The colonial history of the United States began in 1607 with the colonization of Jamestown, Virginia. Music of all genres and origins emerged as the United States began to form. From the Indigenous spiritual music to the African banjos, music in the United States is as diverse as its people. In New England, the music was very religious and was vitally important in the rising of American music. The migration of people southward led to the settling of the Appalachian Mountains. There many poor Europeans inhabited and brought country blues and fiddling. As music spread, the religious hymns were still just as popular. The first New England School, Shakers, and Quakers, which were all music and dance groups inspired by religion, rose to fame. In 1776, St. Cecilia Music Society opened in the Province of South Carolina and led to many more societies opening in the Northern United States.  African slaves were brought to the United States and introduced the music world to instruments like the xylophone, drums and banjo. The diverse music of the United States comes from the diverse type of people who first colonized this country.

Indigenous music

Native Americans in the United States had no indigenous traditions of classical music, nor a secular song tradition. Their music is spiritual in nature, performed usually in groups in a ritual setting important to Native American religion.

It was not until the 1890s that Native American music began to enter the American establishment. At the time, the first pan-tribal cultural elements, such as powwows, were being established, and composers like Edward MacDowell and Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert used Native themes in their compositions. It was not until the much later work of Arthur Farwell, however, that an informed representation of Native music was brought into the American classical scene, part of the Indianist movement.

Appalachian folk music

The Appalachian Mountains have long been a center for cultural innovation, in spite of only sparse settlement by Native Americans and Europeans alike. Due to complex geologic reasons, the mountains and subranges were difficult to cross and included ridges of uninhabitable quartz mixed with valleys of soil unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, immigration of Europeans and their African slaves tended to be southern in direction, along the Piedmont area, and the Appalachian region was populated by poor Europeans. These Europeans were of English, Scots-Irish, German, and Huguenot origin. This settlement occurred primarily from 1775 to 1850.

English, Anglo-Irish, and Border Scottish tunes and ballads continued evolving from their distant roots along the Appalachians, eventually forming the major basis for jug bands, country blues, hillbilly music and a mix of other genres which eventually became country music. These folk tunes adopted characteristics from multiple sources, including British broadside ballads (which switched their themes from love to a distinctly American preoccupation with masculine work like mining or sensationalistic disasters and murder), African folk tunes (and their lyrical focus on semi-historical events) and minstrel shows and music halls. Popular ballads included "Barbara Allen" and "Matty Groves". The banjo was also introduced, having gone through numerous geographic movements since its invention by the Arabians and subsequent travel across Africa, the Atlantic and throughout the Americas.

Fiddling

Appalachian fiddle styles are mostly derived from those brought to the colonies by English settlers. It is often claimed that the "Scotch snap" popularized by Niel Gow influenced Appalachian fiddling; however, according to historian Michael Newton, this is not true. Newton has claimed that English, Scottish, Irish, and American fiddle styles developed around the same time and are more like "cultural cousins" of one another. Appalachian technique was altered during the next century, with European waltzes and polkas being most influential. Square dances, based on the cotillion, and cakewalks, an African American imitation of white dances and the Virginia Reel arose during the 19th century.

Lined-out hymnody

Lined-out hymnody, a religious music style perpetuated by the Old Regular Baptists, Primitive Baptists, et al., is often studied and classified as folk music. See Old Regular Baptist, Lined-Out Hymnody.

New England colonial music The religious singing traditions of New England played an important role in the early evolution of American music. Beginning with the Pilgrim colonists, who brought the Ainsworth Psalter with them to the New World, church hymns were popular across the region. Common New Englanders soon developed their own traditions, which were viewed by some as degenerate and wanton.

New England choral traditions

The original Puritan immigrants to New England sang a number of spiritual psalms, but generally disliked secular music, or at least those varieties which they viewed as encouraging immorality and disorder. They also objected to the use of musical instruments in churches and a complex vocal liturgy, both being associated with Roman Catholicism. The well-known minister Cotton Mather wrote, in Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry, on the subject:

The Ainsworth Psalter provided most of the tunes in use in New England church music until the late 17th century, when congregations abandoned the Psalter, claiming the tunes were too complex and difficult to sing.

The Bay Psalme Book (The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre) was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1640; it was the first book of any kind printed in the English colonies of North America. It became the standard used by New England churches for many years, though it contained no music itself, merely providing psalms and pointing readers to other prominent publications. The Bay Psalm Book was faithful to its source, but did not produce beautiful singing. In 1651, then, a third edition was extensively revised by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon, and became known as the New England Psalm Book; this became the standard for many years. In 1698, the ninth edition was printed and it was the first time that printed notation was used. By this point, the evolution from the Ainsworth Psalter to the New England Psalm Book had steadily dwindled the number of tunes in use.

The practice of lining out was often common, though its presence and utility depended on the degree of illiteracy found in congregation—generally, illiteracy was common, as was lining out. This was the process of a leader presenting one line of a song, then maintaining the first note for the congregation to match as they responded with the same line. This technique was also common in churches of Appalachia, such as the Regular Baptists of Kentucky.

The organ and the birth of the church band

Organs were the only instrument in use in church music during this era, and even this was not without controversy. During the colonial era, in churches in the Calvinist tradition - including in most Puritan meetinghouses - only unaccompanied singing was permitted during worship. Indeed, after the death of Thomas Brattle, treasurer of Harvard College in 1713, he bequeathed his organ to the Brattle Square Church in Boston, but the church (which he had founded) did not think it proper, and gave it to the King's Chapel, which was the Anglican. Still, the organ was used in other New England churches. The first organ said to be designed for church use was installed in Newport, Rhode Island in 1733. Organs, however, were expensive and difficult to play. Only the largest churches could afford an organ and organist, and so many used more portable instruments, such as the bass fiddle, which was called "God's fiddle" to distinguish it from the much-maligned "Devil's fiddle" (violin). Later, other instruments like the ophicleide, trombone, cornet, German flute, bassoon, violin and clarinet were added, thus birthing the church band.

Secular folk music

Though it had long been supposed that the religious aversion to secular music inhibited instrumental folk music in New England, recent research by Barbara Lambert, focused on the Boston area, shows otherwise. Personally owned instruments recorded included the cittern, virginals, soprano clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, fife, flute, viol and violin and fiddle and the Mrs. Healy pipe.

Despite some hostility on the part of ministers like Increase Mather, dance music was popular in the New England colonial era, especially by the early 18th century, as the local population boomed with an influx of more settlers.

Broadside ballads were also known. As in British music, these were printed songs performed to a well-known tune, and included border ballads like The Ballad of Chevy Chase.

Though there is much in primary sources referring to folk music of the time, it is virtually all written by those who condemned the songs as uncouth. As such, little is objectively known. There was a distinction between the "Regular Singing" style of zealous reformers, mostly clergymen educated at Harvard, and the "Common Way" of the folk. Reformers included prominent clergymen like Thomas Walter and Nathaniel Chauncey, many of whom regarded their style of "regular" singing as more sophisticated as well as more devout. The evidence, however, indicates that the common people's music was more complex, using techniques like ornamentation.

The formation of schools and societies promoting regular singing helped to spread the practice, and instruction books were published.

John Wesley's legacy and the spread south In the 18th century, Americans composed a number of their own hymns, often based on the Old Testament; the English nonconformist Isaac Watts, especially his Hymns and Spiritual Songs, was also very popular. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, played a major role in revivalist hymnody after a trip to Georgia in 1735 at the invitation of James Oglethorpe. Wesley and his brother, Charles Wesley, went with Oglethorpe and twenty-six Moravian missionaries. The Moravian singing inspired John Wesley to study their music. He published a collection of translations of German hymns in 1737, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, then returned to England in 1738, attending meetings of the Moravian Brethren in London. There, during a reading of Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans, Wesley had a spiritual experience and found his faith in Christ rejuvenated.

Great Awakening

After returning to America, Wesley became an important preacher in a rise of fervent Christianity called the Great Awakening, along with George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, among others. Wesley and his brother began writing a number of hymns, at first just words, and then with music beginning with a collection usually called the Foundery Collection.

Wesley and some other preachers fought against the embellishment of his hymns. In 1761, Wesley's collection Select Hymns, with Tunes Annext: Designed Chiefly for Use of the People Called Methodists directed singers to follow the tunes "exactly as printed" and to "sing in tune"; both directions were impractical, since most of the worshippers likely couldn't read music or carry a tune.