From “The Rolling Stone Record Guide” published by Random House/Rolling Stone Press in 1979
Electronic Music: Not merely music played by electric instruments, but avant-garde music in which composers work with sounds artificially produced (through synthesizers, tone generators, etc.). Rock has incorporated many electronic innovations, and a few groups that are ostensibly rock bands (because of their audience) might more properly be thought of as electronic ensembles. This is especially true of German acts such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.
English Music Hall: An English institution that more or less parallels American vaudeville, although it has more ancient origins and lasted a bit longer. Like vaudeville, music hall had a variety format, but its values have in some sense descended to certain modern rockers, especially the Kinks’ Ray Davies, whose Village Green Preservation Society is the kind of quaint look at England that music hall favoured. More than anything, however, it is the sense of humour in English rock that is derived from the music-hall tradition.
Folk Music, Folk Song: Essentially, music that is part of oral rather than written musical tradition (though since the eighteenth century most Anglo-American folk tunes, in most or all of their variations, have been collected by musicologists and transcribed). Because they are transmitted orally, folk songs generally exist in a variety of versions, generally they are developed in a musically "primitive" -or musically preliterate-society, and it is essential that the songs have enjoyed, at some time, wide popularity, though all pop songs aren’t folk songs. Folk songs in America, however, have also come to include the often topical compositions of certain rustic performers, such as Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly, even when of recent vintage and written origin. Bob Dylan was at first considered a, folksinger, and it is common to refer to anyone who seems to follow in the tradition of such performers as a folkie.
Folk Revival: The folk revival began around 1958; it was centred, oddly enough around college campuses and large cities the places least likely to produce authentic folk music. The movement was at least as much social and political-with intimate connections to the anti-war and civil rights movements-as it was musical and reflected not only the growing leftism that boomed in the Sixties but also some of the "back to nature" philosophy that would characterize the next decade’s thinking. The Kingston Trio kicked the revival off in ’58 with their hit "Tom Dooley," a traditional gallows ballad. For the next several years, until Bob Dylan splintered the movement by going electric, there was a widespread upheaval of interest in old songs and forgotten performers. Although such pop performers as Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio and 
the Limeliters, among others, prospered, the folk revivalists were also responsible for unearthing a remarkable number of legendary and obscure bluesmen, country singers and the like. Among those who found themselves with rejuvenated careers thanks to the folk revival were Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt and a score of other bluesmen, Elizabeth Cotten, Mother Maybelle Carter, Dock Boggs, and Roscoe Holcomb. The folk revival also developed writers and interpreters of its own, including (besides Dylan) Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the New Lost City Ramblers. While a kind of arch-conservatism prevailed-electric instruments were out, ruled inauthentic by the folk taste makers such elitism cannot deny the important steps the folk revival took toward the Sixties folk-rock explosion.
Folk Rock: Originally, rock derived from folk sources, though this meant rock that reflected the bohemian leftism of the folk revival from the beginning, and that always included original songs much more than those in the traditional repertoire. (The Byrds’ "Turn! Turn! Turn!" -based on Ecclesiastes, with a melody by Pete Seeger is almost the only folk song that became a major folk-rock hit.) The first folk-rock hits came about in 1965, when Bob Dylan released his first electric album, Bringing It All Back Home; the Byrds quickly scored a hit single with "Mr. Tambourine Man," a song from Dylan’s disc, and the boom was on. Other prominent folk-rock performers included The Lovin’ Spoonful, Buffalo 
Springfield, the original (pre-Grace Slick) Jefferson Airplane, the Turtles and Barry McGuire. Folk rock was the first genre to give rock lyrical respectability (not to say intelligence, which had been creeping in for years). The songs themselves rarely used folk devices beyond an occasional banjo lick or cribbed melody. Often the songs were topical or "protest" oriented, which means that even something as meretricious as McGuire’s "Eve of Destruction" fits the fad. Today, folk rock survives principally as an influence on the singer/songwriters of the Seventies and as an indirect ancestor of country rock.
Free Jazz: The modal, superficially unstructured modern jazz that succeeded bop, beginning in the late Fifties with such albums as Ornette Coleman‘s Free Jazz. Free jazz pays much less attention to conventional song structure than does any other native American music.
Funk: Originally, as the adverb "funky," descriptive of low-life. sights. sounds and smells. Later, the pejorative connotation was lost, and funky became a (mostly black) synonym for "authentic." Rock has adopted the latter meaning. Funk also connotes music that is played soulfully, with mellow, syncopated rhythm arrangements, or more recently, any black percussion based instrumental music of sufficient complexity.
Retrorambling 
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