Scrolling through Rolling Stone’s list of all-time best folk albums, one notices they have something in common: they’re old. Twelve of the top 25 albums came out in the 1960s, another 11 in the 1970s, and just two in the early 2000s. One of those aughts records is “Love and Theft,” Bob Dylan's 31st studio album, which the genre-defining troubadour released when he was 60. Just one artist in the list, Beck, could be considered contemporary, and it was his 2002 “Sea Change” album that ranked at No. 5. 

The data begs the question: must music be “old” to be considered folk? And is there a world in which folk music can also be contemporary, or perhaps even novel and innovative? 

The answer is, definitively, yes—that such a world can exist. It arguably already does, in fact. Chartmetric’s data shows that the top 10 trending tracks in the folk genre for May 2026 were released within the past five months, unlike the albums in Rolling Stone’s best-ever folk list.

With or without Rolling Stone rankings, today’s talented contemporary folk artists gather everywhere from regional festivals to historic retreat centers to share, workshop and proliferate music that’s been passed down from previous generations—often with a uniquely modern spin on it. 

Best of all, it’s not your grandpa’s folk music: Chartmetric’s list of top 10 folk artists over the past 28 days shows an interesting cross-section of unexpected genres complementing the five-string acoustic sound we know of as “folk.” Those genres include pop, Punjabi, rock, German hip-hop, alternative and rap. 

A genre with zero rules, but plenty of tradition

We call the broad category of roots-inspired, often-acoustic music “folk,” a genre so grassroots that the industry may never be able to accurately define it. Its influences go well beyond the guitar and harmonica, instruments that were once considered almost obligatory during the mid-century folk revival of Dylan’s time. 

There are no rules in folk music—only traditions. Today’s folk revival requires no cowboy hats (though they are, of course, welcome), and its sounds reach beyond the country western and singer-songwriter stylings associated with American folk music in the 60s and 70s. According to Folk Alliance International, a nonprofit organization that supports artists and industry professionals in the genre, the only requirement for a type of music to be “folk,” is that it represents a community. 

Under this definition, groups like the Saami Brothers of Karachi, who performed at the 2025 Richmond Folk Festival, could fit the bill. Perhaps there’s even no greater example of folk than the Brothers, since their band of hereditary musicians carry forward an unbroken, 800-year-old lineage of South Asian classical vocal improvisation.

Growth outpaced by a new generation’s interest 

The 2026 Folk Alliance International conference brought together more than 2,600 artists and industry professionals in New Orleans this past January. Founded in 1989, the advocacy organization has been meeting annually since its first-ever gathering 37 years ago. Roughly 100 traditional music professionals attended the first Malibu retreat, and in the decades that followed, the conference has grown 26x in size. 

The Alliance hosts its annual gathering in a rotation of musically significant North American cities, including New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City and Montreal. Artists play hotel-room showcases, and attendees can expect to hear all genres and influences represented: Appalachian, Americana, hip-hop, Cajun, Celtic, spoken word, singer-songwriter, Zydeco, world fusion and more. On Spotify, the organization’s seven curated playlists represent 18 total genres. 

"Rather than defining folk in a narrow way, we're thinking about the roots and branches of traditional music, the voice of consciousness, the voice of activism and what's going to be exciting and make sense on a folk festival stage,” said Folk Alliance International deputy director Alex Mallett.

For instance, this year's Folk Alliance conference included Swedish electro-pop collective Symbio among its official selections—a programming choice that might have been unthinkable under narrower genre definitions. Mallett says, in his opinion, electronic production doesn't disqualify music from being folk. Neither does mainstream commercial success. He points to Bad Bunny's 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, with its salsa instrumentation—a blend of indigenous, Afro-Caribbean and Spanish musical traditions—and celebration of Puerto Rican culture. The performance was, in his summation, a legitimate expression of folk values.

“Just as in one moment, I was looking at a major cultural phenomenon, I was also like, Bad Bunny and the way he approaches his culture, the cultural rootedness and the importance of that to him—these are not small things,” Mallett said. 

The day after Superbowl 2026, Chartmetric’s data shows that Bad Bunny claimed nine of the top ten Spotify songs, and genres like reggaeton, urbano latino and pop reggaeton were trending. Perhaps folk sounds—or at least folk-inspired sounds—can, indeed, go viral.

Cross-boundary curation

Beyond industry conferences, this philosophy of expansive curation is rippling through regional festivals across the country, where communities are experiencing their own folk music booms, in some cases, at an even faster pace than Folk Alliance’s 37-year unfolding. 

It took only a few years for the Baltimore Old Time Music Festival to see such dramatic growth, for instance. Founded by father-son duo Ken and Brad Kolodner, the festival kicked off its first year in 2019 with 300 attendees, but recently sold out its April 2026 event with almost 3,000 tickets.

"It's an easier thing to sell in 2026 than it was, say, in 2006,” said Josh Kohn, director of the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, which fiscally sponsors the Baltimore Old Time Music Festival. “Folk music as we define it now has been expanded far more.”

Kohn says the generation of folk listeners that came of age during the Woodstock era, when Bob Dylan dominated the cultural conversation, now has less sway over the marketplace. “There's a younger generation coming up. Those musical ‘North Stars’ that were so powerful to a generation before, they just don't have the same sort of power.”

Chartmetric’s trending folk artists data shows that today’s notions of “folk” aren’t even defined by American geography. Among the platform’s fastest-rising folk acts of May 2026 are artists from India, Mexico, Chile, China and Australia.

The music of the people

No matter what generation we’re in, folk music will always be the music of the people. 

“Folk is the kind of music that tells people's stories,” said Agalisiga Mackey, a Cherokee country-western musician from Oklahoma. “It captures things that are relatable and things that are affecting people, whether locally or abroad.”

Mackey’s music incorporates sounds from country, swing and traditional Cherokee traditions. In 2025, he performed at the Brooklyn Folk Festival after NPR named his Tiny Desk Contest entry a standout submission and his debut album, Nasgino Inage Nidayulenvi (It Started in the Woods) earned recognition from No Depression. 

As a speaker and teacher of the Cherokee language, Mackey sings original songs that revitalize his mother tongue and preserve the linguistic aspects of his culture. 

“That's always been my hope, that not only people speak Cherokee, but they speak their native languages all over the world,” he said. 

Music with a side of activism

The commitment of American folk artists to speaking truth to power has always been central to the genre, all the way back to Woody Guthrie with his guitar proclaiming "this machine kills fascists," to Jesse Welles singing about injustice on TikTok and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2025.

At the 2026 Folk Alliance International conference, guitarist Yasmin Williams received the Rising Tide Award for the ways she has consistently advocated for communities facing systemic exclusion throughout her musical career.

In early 2026, Williams released the soundtrack she composed for Saving Etting Street, a documentary that follows Shelley Halstead, a carpenter training Black women to refurbish vacant Baltimore houses and build generational wealth through homeownership. Williams played both the acoustic guitar and the 12-string guitar on the tracks, along with piano, the West African stringed instrument known as the kora and synthesizers. 

When asked about the future of her genre, Williams says she wants to see more instrumental artists on festival stages, as opposed to only acts with singers.

"Instrumentalists can paint without words the way lyricists do with words," she explained. "If there's more open-mindedness in the folk community," she said, "the future is very positive.

Preserving what’s real

A person can always tell they’re at a serious folk performance when the musicians on stage introduce songs by telling the story of where they learned the tune and who taught it to them. Naming one’s mentors, teachers, elders and collaborators is all part of folk’s tradition. However, this careful practice of tune-identification doesn’t mean folk is static. Asheville-based artist Billy Cardine describes the genre as "a musical game of telephone" that has historically stretched across hollows, valleys and ridgelines throughout the world. 

“You'll hear a tune played 20 different ways, 50 different ways or 100 different ways as you move through different regions,” he said. That applies to even the most well-documented and recognizable folk song melodies. 

Gen Z musician Murphy Campbell is documenting the latest evolution of her community’s tunes in real time. Campbell, who grew up surrounded by a musical family in Western North Carolina, is working on a new album titled Revenant that honors her lineage by telling the oral histories behind each song she plays. She also shares which of her family members collected the tune and the methods they used. 

Campbell was recently featured in Rolling Stone discussing AI's encroachment on musicians' bodies of work. She represents a generation navigating the urgent question of how artists can protect and preserve their crafts.

People are the future of folk

The future of folk isn't a question of instrumentation or genre, or whether it's old or new. Rather, its future depends on whether people keep making music for each other, instead of for the algorithm. 

"Folk is an expression of peoples," Kohn said. "That means there's other people around you supporting you, and you're supporting them."

While there will always be new forms of folk music emerging, Kohn says it doesn’t matter whether a folk musician mixes their music on a laptop, plugs into an amp or plays a pure acoustic set accompanying the lonesome yodel of a cowboy. “If you're listening to your community, and they're listening back to you—that’s the dialogue that is necessary for folk music.”