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American Folk Music
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Folk music is a broad term used to describe a wide variety of musical forms that developed within different cultures, often for different reasons. American folk music varies widely depending on the region, but much American folk music was influenced by the European and African cultures from which many Americans descended. Folk music in America largely developed from a combination of music from the British Isles and other European regions and music brought here by enslaved Africans.
Folk music often uses the form known as the ballad. Ballads most often tell a story that usually contains a moral or lesson.
The Ballad
Listen to this recording of the Scottish/English ballad “Barbara Allen.”
Joan Baez — “Barbara Allen”
Work Songs and Children’s Songs
Work Songs
Work songs often helped groups of people, including enslaved people, perform physical work. The music usually uses the tempo of the work itself and was sung by lumberjacks, railroad workers, and prison chain gangs, among others.
Listen to this recording of a Texas prison chain gang singing “Let the Hammer Reign” as they chop down trees. The source compares this piece to how enslaved people would sing while working on Southern plantations. Its compositional and stylistic traits include the following: it uses a call and response technique, where a lead singer sings a line and then the group follows with their response; it uses a simple melody; its instrumentation is only vocal; it possesses a thicker texture with several singers; its tempo is constant and matched to the speed of the axes; and its dynamics are fairly constant.
Prison Chain Gang — “Let the Hammer Reign”
Children’s Songs
Children’s songs also have a purpose, usually to teach a simple lesson. They are, therefore, simple to sing and easy to remember. In the case of the “ABC Song,” its lesson helped children remember the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.
The “ABC Song”
Protest Songs
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Protest songs are written to directly, or by suggestion, voice complaints about some injustice. Listen to Bob Dylan perform his composition “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a protest song that the source describes as indirectly protesting social injustice and the Vietnam War. Its compositional and stylistic elements include the following: it uses the same music for each verse, its melody is simple, its instrumentation is voice and guitar, its texture is thin, and its tempo and dynamics are constant.
Bob Dylan — “Blowin’ in the Wind”
Folk Dance Music
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Dance music is folk music written for dancing. The instrumentation of various types of folk dance music varies with the style. Acoustic instruments were used before the 1950s simply because electric and electronic instruments did not yet exist. Its compositional and stylistic components include the following: the form is almost always a repeating form; sometimes dance music comprises songs with words while at other times it is instrumental; and the dynamics are usually loud in order to be heard in a dance hall or other large space.
The following examples demonstrate three different dance forms: a two-step, a waltz, and a square dance.
Two-Step
Gid Tanner & His Skillet Lickers — “Soldier’s Joy”
This page titled 5.5.4: Folk Music was last modified on Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:56:28 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Clark, Heflin, Kluball, and Kramer (GALILEO Open Learning Materials) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.
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