RadioBOB Folk Rock streams the meeting point of fiddle, mandolin and acoustic guitar with electric rock drive, one of more than 60 genre streams run by RadioBOB, Germany's biggest private rock network. It is free to listen right now, anywhere in the world, no account required.
A Genre Built From an Electric Shock to Tradition
Folk rock's own origin story is really a story about plugging in. English group Fairport Convention started out covering Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell before their 1969 album Liege and Lief, widely credited with launching the English folk rock movement, fused traditional British tunes with electric rock instrumentation for the first time, according to a history of the band on Wikipedia. That same instinct, old songs and old instruments run through amplifiers, is exactly what RadioBOB's own stream description promises in German: a station built on "the perfect symbiosis of tradition, modernity and our beloved guitar sound."
One Stream in a 60-Channel Rock Catalog
RadioBOB launched on August 5, 2008 out of Kassel, after Regiocast relaunched the struggling local station SkyRadio Hessen under a new rock-only identity, and the network has since split its catalog into dozens of tightly defined genre streams rather than one general rock mix, according to Wikipedia's entry on the station. Folk Rock sits alongside neighbors like Gothic Rock, Hair Metal and Guitar Heroes in that same lineup, each one built so a listener never has to sit through an unrelated genre to get the sound they actually came for.
Fiddle and Mandolin Next to the Guitar Riff
Where RadioBOB's harder streams lean on distortion, Folk Rock leans on the instruments that electric folk borrowed from traditional music in the first place, fiddle, mandolin and acoustic guitar sitting next to a rock rhythm section rather than replacing it. It is the lineage that runs from Fairport Convention's British folk revival through to the 2000s and 2010s wave of bands like Mumford and Sons and Fleet Foxes, who brought banjos and close vocal harmonies back onto mainstream rock radio decades after the genre first went electric.
Listen to RadioBOB Folk Rock Free on Radio Shuffle
RadioBOB Folk Rock streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed live with nothing to install and no subscription required. Press play above for a genre that has spent more than fifty years proving tradition and a guitar amp can share the same song.