Gosh, I don't know.   I just grew up with it.   

We learned all kinds of songs that I now understand are folk songs in class from 1st grade on. Stuff like Go Tell Aunt Rhoady, Sweet Betsy From Pike, Ol' Dan Tucker (lots of cowboy songs, Westerns being the thing on television and in movies.) My eastern Kentucky grandfather sang old hymns in a fine hillbilly voice as he worked around the yard from my earliest memory. We watched the broadcasts of WSAZ's (Huntington, WV) "Saturday Night Jamboree" from when it started broadcasting in 1953 (I was 2 years old,) listened to Ralph Stanley on WOAY, watched the Flatt & Scruggs show, and listened to the Grand Ol' Opry from before I can actually remember.

So I'm guessing the first songs I likely heard were folk songs, but I sure couldn't tell you what the first were. And I certainly didn't think of it as folk music.

By age 6 or 7, I didn't like most of it. Hick music. (I lumped it all together as country.) Was embarrassed by it, just like I was embarrassed by my hillbilly accent - but Daddy controlled the TV and the radio dial. In the 50's and 60's the mass media portrayal of Appalachian people (really, of rural people in general,) and West Virginians and people from eastern Kentucky in particular were extremely negative, and I internalized those negative messages. I sang in school chorus for 6 years, where we worked very, very hard to not sing like we talked.

Probably the first folk music I heard that I identified as folk music was from the KT, probably Tom Dooley. Mom and Dad went nuts over the Kingston Trio, and bought each of their 1st 5 albums as soon as they were released. Now, I did like the KT, and the other commercial revivalist folk groups, and the whole family gathered every Saturday night when "Hootennay" came on the air. T'wern't a hillbilly twang or mountain voice ornamentation to be heard. That sounded good!

It wasn't until the early or mid '70's that I finally came to love the sounds of a good hillbilly voice singing a mountain ballad or an old hymn. I worked hard to eliminate any hint of nasal mountain or country out of my singing voice when I was young. I wanted to sound like Joan Biaz or Joni Mitchell (only an octave or two lower.) I have got some of the country back, but not the mountain.

Not what you were asking, Voyager, but this is the direction thinking of your query led me.

Janie