3 Folk Songs That Everyone Can Recognize (Even if You Don’t Listen to Folk Music)

Most people don’t consider folk music to be commercial or mainstream, but there are some songs that everyone knows. Here are three songs that might give you folk deja vu, because you’ve definitely heard them before.

“The House Of The Rising Sun” by The Animals

Before it reached new levels of popularity with The Animals, “The House Of The Rising Sun” was recorded by music legends like Woody Guthrie. However, as The Animals’ lead singer Eric Burdon told SongFacts, that song was meant to be his. While on tour with Chuck Berry in 1964, The Animals played this one live.

“Well, ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ is a song that I was just fated to,” he shared. “It was made for me and I was made for it.”

There’s something about this song that will always feel like a mystery to me.

“California” by Joni Mitchell

Even if you’re not the biggest folk music listener, it’s hard not to enjoy the sound of Joni Mitchell’s voice, especially in this song. Even actress Amanda Seyfried did a little performance of the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, sharing that she’d learned to play the dulcimer during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Because [Joni Mitchell] wrote a lot of the songs from the ‘Blue’ album on the dulcimer, and I learned a lot of her stuff from the ‘Blue’ album when the world stopped,” Seyfried told Fallon.

Both versions of the song are great, but if you enjoy Seyfried’s cover, you’ll definitely love the original.

“The Sound Of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel

Whether through social media or in a film like The Graduate, you’ve definitely heard this one before. As Art Garfunkel told Forbes, “The Sound Of Silence” wasn’t actually a big success at first.

“Nobody expects a hit. Hits are something that happen one in a thousand times,” he explained. “I’m depressed by those odds. It means, ‘Forget it Charlie.’ So you put things out, you roll the dice, you walk away from the table and let life surprise you. As much as I loved ‘Sound Of Silence’, it had been out for a year and did nothing. But the Columbia field sales guys, particularly down on the east coast of Florida, knew it was capturing an audience. People were calling in nightly.”

In September of 1965, following the song’s radio success, Simon & Garfunkel decided to release a remixed version of the song, which ended up giving them a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Photo by: Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images