For this assignment I watched Musical Holdouts by John Cohen, which is the story of an isolated groups of people in various locations around the US that manage to live almost completely outside of US popular culture. The first group in North Carolina has created their own community culture that is very unique to their own specific way of life. The first several minutes of the film highlight various musical interactions between kids, which is described as "family games." Essentially they chanting and dancing songs that are passed down from generation to generation. Later, we come to learn that there is a song, a dance, or a ritual chanting of some kind attached to nearly every aspect of the lives of these people. These songs and rituals keep them tightly bonded as a community and acts as a kind of language to which it becomes very special to belong. Other stories follow a similar pattern of musical language and tradition between somewhat isolated groups in deeply rural areas, unaffected by what we've come to understand as the standard "busy-ness" of American living. 

It fits the mold for folklore because of the specific and unique patterns of behavior and community that are respected and honored as tradition and ritual, and how those traditions are passed down to younger generations to keep the history of their community alive. What I really enjoyed was how people weren't lumped together by noticeable biological family categories. They were all family, blood-related or not and they just coexist together, wherever, because they all belong to the same bonds of their folk traditions in sustainable living practices. 

Obviously these groups represent the musical genre of folklore traditions, but I also think there's a level of material and ritual folklore as well. For example, the first group represented talked about how their father was a fisherman, and because of that, they became net-makers, and this opened the doors for more fisherman, all tied together by song of course. There also seems to be different sets of beliefs that guide these groups, expressed through their song, about what pop culture would deem 'simpler' ways of living. Particularly the Native groups represented in ceremonial drum circles.