The folk genre has origins dating back to the 19th century, which in many ways is reflected in many popular genres of modern music genres. To simplify, folk music is simply “ballads and songs that are composed and transmitted vocally, without being written down.” Although what we distinguish today as "folk" as being stylistically very different from what "folk" was in the 19th century, in its basic form it still retains the same standards and concepts, describing the times simpler. Through extensive research, it is difficult to overlook the history and development of Southern folk music, and how it can help understand the importance of observing and expanding the dynamics of Southern race relations. Southern racial associations and Southern composition are replicas of the social construction of the rural South. In the physically segregated South, black and white melodic backgrounds show the same deviations and junctions that have historically characterized black-white relations. This is not an emotional analysis; but rather it is a socially ancient examination of regional popular culture that focuses on the collaboration between two important features of that culture: race and music. The growth of American folk music as a popular product is a process that corresponds to the historical and cultural expansion of American society. In the formation of this product, two major currents, British and African, met over a period of two centuries. Alan Lomax, one of the most iconic historians of folk music, observed that the joining of these varied elements resulted in a cultural product "more British than anything to be found in Britain". Southern music is a remarkable measure of folk customs. ; in humans...... middle of paper......a pleasant range by twisting the guitar strings to achieve sounds that express their feelings. These "bent notes" became a normal feature of the blues. and the patterns of response were complicated woven into the vocal arrangements of black music, both transcendent and secular. Another Africanism that deserves attention is the widespread use of the "falsetto cry" or "falsetto leap" in which the singing was raised an octave "usually in . the preceding syllable of a word, at the end of a line". It is commonly believed that this mannerism was preserved in the field cries and work songs of the slavery era and found its place in the early form of blues Some scholars have suggested that the "blue yodeling" marketed by Jimmie Rodgers and his many followers may have been a deliberate mixture of the Swiss yodeling and the African falsetto hop..