The close relationship between nationalism and folklorism in literature, music, and the arts constituted a natural and self-explanatory symbiosis until the first half of the twentieth century, and it still does in the popular imagination to this day. The premise is simple: the spirit of any given nation is expressed by its common language and unique folklore. Such ideologies famously drove James McPherson (1736–96) and Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) to forge ancient poetry skillfully. The reception of Ossianic poetry—really McPherson's, ascribed to a fictional third-century Gaelic bard—in Western European literary and artistic circles reinforced the idea of defining national cultures through an assumed affiliation to a deep cultural past, particularly through ancient poetry and music, whose degenerate and fragmented form was, or was thought to be, still preserved by peasants. As Matthew Gelbart has argued, Ossianism reinforced, and to some extent even generated, the motivation of committed musical folklorists to promote national uniqueness and noble savagery. Accordingly, learning from the common folk had the dual benefit of authentically representing national identity and of escaping the artificiality of learned art or music. These ideas were significantly developed in the 1770s in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who further argued that in order to express a timeless national spirit in modern times, the great writer, poet, or composer must tap deeply into the natural reservoir of collective genius, as bards had done in ancient times. This late Enlightenment idealist conception of national identity and culture as organic outgrowths of folklore has underpinned both grassroots and statesponsored artistic production right up to the present day. It has conferred a halo of naturalness and health on nationalist projects, and it has defined their soundtracks.

However, critical studies of nationalism, particularly from the 1980s onward, have highlighted the way nationalist ideologies exploit folkloristic materials to construct a collective identity from the top down, as well as the societal and class-ridden stratification of nationalism. Indeed, Paul Gilbert has argued that the classical naturalist (protoracialist or racist) and linguistic arguments for nationalism, namely that a group's nationalism is ordained by natural traits and a common language, are only two out of nine possible conceptual varieties.