Folk process

In the study of folklore, the folk process is the way folk material, especially stories, music, and other art, is transformed and re-adapted in the process of its transmission from person to person and from generation to generation. The folk process defines a community—the "folk community"—in and through which folklore is transmitted. While there is a place for professional and trained performers in a folk community, it is the act of refinement and creative change by community members within the folk tradition that defines the folk process.

The phrase was originally coined by musicologist Charles Seeger, father of the folk singer Pete Seeger, but the underlying concept goes back all the way to 1907, when Cecil Sharp observed that the transmission of folk songs and the forms they took when they were collected and attested was the result of three factors: continuity, variation, and selection. These factors were expanded on in 1954 by the International Folk Music Council, which wrote that:

The transformation and reinterpretation of received material is central to the folk process. The traditional Irish lament "Siúil A Rúin", with its macaronic mixed language Irish and English lyrics:

I wish I was on yonder hill
'Tis there I'd sit and cry my fill
And every tear would turn a mill
Is go dté tú mo mhuirnín slán

was reinterpreted in the nineteenth century United States and turned into the song "Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier" or "Buttermilk Hill", which has several variations, which preserve different parts of the original, as in a version collected by Walt Whitman:

I'll trace these gardens o'er and o'er,
Meditate on each sweet flower,
Thinking of each happy hour,
Oh, Johnny is gone for a soldier.

or another, anonymous variation:

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