Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and musicians.

American folk music is a broad category of song that encompasses the everyday traditional music that people hear and perform together in small communities: Indigenous ceremonial songs, mournful ballads that groups like the Scots-Irish brought from the British Isles to the Appalachian hollers, the banjo-fueled call-and-response songs that Africans carried with them when they were kidnapped from their homeland and enslaved here in the South. But by the mid-20th century, folk music had generally fallen out of favor, considered antiquated as newer technologies transformed music-making and recording. By then, the national charts were jumping with the more modern sound of pop crooners.

But a funny thing happened in the 1950s and early ’60s: A group of urban musicians in New York City began looking to traditional rural America for inspiration. North Carolina was a prime target, and during that period, the songs of many of our state’s greatest folk musicians, such as Doc Watson and Elizabeth Cotten, were revived, and those musicians were signed to big independent record labels. Since then, what’s now known as the ’60s folk revival has never really gone away, and musicians across North Carolina today continue to record the old standards and write new songs in traditional styles. Just go to Merlefest in North Wilkesboro in any given year, and you’ll hear scores of those musicians interpreting, reinterpreting, and writing new songs with old instruments.

Take the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group that formed in Durham in the early 2000s with the sole purpose of reviving the old string-band music played by African Americans at the turn of the 19th century. And then there’s the Avett Brothers of Concord, whose earliest original songs blended old-time Appalachian folk styles with the urgency of punk rock. In our playlist for this month, you’ll find songs by each of those artists — Watson, Cotten, the Chocolate Drops, and the Avetts — plus many more.

One of the more enduring styles of folk music is the murder ballad. Those are songs that, in the old days, functioned much like the editorial page of a newspaper, telling morality tales about killings, hangings, and other grim activities. One of the most enduring murder ballads tells of the tale of a young damsel named Naomi Wise, who, in 1807, was drowned by her lover in Deep River near the Randolph County town of Randleman. Shortly after her murder, a poem was written about this dastardly deed. That poem was later put to music and passed down from generation to generation, performed and recorded countless times in various forms and under several different titles. Bob Dylan recorded a rough-sounding version early in his career. The British folk-rock band Pentangle recorded a version in 1971. And the indie-rock group Okkervil River recorded a version in 2003. But perhaps the best-known contemporary version of the song was recorded by Doc Watson as “Omie Wise” and released in 1964 — during the height of the folk revival — on his debut album for the folk label Vanguard Records.

The story of Naomi Wise represents a classic in the folk genre of murder ballads, and North Carolina has produced many of them. Another grisly tale, “Tom Dooley,” about a Wilkes County man named Tom Dula, who was hanged for killing the mother of his unborn child, became a No. 1 Billboard pop hit for the Kingston Trio in 1958. Watson also recorded “Tom Dooley,” but we’ve included the Kingston Trio’s hit version here.

You’ll find other murder ballads in this playlist (Outer Banks native Isabel Etheridge’s “Nelly Cropsey,” the Avetts’ “I Killed Sally’s Lover,” and Watauga County singer Frank Proffitt’s “Poor Ellen Smith”), and you’ll also find plenty of other kinds of ballads, work songs, and ceremonial music. Like the Chocolate Drops performing Greensboro resident Laurelyn Dossett’s ode to a mill family, “Leaving Eden”; Piedmont blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s version of “John Henry,” about a hard-driving mythological steel driver; and Indigenous singer Charly Lowry’s “Trees,” in which the Pembroke native incorporates brush strokes of Native instrumentation. We’ve included obscure songs, old standards, songs by contemporary North Carolina folk artists like Mipso, a few big names (James Taylor, Andy Griffith), and even one by the biggest contemporary artist in America today, Taylor Swift, who performs her gorgeous folk song, “Carolina.”