This course examines much more than just the songs and music of the vernacular (and popular) American cultural landscape. Readings and discussion also investigate the history of scholarly and popular attention to folk music in America. We see how this attention gradually shifted from the Romantic Nationalist idea of folk music as the music of the peasantry to a fascination with African American music; the utilization of folk music by labor organizers and the American Left as a tool for propagandistic purposes; its rediscovery by a new generation of primarily young white students in the late 1950s and 1960s, creating the great folk revival of that era; its shift to a more commercial, singer-songwriter basis as seen from the 1960s through the 1980s; and finally to a renewed interest in "more honest" music as exemplified by the contemporary American roots music movement