You can draw a straight line from folk music to the birth of metal. They use a lot of the same melodies and structures, and they’re both often built around storytelling and symbolism. Before the metal gatekeepers jump on me with “but but but most metal has a classical influence”, what we call “classical music” is heavily influenced by European folk music. Over time it just became more complex and incorporated more instruments and so on. Classical is just fancypants folk.

The reason folk music blends so well with metal is the same reason classical music blends so well with metal: The common ancestor of both classical and metal is folk.

Metal is born from rock, which itself is born from blues and american folk.
Blues itself is born from African-American folk music.

The hair.

Metal takes inspiration from lots of different types of music. A lot of guitar solos have clear inspiration from Classical music

[off topic?]

Combination of metal and traditional.

https://youtu.be/jM8dCGIm6yc

It’s all roots music. Blue grass, outlaw country, folk, metal, reggae, lots of pop, the first 2 iterations of ska, list goes on. It’s all based on the same formula. Im not saying thats a bad thing, I dig roots music. It’s simple, groovy, infectious, and gets you moving.

Finntroll

I used to talk about this all the time back in college but everyone always looked at me like I was crazy.

I think it comes down to subtle mathematical properties of the sounds.

Many years ago there was an article in Scientific American that talked about how most art depicts something from the world but music doesn’t really sound like anything in nature, not even birdsong. So what does it sound like? It turns out that all popular music, regardless of genre, predominately features fractal patterns, and so does our nervous system. If you measure nerve activity at the periphery like on your skin you get a lot of white noise, and as you probe closer to the central nervous system the signal gets more fractal - as if our nervous system itself is built to filter out the white noise and let the fractal components of our perceptions through. So presumably fractal patterns play a part in our processing and maybe how we do pattern matching. In addition, if you measure the difference between moving patterns in nature - like trees waving in the wind, or people moving around in a crowd, the difference between one moment and another is strongly fractal. In other words, fractal patterns could be important in how we perceive changes in the world around us.

This could explain why specific pieces of music can almost universally sound happy or sad, or stirring, or comforting, or can remind us of a specific person or experience - even if it’s a song we’ve never heard before. Anyway, my guess is that if you did the right math on metal and folk music you would see a lot of similar numbers.

I believe it. Iron Horse jams Metallica songs bluegrass style. (and many more artists!)

Both Are extremly easy when it comes to chords. Jokes are you only need three chords to play all metal songs ever written.