[This book] is a contribution of considerable substance because it takes a holistic view of the field of folk music and the scholarship that has dealt with it. -Bruno Nettl

. . . a praiseworthy combination of solid scholarship, penetrating discussion, and global relevance. -Asian Folklore Studies

. . . successfully ties the history and development of folk music scholarship with contemporary concepts, issues, and shifts, and which treats varied folk musics of the world cultures within the rubric of folklore and ethnomusicology with subtle generalizations making sense to serious minds . . . -Folklore Forum

. . . [this book] challenges many carefully-nurtured sacred cows. Bohlman has executed an intellectual challenge of major significance by successfully organizing a welter of unruly data and ideas into a single, appropriately complex but coherent, system. -Folk Music Journal

Bohlman examines folk music as a genre of folklore from a broadly cross-cultural perspective and espouses a more expansive view of folk music, stressing its vitality in non-Western cultures as well as Western, in the present as well as the past.