Keeping Traditional Folk Music Alive in Nashville | Mike Tod Podcast
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There's something profoundly moving about watching someone discover their life's purpose by accident. For Mike Tod, that moment came at twenty-one, lonely in Glasgow with a handful of pocket money from his grandparents burning a hole in his pocket. He walked into a thrift shop, spotted a resonator guitar with a wooden body and metal cone, and walked out having found his calling. That guitar would eventually lead him from Scotland to Nashville, where he now spends his days hunting down forgotten folk songs and breathing new life into instruments most people have never heard of.
Tod's journey to Music City wasn't the typical Nashville pilgrimage. Originally from Manitoba before being raised in Alberta, he grew up with equal parts nature and curiosity—summers at a cabin in Manitoba, fishing and boating, the kind of childhood that roots you to something real. Those early years soaking in lakes and wilderness clearly shaped his approach to music, which feels less like chasing trends and more like archaeological excavation. He's digging through history, looking for the songs and stories that built the foundations of the music we listen to today.
I was living in Glasgow, Scotland at the time in a bit of a challenging part of my life and a little bit lonely, and that's when I started playing guitar.
— Mike Tod
What makes Tod's work particularly compelling is his refusal to compartmentalise folk music into neat geographical boxes. His Canadian roots, his time living in Glasgow, and his current base in Nashville have given him a unique vantage point for understanding how traditional songs travelled, evolved, and connected cultures. In conversation, he speaks about these songs not as museum pieces but as living, breathing things—vessels carrying the DNA of real people's lives across continents and centuries. When you listen to him talk about blues musicians using resonator guitars at juke joints before amplification existed, you hear someone who understands that every creative choice has a story, that nothing in music happens in a vacuum.
But perhaps the most intriguing part of Tod's artistic practice is his recent embrace of the Crankenstein—yes, that's really what it's called—a handmade hybrid instrument combining a medieval hurdy-gurdy with a guitar. There are only ten in the world, all crafted by a luthier living in the Polish mountains. Most owners are film composers, but Tod approached the instrument differently. He was drawn to its primal sound, that constant drone that sits underneath the melody like the heartbeat of something ancient. When he describes it, you understand immediately why he chose it: it doesn't sound like anything modern, anything polished. It sounds like pipes, like history itself has a voice.
Before amplification, before microphones and amps, that metal cone basically is a natural amplifier—blues musicians loved playing those at juke joints because they'd just cut through all the noise.
— Mike Tod
In a music industry obsessed with the new, with what's trending, with chasing algorithms and viral moments, Tod's commitment to preservation and historical investigation feels almost subversive. He's not interested in making folk music trendy or accessible in the way contemporary music tries to be. Instead, he's asking harder questions: Why do these songs matter? What were people experiencing when they created them? How do they speak to us now? These aren't the concerns of someone chasing commercial success. They're the concerns of someone genuinely convinced that understanding our musical past is essential to understanding ourselves.
Nashville, despite its reputation as a commercial music factory, is increasingly becoming home to artists like Tod—people drawn not by hit-making dreams but by the city's proximity to American musical roots. In his podcast conversation with Camden, you can hear someone thinking out loud about music in ways that feel genuine and searching. He's not selling you anything except the idea that this music deserves your attention, that these stories deserve to be told, and that the instruments our ancestors played still have something crucial to teach us.
For anyone curious about how folk music connects across continents, why preserving musical history matters in our streaming age, or what a medieval hurdy-gurdy sounds like when played by someone who genuinely loves it, this episode is essential listening. Mike Tod represents something increasingly rare in modern music: an artist driven by genuine historical curiosity rather than commercial calculation.
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