Folk Music of Korea

T’onga guitar (or tong guitar) is a type of Korean folk and folk music coined in the early 1960s and 70s. This was highly influenced by the American folk music and musicians in the genre which were considered as Korean versions of American folk singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

source of picture: mind42.com

Prominent Korean early musicians include Kim Min-ki and the American-educated Hahn Dae-soo. Kim and Hahn recorded both the social and political aware folk songs and both musicians had their music censored and stopped by the autocratic Park Chung-hee administration, much as the psychedelic rock guitarist like Shin Jung-hyeon had his songs changed and stopped. In spite of the government’s efforts to change political music, however, famous folk songs increasingly came to be used as rallying cries for the social change within Korea that brought the term norae undong which literally means song movement, being initiated to describe song targeted at social change. As South Korean was changing government into democratic in the year 1987, the late folk artist Kim Kwang-Seok was recognized as political active, and his songs were well-known at the democratic campaign.