Folk & Singer-Songwriter

Songwriters and folk traditions from across the Arab world, acoustic, voice-first and lyric-led.

The strongest thread here is sung poetry. The tradition of setting a serious poet to music runs deep, from Sheikh Imam’s settings of Ahmed Fouad Negm in Egypt to Marcel Khalife’s of Mahmoud Darwish, and it is why an acoustic guitar or an oud and one voice has never read as slight in this part of the world.

The other thread is regional folk repertoire: village songs, wedding and harvest material, Levantine and Maghrebi forms carried forward by singers who rearrange rather than preserve them.

Contemporary songwriters sit here alongside both, writing in Arabic, French, English and Amazigh languages. Where a song is more about the room than the words, it is likelier to be under Indie or Arabic Alternative.