Turkish folk music (Turkish: Türk Halk Müziği) is the traditional music of Turkish people living in Turkey influenced by the cultures of Anatolia and former territories in Europe and Asia. Its unique structure includes regional differences under one umbrella. It includes popular music from the Ottoman Empire era. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ordered a wide-scale classification and archiving of samples of Turkish folk music from around the country, which, from 1924 to 1953 collected more than 10,000 folk songs. Traditional folk music was combined with Western harmony and musical notation to create a more modern style of popular Turkish music.

Western music had begun to influence Ottoman music from before the early Tanzimat period. According to Degirmenci "the first westernization movement in music happened in the Army; in 1826 Giuseppe Donizetti, brother of the famous opera composer Gaetano, was invited to head the military band of Nizam-i Cedid (the Army of the New Order), which was founded by Selim III." Sultan Abdulhamit II was said to prefer Western music, saying "To tell the truth, I am not especially fond of alaturka music. It makes you sleepy, and I prefer alafranga music, in particular the operas and operettas." Music in the Ottoman period is often classified into the music of the palace (Classical Turkish Art Music, which became Turkish Art Music in the Republic), local traditional or rural music, and the music of religious orders, called tekke music. All the old Ottoman musical institutions and religious institutions were closed down at the start of the Republic period.

Turkish nationalist intellectual Ziya Gokalp "stressed the importance of collecting folksongs to create a national music culture and indeed he engaged in the activity of collecting folksongs in Diyarbakir and carried out ethnographic research among Arabs, Kurdish, and Turkish tribes and hoped to establish a small museum of ethnography there." According to Gokalp, "our national music... is to be born of a synthesis of our folk music and Western music. Our folk music provides us with a rich treasure of melodies. By collecting and arranging them on a basis of Western techniques, we shall have built a national and modern music."

The Ministry of Education established the Bureau of Culture in 1920, which began to collect folk songs, around a hundred of which were published as Yurdumuzun Nagmeleri (Melodies of our Country) in 1926. Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was also invited to help collect folk songs in Turkey, 2000 of which were published between 1925 and 1935. A group of composers including Adnan Saygun and Ulvi Cemal who had been sent to study abroad on state scholarships, "took part in full-scale expeditions for the collection of folk music that were organized and sponsored by the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory (Istanbul Belediye Konservatuvari) between 1926 and 1929, and by the Ankara State Conservatory (Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarl) between 1936 and 1952".

Turkish 'folk music' was not a unified form of music until the state construction of the early Turkish Republic. Degirmenci has noted that "the history or the reconstruction of Turkish folk music reflects political aspects of the formation of the nation-state and Turkish nationalism." The foundation of the Turkish Republic also saw attempts to collect folkloric stories, and to create a more unified and pure Turkish language by removing many Persian and Arabic words to construct a vocabulary supposedly closer to that of ordinary people.

In 1937, a Turkish state radio was established and the dissemination of Turkish folk music became a priority for those in charge. Musicians were recruited by Muzaffer Sarisozen, "who acted as a talent scout, hand-picking regional performers who displayed exceptional talent."

In the 1960s, musicians like Aşık Veysel, Neşet Ertaş, Bedia Akartürk became popular folk artists. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the rising popularity of arabesque and Turkish light western, Turkish folk music lost some ground, but singers like Belkıs Akkale, İzzet Altınmeşe, Selda Bağcan, Güler Duman, and Arif Sağ made hit songs and became important representatives of the genre. By the late 1980s, proponents of a Kemalist-inspired Turkish folk music began to worry that the "Ataturk's "musical revolution" had not been entirely successful. Its failure could be demonstrated by the fact that the cultural vacuum in Turkish society alluded to by Gokalp had been filled not with the proposed new national fusion music, but with the hated arabesk, a genre that embodied the ideals and aesthetic of a predominantly foreign Eastern element."

Türkü, literally "of the Turk", is a name given to Turkish folk songs as opposed to şarkı. In contemporary usage, the meanings of the words türkü and şarkı have shifted: Türkü refers to folk songs originated from music traditions within Turkey whereas şarkı refers to all other songs, including foreign music.