The Northeast:

Since the first white settlers of the northeast were mostly English Puritans, there was a lot of fresh contact with British folk song. Due to later immigration, the folk music of the northeast stayed much closer to traditional British forms than that of other parts of America.

The land in the northeast was harsh. New English winters were colder and the soil was rockier and harder to till than anything the Puritans had ever before experienced. Some of the early settlers died or were killed soon after they arrived. But many survived. Those who did became farmers, freshmen, shipbuilders, and loggers. Later, after new waves of immigrants form England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany build up the population, trade, mining, and manufacturing became important activities in the north country.

Because of these influences, many new style folk songs were created, especially the songs of working men. And because there was lots of movement among the trades, one work song often generated many others. Lumbermen, cowboys, miners, sailors, and even textile-mill workers sang many songs which were similar to those of each other's trades. These were all leisure-time songs, songs to pass spare hours with.

The South:

By the time the Civil War erupted, the north was already developing into an industrial area with most of its activities centered on its cities. The South, meanwhile, was still almost completely rural and agricultural, largely because the powerful slaveholders had kept it that way. Even after the war, many Southerners remained isolated from the rapidly expanding industrialization that was sweeping the rest of the nation. Until radio and the automobile finally broke through their isolation, poor whites in the backwoods and mountain areas of the South continued to live much as their frontier-clearing great-grandparents had. Men hunted and fished, women wove their own cloth and made their own clothing, and people grew their own food, built their homes and furnishings, and took care of their needs in the same ways their ancestors had done.

The backwoods and mountain people of the South drew on the same batch of song their common ancestors had brought with them, they just held on to them longer. They sang many of the old British ballads, gradually Americanizing them by substituting local names, places, and expressions for British ones.

Their lives were hard and poor, full of violence and sadness. They favored the tragic songs, the stories of death and bloody murder and the songs of unrequited love, such as "Barbara Allen".

Southern coal miners created another kind of song, wrought out of hard and sometimes violent lives. They made up songs about their harsh lives, and about their struggles to improve them.

The West:

Thousands of people, some of them on the run or out for adventure, including whole families looking for a home, traveled west across the Mississippi River, over the Great Plains, the snow-tipped Rockies and through the desert.

Thousands of fortune seekers made the hard trip to California within a few years when James Marshall's discovery of gold there in 1848. The prospectors who survived the trip were a tough bunch. Some of their songs were sad and bitter, but most are full of the excitement and hope that must have made the journey bearable.

The west was a refuge for men and women who had reason to put their past behind them. They loved and respected the hero of dozens of ballads from an earlier era, like Robin Hood, enemies of the rich, and friends and benefactors of the poor.

The most familiar of the folk songs that have come down to us from the Far West are the cowboys' songs. Most cowboy songs were composed during the open-range period, the thirty-five years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century.

Cowboy songs had no more in common with the country and western music that comes out of Nashville than the cowboys' lives did with the Western. They sang ballads, hymns, popular tunes, and bawdy songs to stay awake on long night watches. As they rode among the cattle, they sang soothing, lullaby-like songs, the songs helped to quiet the beasts' nerves and cover up noises that might otherwise startle them into a stampede. During round-ups, the cowboys shouted songs with a driving rhythm and endless verse such as "The Old Chisolm Trail," probably the most popular song among the cowboys themselves.