Music family
Folk, Country & Roots Music Genres
Explore folk, country, bluegrass, and roots traditions where regional storytelling, acoustic instruments, and community memory shape the sound.
85 genre guides
1300Piphat – Thailand
Piphat is a traditional Thai classical music ensemble characterized by its use of wind and percussion instruments, creating a vibrant and rhythmic sound. It often features instruments such as the ranat ek (xylophone), pi nai (oboe), and various types of drums and gongs.
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1700Cajun
A rooted south Louisiana dance tradition with Acadian origins, Cajun music keeps its pulse in fiddle and accordion lines, French lyrics, and a repertoire that balances old-country intimacy with floor-filling drive.
1800Drinking Songs
A social folk label rather than a narrowly bounded commercial genre, drinking songs live in the overlap between pub tradition, oral history, and recorded revival. The strongest documentation clusters around Irish and Celtic repertories.
1800Fado
A Lisbon-born Portuguese song tradition centered on voice, guitarra portuguesa, and a deep sense of saudade. Strongly documented, historically rooted, and still carried by major contemporary artists.
1800Merengue Típico
A traditional Dominican dance style that still sounds alive in present-day recordings, merengue típico centers the accordion and percussion while keeping a direct line to rural Cibao roots.
1830Polka
A durable Central European dance music that moved easily from village halls to immigrant ballrooms, polka remains most vivid when the accordion leads and the rhythm feels ready to spin people into the room together.
1850Barbershop
A warm, tightly tuned vocal style rooted in African-American harmony-making, later formalized by revival-era organizations and still most recognizably heard in quartets and choruses.
1850Música criolla
A coastal Peruvian tradition that blends guitar-led song, Afro-Peruvian rhythmic memory, and urban salon-and-street vitality, now recognized as a key part of the country’s cultural identity.
1900Australian Country
A rooted, story-first country tradition shaped by the bush, the pub, and the long road between them.
1900Chanson
A long-lived French song tradition that stretches from medieval courtly music to the intimate, word-first popular songs associated with Piaf and Aznavour.
1900Chanukah music
A holiday-music tag for songs tied to Hanukkah, spanning synagogue-adjacent classics, community singalongs, and contemporary parody-pop releases.
1900Children’s Music
A broad, durable children’s-music entry anchored in nursery-rhyme tradition, the rise of recorded children’s albums, and later education-focused performers.
1900Christian Country
A faith-forward branch of country music that leans on familiar roots instrumentation and gospel-minded storytelling. The label is historically connected to country gospel and has been carried by artists who moved fluidly between sacred and mainstream country worlds.
1900Country Blues
A prewar acoustic blues umbrella rooted in rural Southern Black life, Country Blues is best understood as a family of local styles rather than a single fixed sound. The classic recordings are spare and vivid, with guitar lines that can sound both intricate and weathered, and singers who make a whole world out of a few minutes of shellac.
1900Holiday
A broad seasonal tag rather than a single style, Holiday sits where church carols, pop nostalgia, and yearly ritual meet. Its modern shape was formed by older hymn traditions, wider 19th-century publication, and the 20th-century dominance of evergreen recordings like Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”
1900Huayno
A durable Andean song-and-dance tradition rooted in the central highlands, huayno carries older village performance practices into modern recording and urban listening cultures.
1900Iranian Pop
A broad Persian-language pop tradition that took modern form in mid-20th-century Iran, splintered across the revolution and exile, and later re-entered public life in new forms.
1900Thanksgiving
A small seasonal category rather than a full genre, Thanksgiving music usually leans on acoustic, homey arrangements and songs about gratitude, family, and harvest-time warmth. Its documented footprint is real but modest, with much of the repertoire living in holiday playlists and artist catalogs instead of a standardized canon.
1900Twoubadou
A Haitian acoustic song tradition with blurred historical edges, twoubadou sits between folk memory and popular performance. Its most durable image is of small, mobile ensembles: guitars up front, percussion close behind, and songs that feel personal even when they move through public space.
1920Country Gospel
A warm, plainspoken form of sacred country music that grew out of early Southern recording culture and still feels rooted in front-porch harmony and revival songs.
1920Europe – Greece: Laiko, Entechno, Rebetika
This genre encompasses traditional Greek music styles that are characterized by their emotive melodies and often poignant lyrics. Laiko is a popular form of Greek music that blends traditional Greek folk music with modern sounds. Entechno is a more artistic and sophisticated style that often incorporates poetic lyrics and classical influences. Rebetika, known as the Greek blues, is marked by its soulful and often melancholic themes, typically featuring instruments like the bouzouki.
View guide1920Folk-Blues
A loose, acoustic-minded blues umbrella with deep roots in Southern U.S. performance culture and later importance in folk revival listening.
1920Gospel Blues
A sacred-blues crossroads genre with early recording-era roots in African American Southern music, later sharpened by figures such as Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
View guide1920Piedmont Blues
A well-documented acoustic blues style from the southeastern U.S., Piedmont Blues sits at the meeting point of ragtime, string-band music, and blues. The best recordings feel agile and unforced, with the guitar carrying both rhythm and melody in the same breath.
1920Yodel
A mountain-born vocal style that moved from Alpine herding calls into folk song and early country recording, where it found some of its most famous American exponents.
1927Country music
A broad, durable American genre that took shape in the early twentieth century but reaches back into older folk and ballad traditions. Its first stars made the template: plainspoken songs, close harmonies, and a frontier between homegrown intimacy and mass-market polish.
1927Traditional Country
Traditional country sits at the point where rural song, early recording culture, and plainspoken storytelling met. Its sound is spare but vivid, and its earliest stars helped define what country music would become for decades.
1930Cowboy / Western
Cowboy / Western music often features themes of the American West, cowboys, and rural life. It typically includes acoustic instruments like the guitar, harmonica, and fiddle, and is characterized by its storytelling lyrics and often nostalgic or adventurous tone.
View guide1936Instrumental Country
A guitar-forward corner of country music where melody, tone, and technique carry the narrative. The strongest documented lineage runs through western swing and Nashville-era pickers, especially Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Jerry Reed, and Floyd Cramer.
1936Tejano
Tejano is a borderland genre with deep Texas roots: dance-forward, accordion-led, and shaped by Mexican American experience as much as by outside influences. Its history is best understood less as a single origin story than as a long conversation among community dance halls, regional recording industries, and later crossover stardom. (loc.gov)
1937Skiffle
A British revival style built from American roots music, skiffle turned cheap instruments and quick, communal energy into a lasting spark for later rock and pop.
View guide1940Honky Tonk
A classic country offshoot born in bars and dance halls, honky tonk favors direct singing, unsentimental storytelling, and a band sound that feels close to the floorboards.
View guide1940Tex-Mex / Tejano
Tex-Mex, also known as Tejano, is a vibrant and energetic genre that blends Mexican folk and traditional music with American rock, country, and blues influences. It typically features accordion, bajo sexto, and electric guitars, with a rhythmic foundation that encourages dancing.
View guide1940Traditional Bluegrass
A sturdy, first-generation bluegrass tag for the Monroe-to-Scruggs lineage: acoustic, fast-moving, harmony-rich, and historically grounded in the 1940s country-string tradition.
1950Australian music
A broad Australian-scene label rather than a narrow genre, this entry should be read as a national music tag spanning Indigenous traditions, rock, pop, and newer global pop-rap exports.
1950Lubbock Sound
A regional label anchored in Buddy Holly’s Lubbock-era recordings and the broader West Texas habit of blending country lift with rock-and-roll drive.
1950Pop en español mexicano
A mainstream Mexican pop lane shaped by Spanish-language radio, romantic balladry, and sleek crossover production.
1950Red Dirt
A scene-first country subgenre with roots in Oklahoma and strong ties to Texas, Red Dirt sits between honky-tonk directness and rough-edged rock energy.
1950Sertanejo
A Brazilian rural-popular genre that moved from interior duos and radio into a huge commercial mainstream, while keeping a clear line back to acoustic, regional storytelling.
View guide1950Texas country music
A regional country scene with a strong Texas identity, Texas Country sits between honky-tonk grit and songwriter intimacy, with Red Dirt as a closely related neighboring label.
1954Classic Country
A retrospective label for the older, story-first side of country music, centered on mid-century recordings that still feel intimate and sturdy in the hand.
1957Bakersfield Sound
A lean, twang-forward California country style that emerged from Bakersfield’s live scene and recording studios, then fed directly into later waves of country and country-rock. The best-known names attached to it are Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, with Ken Nelson helping shape its recorded sound.
1957Contemporary Folk
A broad, living folk label rooted in the 1960s revival, with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as anchor points and Joni Mitchell showing how quickly the style opened outward.
1957Nashville Sound
A polished Nashville-born country style that traded grit for glide, built by producers and carried by crossover voices.
1957New Mexico music
This entry now treats New Mex as a likely mislabel or shorthand for New Mexico music rather than a fully established standalone genre name. The copy emphasizes the region’s documented Hispano-rooted song tradition, its later pop and rock crossover, and the uncertainty around the tag’s usage in cataloging.
1962Celtic
Celtic is less a single, tightly bounded sound than a family of related traditional musics, rooted in Irish and Scottish practice and carried into a wider international field through revival, recording, and crossover work.
1962Celtic Folk
A broad folk umbrella for traditional music from the Celtic world, with a sound that moves easily between plaintive songs and brisk dance tunes.
1964Folk Rock
A concise, evidence-based portrait of folk rock as a 1960s crossover style that fused folk songwriting with rock’s amplification and momentum.
1964Vispop
A Scandinavian singer-songwriter tradition with Swedish roots, vispop sits between the old visa and a more polished pop sensibility.
1967Cajun Fiddle Tunes
A historically grounded, fiddle-centered Cajun entry with a careful distinction between the older fiddle repertory and the broader Cajun music tradition that later foregrounded accordion.
1967Contemporary Christian music
A retrospective label for the early, foundational years of contemporary Christian music: faith-first songs, familiar pop structures, and a clear lineage back to the Jesus movement.
1967Contemporary Singer/Songwriter
A modern continuation of the classic singer/songwriter idea, this tag sits where confessional writing meets cleaner pop craft. It is less a strict scene than a useful umbrella for artists who keep the song and the voice in the spotlight.
1967Country Pop
A mainstream-friendly country style shaped by Nashville polish and crossover ambition, with major visibility from the late 1960s onward.
1967Roots Rock
Roots rock sits close to rock’s foundation: songs with dust on the boots, blues in the fingers, and country or folk in the bloodstream. The genre name covers both the late-1960s move toward rougher, more traditional sounds and a later 1980s revival that pushed back against polished new-wave production.
1967Singer/Songwriter
A broad, durable label for artists who write and perform their own songs, usually with a close, personal point of view. The style is less about a fixed sound than about authorship, intimacy, and the feeling that the performer is speaking directly from lived experience.
1967Truck-Driving Country
A roadside country subgenre built around the life, language, and loneliness of long-haul driving.
1970Gulf and Western
A coastal-country shorthand anchored by Jimmy Buffett: part barroom storytelling, part sunset-at-the-marina sway, and never far from the Gulf or the beach.
1970Outlaw Country
A concise, evidence-based entry for the 1970s outlaw country movement, centered on its anti-Nashville stance, artist-driven control, and close ties to honky tonk, progressive country, and rough-edged storytelling.
1970Praise & Worship
Praise & Worship music is characterized by its uplifting and spiritual lyrics, often directed towards expressing devotion and reverence to God. It typically features contemporary musical styles, including pop, rock, and folk influences, and is designed to be sung by congregations during church services.
View guide1970Soft Rock
A radio-friendly branch of rock that softened the edges without losing the hook, soft rock grew out of early-1970s pop-rock and singer-songwriter culture and became a lasting FM staple.
1977Chamber Jazz
A flexible jazz tag for intimate, composition-minded playing rather than a single rigid scene. The strongest documented history ties it to mid-century third stream ideas, Jimmy Giuffre’s small-group experiments, and later ECM-era European recordings.
1977New Acoustic
A loose but historically useful label for acoustic string music that opened bluegrass to jazz-like improvisation and wider harmonic color.
1980Cowpunk
Cowpunk is best understood as an early-1980s punk-country crossover: rowdy, twangy, and historically tied to a small but influential wave of bands that helped clear the path for alt-country.
1980Folk Punk
A broad, hybrid tag for songs and scenes where folk’s narrative closeness meets punk’s blunt force. The strongest early documentation clusters around the UK and US in the early 1980s, with The Pogues, Violent Femmes, and Billy Bragg as the most useful anchor points.
1980Franco-Country
A Quebec-centered francophone country label with a long documentary trail, not a newly coined niche. The sound lives in the overlap of country storytelling and French-language regional identity.
1984Neotraditional Country
A tradition-forward country style that rose in the mid-1980s and helped steer mainstream country back toward fiddle, steel, and plainspoken songcraft.
1987Alternative Country
A rootsy, indie-leaning country strain that came into focus around the Uncle Tupelo era and the No Depression scene.
View guide1987Contemporary Bluegrass
A modern, lightly cross-pollinated branch of bluegrass that keeps the acoustic pulse but allows more room for contemporary songwriting, cleaner production, and subtle genre mixing.
1987World music
A useful but imperfect umbrella term, world music points readers toward music with strong regional roots and global reach rather than one fixed style.
1990Kwaito
Kwaito is best understood as a post-apartheid South African township sound: house music slowed down, made local, and turned into a language of youth identity. The strongest documented core is its 1990s emergence, its house-and-local-rhythm fusion, and its deep ties to artists like Boom Shaka, Bongo Maffin, and TKZee..za)
View guide1997Americana
Americana is best understood as a broad roots-music umbrella rather than a single locked-in sound. Its name is relatively recent, but the style reaches deep into older American folk, country, blues, bluegrass, soul, and rock traditions.
1997Contemporary Country
A mainstream-friendly country sound that keeps the genre’s core storytelling intact while leaning hard into polish, hooks, and crossover appeal.
1997Hellbilly
A fuzzy, artist-centered label for Hank Williams III’s rough-edged country-punk strain, with roots in outlaw country and psychobilly.
2000Alternative Folk
A porous, scene-crossing folk label that covers acoustic singer-songwriters with a modern edge. The evidence suggests it overlaps more than it contains, so the safest story is one of adjacency: folk tradition filtered through indie, anti-folk, and contemporary songwriting cultures.
2000Indie Folk
A warm, early-2000s indie strain of folk songwriting: intimate, harmony-rich, and usually more at home in rock ecosystems than in traditional revival spaces.
2000Steampunk
A scene label built around retro-futurist storytelling more than a fixed sonic template. The strongest documented early anchors are Abney Park and Vernian Process, but the tag is broad and sometimes self-applied.
2021Chubina-style Georgian folk fusion
This entry defines Georgian Chubina as a practical modern genre label for a recognizable Georgian folk-fusion sound, while avoiding the claim that it is an old traditional genre. The style is anchored by the Chubina melody and its online variants, but its broader identity comes from Georgian folk instrumentation, mountain imagery, plucked-string drive, and modern cinematic/trap/phonk production.
View guideBlues Country
Blues Country sits in the overlap where a weathered country song can lean into a blue note and suddenly feel older, deeper, and a little lonelier. The label is used loosely, but in practice it points to country music with an audible blues pull: plainspoken storytelling, rootsy guitar work, and an emotional register that favors ache over polish.
Chanson française
A lyric-centered French-language song tradition with deep historical roots and strong twentieth-century identity around Piaf, Brassens, and Brel.
Holiday music
A catch-all for music tied to holidays outside the Christmas/New Year’s lane, ranging from spooky seasonal songs to Thanksgiving reflections and Easter devotionals.
Jiangnan sizhu
A refined regional ensemble tradition with deep local roots, Jiangnan sizhu sits between chamber music and social music-making, sounding both polished and spontaneous. Its documented center of gravity is the Jiangnan region, but Shanghai's amateur clubs and conservatory life helped carry it into the modern era.
View guideChanson
A broad French song tradition rather than a narrowly bounded genre tag; best framed as a love-song reading of chanson, with documented medieval roots and a strong modern association with expressive, singer-centered performance.
Lullabies
A wide, old family of songs rather than a single genre with one birthplace, lullabies live in the quiet space between folk inheritance and bedtime routine. The record is strongest when it treats them as living songs: passed down, adapted, and still sung in kitchens, nurseries, classrooms, and recordings.
Stories
This record should be treated as an editorial narrative-song category rather than a formal genre with a single origin or scene. The strongest documented use of the label comes from AllMusic’s Stories style page, while the musical lineage is rooted in folk balladry and American story-songs.
Traditional Folk
A spare, story-first tradition that lives in memory, family repertoires, and archival recordings as much as in modern revival albums.