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2.6.3 Folk Music: Its Origins In Ancient Times
Origins
Folk music has several alternative names, such as community music, people’s music, and music in the oral tradition.
Folk music likely goes back 100,000 to 200,000 years—before Homo sapiens walked out of Africa and colonized the rest of the planet. Ancient times indeed.
To get an idea of how old folk music is, have a look at the horizontal bar at the top of Figure 4 above. It represents only 200 years. Now imagine this: to accurately represent 100,000 to 200,000 years, that horizontal “Folk/Roots” bar would have to stretch to the left roughly 190 to 380 feet (58 to 116 metres)! If you went riding out of Dodge, looking for the origin of folk music, you would get so lost that not even a halfway competent posse on fresh horses hand-picked by Sadie and Ellie Sue from the Dodge City Horse Store, a posse led by Marshal McDillon himself, would ever be able to find you. That’s how old folk music is, compared with all other musical genres.
With the advent of the printing press in the 15th Century, vendors hawked “broadside ballads” in the streets—folk ballads printed on one side of a sheet. Early journalism.