From Screen to St Andrews: The Enduring Power of Folk Music

In recent years, folk music has found a new home on the big screen. Once confined to niche folk horror films and local stages, it’s now playing a central role in films that explore memory, identity, and belonging. The latest example is The History of Sound, released in the United States in September and in the United Kingdom in January. 

The History of Sound follows two young men, Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O'Connor), who fall in love while recording the lives and music of their American countrymen in the shadow of the Great War. The film uses its soundtrack of traditional folk music to heighten the story’s themes of love, loss, and what music can mean when you’re far from home. In one of the opening scenes, Lionel hears David singing a song from Kentucky (his home) from across the bar. Lionel, who hasn’t been home in years, is moved by hearing the song once again, so he approaches David, and the plot develops from there. 

This moment leans into a familiar cinematic trope: the use of folk music as a trigger for characters to confront their memories and/or displacement. Throughout film history, the use of folk songs can signal to the audience that a character is being emotionally pulled back toward a place or identity they can no longer access, whether geographically or temporally. The use of this trope continues throughout The History of Sound, and it deepens as the story unfolds, culminating in a memorable ending. 

But folk music has always been about more than melody. It’s about memory, community, and place. Because traditional folk music is so deeply tied to the regions it comes from, it has the unique power to locate a person within a specific sonic history that might not be otherwise accessible. This regional specificity exists in part because many traditional folk songs are passed down orally, within families or tight-knit communities. These songs are often influenced by local dialects, landscapes, and histories, which makes them much more localised than most commodities or cuisines in this increasingly globalised world. When someone hears a melody from their home region, they can be reminded that no matter how far they’ve travelled, there are others out there who know the same songs and belong to the same shared history. 

As university students, many of us are living far from home. I remember my first year of university, before I transferred to St Andrews, when I felt the 3,000-kilometre distance between my hometown and my university very acutely. One of the only things that tempered my homesickness was a university radio show, which played a range of folk music across time. Hearing ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ a song about the region where I grew up, on the show stirred a deep sense of connection to home, despite being thousands of kilometres away. 

This experience clearly isn’t unique to just me. It’s something shared by many students here at St Andrews, particularly among those at the St Andrews Folk and Trad Society, where traditional and folk music is played, taught, and passed on. Erin Dundas, the society’s publicity officer, spoke to her experience: “Everyone brings their own tunes from where they’re from. It does make me feel closer to home. It’s always nice to see someone come from where I’m from, and we can go, ‘oh my goodness, do you know this one?’ and we play it together, and it’s excellent.” 

What The History of Sound captures so effectively, and what resonates far beyond the screen, is the persistent pull of home. The film explores how folk music, with its deep ties to localised history, can function as a link between people and the places they’ve left behind. It doesn’t matter if it's two characters in America or students gathering in Molly Malone’s: folk songs remind us that home isn’t always a fixed point on a map. In a world that often asks us to keep moving, folk music lingers to offer us something deeper and more enduring: a way back to who we were, and a connection to where we came from. 

The St Andrews Folk & Trad Society meets every Sunday at 8pm in Molly Malone’s.

Illustration by Dasha Andreeva