What is folk music in the year 2025?
Thoughts on the 48th Ann Arbor Folk Festival, featuring Waxahatchee, Josh Ritter ... and more!
Thank you Bob Dylan movie! Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton and co. have given me the greatest gift you can ask for: A fresh take on folk music to pair with this year’s Ann Arbor Folk Festival review.
While I confess I haven’t yet watched A Complete Unknown, which aims to chronicle a key shift in the career of legendary songwriter Bob Dylan, it’s clear conversations are still being had about what exactly folk music is — and what it remains 60 years after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the film was inspired by.
It was a question I pondered during and after this past weekend’s 48th Ann Arbor Folk Festival, an annual two-night celebration of folk music in all of its forms. The lineup for the first night of the festival brought forth at least a couple of artists that might have you debating where they fit within the spectrum of folk music, while also challenging you to rethink what that term even means in 2025. According to The Ark, the nonprofit venue the folk festival benefits, that’s precisely the point.
The festival intends to spotlight artists on the “leading edge of acoustic music” while also delving into the heart of folk and roots traditions. Many of these artists return later in the year to perform at The Ark, an Ann Arbor venue that hosts more than 300 performances a year. Collaborative jams and singalongs are part of the festival’s makeup, which includes an emcee often serenading the audience between performances (this year’s being Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor).
Friday’s opening act Afro Dominicano demonstrated this wide spectrum of art, borrowing from folk-adjacent genres from the Dominican Republic like Perico Ripiano, Palo and Merengue de Orquesta, and combining it with calypso, funk, rock and African rhythms. They call it Afro Carribean soul. To the average consumer of music, this is not what comes to mind when you think of folk music — at least not how you previously experienced it.
The quartet’s infectious energy and the sum of its wide range of musical influences is intended to bridge the seemingly wide gap between acoustic guitar music some might immediately associate with folk music and the music that they make. And yet, the band had no issues warming itself to the folk festival crowd with its lively genre melding that served as a proper ramp up for the evening.
The festival atmosphere got a little more fiesty as the evening unfolded, with Secor warming the audience up with his rendition of Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ Bout a Revolution between performers. The next performer, Adeem the Artist, delivered a raw, inspired set, as the seventh-generation, pansexual Carolinian didn’t shy away from their country-tinged tales of trauma, apostasy and complicated truths about the American south.
After seeing Adeem open up for The Mountain Goats a couple of years ago, I was struck by how charismastic they were then and how that command of the stage has remained their greatest gift. They know how to share their story, which is affecting, and they’re not a bad picker, either. The set felt like evening’s biggest rallying cry, with songs like Going to Hell resonating as an antidote to the country’s ongoing satanic panic. It was an honest performance that felt like the very definition of folk music.
Jobi Riccio, the next performer of the evening, is probably first thought of as more of a country artist with some indie rock arrangements, but her voice quickly demonstrated she’s an artist capable of transcending genres. Ricco’s stripped down set also displayed the traditional folk influence in her songwriting and was an immediate hit with the audience.
While Riccio’s songwriting has earned her titles like 2023 Newport Folk Festival John Prine Fellowship recipient and 2024 Luck Reunion Artist on the Rise, Riccio’s vocal range stole the show and was a highlight of the evening. A southern singer-songwriter via Colorado, Riccio performed several songs from her 2023 debut album Whiplash, including the self-love anthem Sweet, a great demonstration of her gift for writing hooks. There’s a reason Riccio has been bestowed with titles like “emerging” and “on the rise.”
Josh Ritter feels like the type of artist who is destined to star in this type of festival lineup, with a catalog of 11 studio albums to his credit that are filled with songs that meander and reach their own conclusions on their own timeline.
In a live setting, I was hoping for a “best of” representation of what Ritter is capable of as a songwriter. Ritter obliged, delivering a joyous performance filled with three-part harmonies and some of his most vivid storytelling. Highlights included his better known tunes like Miles Away, Kathleen and set closer Girl in the War, as well as deep-ish cuts Right Moves and Feels Like Lightning, covering eight albums across nine songs. On a couple of occassions, Ritter spoke to the audience about how fortunate he felt to be playing live music and you believed him by the end of the set, as he exited telling the crowd, “Please take care of each other. I know you can do it.”
Ritter was a difficult act for headliner Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee to follow. How much you enjoyed Crutchfield’s performance might be influenced by if you’ve seen her perform previously with a backing band. The headlining set was the first solo show for Crutchfield in years, she said, giving her license to change her setlist on the fly. She even chose to end one song seconds into strumming it when she wasn’t feeling it.
Luckily, this is Waxahatchee we’re talking about, and there were plenty of songs to adore among the set heavy with cuts from her critically lauded albums Saint Cloud and 2024’s Tigers Blood. There were whispers of how catchy Crutchfield’s songs were and how talented she was behind songs like Crutchfield threw in Cerulean Salt’s Dixie Cups and Jars and a new song she was performing for the first time that didn’t have a title but went, “you’re sitting around next to me.” Her voice filled Hill Auditorium up to its vast parabolic ceiling, giving first-time listeners great acoustics for their first dose of her vocal talent that accompanies some of the best songwriting in music today. If you wanted to see her with backing band Bonny Doon or see a guest performance from MJ Lenderman, I get it. Those who attended the folk festival got something even more unique, though: Crutchfield at her loosest and most intimate.
Applying the “are they folk?” test to each of these artists misses the point when you consider what each brought to the festival lineup: Songwriting that reflects their own unique perspectives, experiences and places in the world. There were probably more than a dozen genres on display throughout the evening, if you want to get technical. A lot has changed since Dylan went electric. Whether it’s genre-bending music from the Dominican Republic, blue collar stories about identity in the deep south or finding a creative muse in filling the void of addiction, the sharing and passing on of these stories is the common thread. I guess you’d call that folk music.
I saw the movie A Complete Unknown and it was great! I gave me a whole new appreciation for folk music.