DURING THE PAST FIVE YEARS music has received increasing attention-by scholars, critics, and musicians, not to mention those who simply buy, listen to, and appreciate this music as amateurs. Festivals, periodicals, and record companies are devoted exclusively to the idiom, and long-time performers like Horton Barker are suddenly thrust within the spotlight of mass concerts in New York, Newport, or San Francisco. The search for the real grass-root nucleus of artists has also uncovered persons like Hedy West who might have sung for years in the obscure hills of Georgia, but who now find themselves in the smoky, half-lighted environs of Folk City or the hungry i. And if the hard-core performers of the sound do not stray from their native hills, their music finds reproduction in the work of such groups as the New Lost City Ramblers or the early songs of Bob Dylan. Developments in the popular music world during the past year have raised new issues with regard to the nature of this traditional brand of music. Quite outside the character of Josh White, Woody Guthrie, or Blind Lemon Jefferson is the current sound of the so-called folk rock, supposedly a combination of 'n' roll on the one hand, and of music on the other. Within this somewhat amorphous genre one finds the likes of the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, or Sonny and Cher. The nature of folk rock is not the concern of the present discussion, although we should mention that it is the coining of this phrase which has served to make many students of contemporary music aware of the question of how and may in fact be related within the tradition of American music in general. This discussion is concerned wholly with the variety of popular music known as 'n' roll, and it puts forth the thesis that it is this music which, in the past decade and a half, has assumed the character and function of the traditional sound.