Keeping Traditional Folk Music Alive in Nashville | Mike Tod Podcast
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The Keepers: Why One Canadian Musician Is Fighting to Save Folk Music from Obscurity
In a city obsessed with the next big thing, Mike Tod is doing something quietly radical: he's digging through the past with the reverence of an archaeologist and the passion of someone who genuinely believes that forgotten songs still matter.
Now based in Nashville but rooted in Canadian soil, Tod represents a particular breed of musician—one whose curiosity about where the music comes from often runs deeper than ambition about where it's going. In a recent conversation, he opened up about traditional folk music, the stories embedded in old songs, and why preserving musical history isn't some nostalgic hobby for obsessives; it's essential work that contemporary artists desperately need.
It's easy to dismiss folk music preservationists as antiquarians, content to live in the past while the world moves on. Tod's perspective offers something more compelling. He understands that folk songs are documents—they tell us about the lives, struggles, and values of the people who wrote them. They carry traces of how music travelled between continents, how melodies mutated as they crossed oceans, and how ordinary people expressed extraordinary things through simple, unforgettable tunes. When we lose these songs to time and indifference, we're not just losing music. We're losing part of our collective memory.
Coming from Canada, Tod brings an outsider's perspective to Nashville, a city that often treats tradition as a museum piece rather than a living, breathing thing. The American country and folk establishment has its own mythology and hierarchies, but Tod's Canadian background gives him a different relationship to roots music—one that includes the ballads and work songs of Eastern Canada, the fiddle traditions, and the particular way that Celtic and British influences took root in North America. He carries that knowledge with him, understanding that traditional music is fundamentally international, a conversation across borders and centuries.
What's particularly striking about his approach is the playful curiosity underneath the scholarship. Tod doesn't approach folk music as a dusty academic subject; he collects songs the way others collect rare records or vintage guitars, drawn to the strange, the obscure, the forgotten. He's not interested only in the most famous ballads everyone knows—he's hunting for the weird stuff, the songs that survived in only a handful of recordings, the melodies that travelled strange routes through history and arrived transformed by circumstances nobody could have predicted.
His construction of the "Crankenstein"—an unusual instrument built from a music box mechanism and other found objects—reveals something essential about how Tod engages with music. Rather than treating tradition as something sealed behind glass, he's using it as a springboard for experimentation. The instrument becomes a bridge between past and present, between folk music's humble, utilitarian origins and contemporary sonic exploration. It's exactly the kind of approach that keeps traditional music alive rather than embalmed.
The conversation touches on why all of this matters now, in an era when algorithmic playlists encourage consumption over discovery, when streaming has flattened the context of songs into pure content. Young musicians coming up in Nashville might never encounter the ballads and work songs that informed everything from bluegrass to Americana to modern indie folk, simply because nobody's actively putting them in the conversation. Tod is doing that work—not to suggest that modern artists should simply copy the past, but to ensure they understand what came before, the depths they're building on.
There's something almost missionary about musicians like Tod who dedicate themselves to preservation. They're not trying to stop time or convince everyone that old music was better. They're simply insisting that history matters, that the stories buried in folk melodies deserve to be remembered, and that the connections between traditional music and contemporary work are deeper and more important than most people realize.
If you've ever wondered why some songs feel timeless, or where the roots of modern Americana actually lie, Tod's episode offers a master class in musical archaeology done with genuine affection. Listen to understand not just the music, but why one musician chose to dedicate himself to keeping these voices alive.
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