The genre of Folk music is in a strange place these days. There are many artists with acoustic guitars calling the music they play Folk music but really its just acoustic pop love songs. The key to Folk music is the story. A folk song must tell a story of some kind or be inspired by a story or tradition in the case of instrumental Folk music. Despite the watering down of the Folk genre with simple love songs, the true essence of Folk music will never die and that’s because it holds stories and history.

Record companies would have you believe that music listeners prefer simple structured songs that don’t stray too far away from the songs you hear on the radio. I think music listeners are smarter than that and are searching for something more engaging to listen to and what’s more engaging than stories? Not much. Stories will always be around. People will tell their friends about the accident they saw on the freeway, the awesome birthday party they went to and the interesting conversation they had with a stranger on the street. Folk music is based off of the same idea. Telling stories to convey a theme or moral and to keep a record of the story for future generations.

There’s so much history in Folk music. In every kind of Folk music from different cultures. Appalachian Folk music sometimes tells stories of what happened to bad people in their community, Native American Folk music tells stories of spiritual experiences and interactions with the environment and Indonesian Gamelan Folk music tells epic stories of gods and humans with themes and morals to learn from. The great part of Folk music is that most of these stories are written down or memorized by many in the community to pass on to the next generation. The stories are so engaging that the next generation embraces the Folk music and learns to perform it themselves to pass on the history to the next generation after them.

The best part of Folk music is that its still being created. Many people are still writing music that tell stories which will stand forever in history for others to listen back to learn lessons and what life was like in another time. This is why Folk music will never die. People will always have stories to tell and they’ll always put a few of those stories to music. People will also always look back at older Folk songs in an effort to spread the knowledge that these old stories exist and are still relevant to current issues.

I’ll do my best to keep old folk songs alive and continue to write new Folk song stories but I’m comfortable knowing that I’m not the only one doing this. There are plenty who feel the same way so this is why I’m so confident that Folk music will never ever die. In fact, if any calamity ever hits this world, I would imagine Folk music would be the last genre to go.