amongst the finest young British folk singers, Laura Marling is has won legions of admirers for her gifts as a musical storyteller.
Born to a music teacher mother and a baronet father who ran a recording studio, Marling started learning the guitar at an early age. Naturally introverted, she had some difficult periods at school. She quit before her AS-levels to embark on a musician's life in London - with her parents’ approval.
The result was an ethereal new voice. There are debts to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but there's also something totally distinctive. Reserved and enigmatic, Marling draws the listener in with her quietly poetic brand of music making, often leaving listeners’ to guess at its emotional significance. ‘There's a level of conscious removal,’ she once told The Guardian, when describing her music. ‘I don't see a time where I'm ever going to sit and sing with my heart on my sleeve.’
Standout track: 'Rambling Man'
Lal Waterson
Who knows what else this English folk singer might have achieved, had she not died suddenly, aged 55, of cancer diagnosed only ten days before.
As it is, she produced a significant body of songs. Stark but mesmerising, they often focused on the bleaker side of life.
An orphan brought up by her grandmother of part Gypsy descent, Waterson grew up singing with her siblings. Together they opened their own folk club in a pub in their native city of Hull. By the mid 1960s they had developed their own unaccompanied style singing harmony style re-workings of traditional English songs.
Later, when Waterson branched off on her own, she would draw on influences ranging from jazz and ragtime. But that facility with harmony, and her ability to take it in unexpected directions, stood her in good stead throughout her relatively short life, contributing to a musical voice that was as original as it was powerful.
Standout track: 'Red Wine Promises'
Elizabeth Cotten
For all that she wrote some of America’s most sophisticated folk songs while still a young girl, the self-taught African-American guitarist Elizabeth Cotten had to wait more than sixty years to get the acclaim she deserved.
Born in 1893, the youngest of five children, Cotten taught herself the guitar. Because she was left-handed she played it upside down, plucking the melody line with her thumb. This technique came to be known as ‘Cotten picking’. At nine she was forced to quit school and work as a domestic help. At 13, she got a live in job as a maid. All the while, though, she continued to write her own songs, with ‘Freight Train’ in particular, becoming hugely popular in the US.
Not that anybody knew she had written it: for a long time the song was miscredited. And it was only decades later, with advocacy from the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger and her family, for whom Cotten worked as a housekeeper, that she was recognised for it.
It was while working for the Seegers in her sixties, that she rediscovered her guitar. The instrument had lain dormant for 40 years. Relearning to play it, Cotten started performing publicly and recording. She thus played a big part in the burgeoning folk revival of the 1960s. She died in 1987, aged 94.
Standout track: ‘Freight Train’
Luke Kelly
One of Ireland’s most important cultural icons, Luke Kelly is best remembered as the man who knew how to sing his heart out, and to move even the steeliest listeners to tears.
Born in 1940 to a working class family near the Five Lamps area of Dublin, he grew up in poverty. His family shared communal taps and toilets with eight other families. He left school early, going on to take on a series of menial jobs, while learning the banjo.
Perhaps it was those early experiences that left him with a lifelong sympathy for the sufferings of others. It certainly informed a lot of his material, which focused on the plight of the worker in what he saw as a corrupt capitalist system.
As part of the band the Dubliners, he enjoyed huge success, releasing a steady stream of Irish classics such as the 'The Wild Rover', 'The Monto', 'Whiskey in the Jar', and 'Seven Drunken Nights'.
But it was all too short-lived. He died in 1984, aged only 44, of a brain tumour. Allegedly on the day of his funeral one mourner declared that if Kelly had any idea of how much he was loved, he would never have died.
Standout track: 'Whiskey in the Jar'
Siân James
Siân James came from a line of singers who accompanied themselves on the harp – a line that she has done a fine job of continuing.
Brought up in a Welsh speaking family in the village of Llanerfyl in Powys, she started competing at age three in the local Esteddfodau, going on, later, to pick up the piano, violin and harp.
Later she sang with a folk-rock band. Now she is one of Wales’s finest, most adventurous multi-instrumentalists - someone who is able to explore the worlds of classical and classical crossover music while always remaining emotionally authentic.
As well as being one of the best folk singers in the pantheon Siân is also an actor, with various TV credits to her name.
Standout track: 'Ei Di'R Deryn Du? ('Blackbird, Will You Go?')
Ian Campbell
This Scottish singer took a labyrinthine route through life. Born in Aberdeen - the son of a trade union leader - he moved as a teenager to Birmingham, where he worked for several years as an engraver in the city’s jewellery quarter. In the mid-1950s he and his younger sister Lorna formed the Clarion Skiffle Group. They later became the Ian Campbell Folk Group.
Together they toured nationally and internationally, giving performances at venues including the Royal Albert Hall in London. Their songs, often political in subject matter, were loved as much for their haunting melodies as they were for their poignant lyrics. One number in particular, 'The Old Man's Tale', stands out for its last lines: ‘When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry/ I'm not sure how to change things, but by Christ we'll have to try.’
The group split in 1978, following which Campbell did a degree in theatre studies at Warwick University. For a time he worked as a television producer and presenter, before eventually returning to full time singer. He never reclaimed the success of his early years. When he died in 2012, he was no longer a household name. For all that, he remains one of the most important singers of the British folk revival of the twentieth century, who had a lasting influence on generations of folk singers.
Standout track: 'The Old Man's Tale'
