Folk music, by definition, has always been music by the people and for the people. Whether because of the oral tradition that keeps these songs alive or the way this music speaks to a collective stream of consciousness, this particular genre has always lent itself to impeccable songwriting, including opening lines that hook you in immediately and send chills up your arms.
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Here are four of the best examples of opening lines in folk music that still give me goosebumps, no matter how many times I listen to them.
“Humidity Built the Snowman” by John Prine
John Prine’s twelfth studio album, Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, features plenty of great tunes, but one with a particularly attention-grabbing set of opening lines is “Humidity Built the Snowman”, the album’s sixth track. Prine waxes poetic about failing relationships throughout the album, but his use of natural metaphor to describe the build-up and breakdown of a romantic connection makes this song all the more poignant.
“Does he still think about her? / Why, there was never really any doubt / Every time he lights a candle or blows a candle out / The scientific nature of the ordinary man is to go on out and do the best you can.”
“A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell is one of the most incredible lyricists in folk music history, and Blue is a shining example of that fact. The album was so intensely vulnerable that Kris Kristofferson once famously told Mitchell to ‘save some for herself.’ But withholding her emotions of any kind has never been Mitchell’s M.O., and one of her most beloved tracks from this 1971 album lays her cards on the table with unflinching honesty.
“Just before our love got lost, you said, ‘I am as constant as the Northern star’ / And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness? Where is that at? If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.”
“There But for Fortune” by Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs was one of the more traditional folk revivalists of the 1960s, focusing on political and societal issues in his songwriting, which made it the perfect backdrop to the early 1960s social movements. Joan Baez famously covered this song, but Ochs recorded it first. And in each rendition, the opening lines hit the same—a testament to just how good a folk song it really is.
“Show me the prison, show me the jail, show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale / And I’ll show you a young man with so many reasons why / and there but for fortune go you or I.”
“Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez
Speaking of Joan Baez, we’ll use a devastatingly emotional track from her 1975 album of the same name to close out this list of incredible opening lines in folk music. Although Baez didn’t set out to write a song about her former colleague and lover, Bob Dylan, that’s who it came to be about. And in just a few lines, Baez presents a smorgasbord of conflicting emotions, from annoyance to acceptance to yearning to indifference.
“Well, I’ll be damned / There goes your ghost again/ But that’s not unusual, it’s just that the moon is full, and you happened to call / Hear I sit, hand on the telephone, hearing a voice I’d know a couple of light years ago heading straight for a fall.”
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