The Tennessee Folklore Society was formed in 1934, when famed folksong scholar John Lomax said to his friend J.A. Rickard that parts of Tennessee "were the richest in folklore of any portion of the United States." Rickard called a meeting of interested parties that resulted in the formation of the Tennessee Folklore Society. TFS elected Dr. Charles Pendleton of George Peabody College in Nashville as the first President. The following year, TFS published the first issue of the Society's journal, the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin.

Throughout most of its history, the TFS was led by individuals affiliated with Tennessee colleges. The organization’s secretary-editor’s institutional home became the society’s de facto headquarters during that officer’s term of service.  Earliest terms moved the base of TFS operations to different colleges around the state for up to five years before William Griffin’s editorial tenure gave the society a longer-term home at Peabody College from 1952 to 1966. 

In 1966, the society moved under the editorship of Ralph Hyde to its next long-term home at the English Department of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU).  The move came at the inception of a new era of nonprofit activity and public support for arts and humanities, spawned by the 1965 creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities as federal agencies, which in turn gave rise to partnering state agencies across the country. 

In the 1970s TFS initiated a record series featuring some of the state's finest traditional musicians.  Items from the series were often recognized through inclusion on the annual selected list of "American Folk Music and Folklore Recordings" compiled by the Library of Congress. One of the early (and now unavailable) LPs, Tennessee Folk Heritage: The Mountains, was nominated for a Grammy award.  In 1980, the Society began to sponsor a series of television documentaries, including a show on Uncle Dave Macon that won a regional Emmy. Later in the decade the Society helped sponsor the production of Southbound, a series devoted to southern music that aired on PBS. In 1995, the organization released its first video, Banjo Meltdown, a documentary based on the popular Tennessee Banjo Institutes that were held in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Under longtime TFS Secretary-Editor Charles Wolfe, the society continued to be headquartered at MTSU. Upon his retirement, the TFS Board received a proposal from Jubilee Community Arts to move its operational base to JCA’s Knoxville office, and for their director, folklorist Brent Cantrell, to assume Secretary-Editor duties. In 2023, TFS moved headquarters to Selmer in West Tennessee under an agreement with Arts in McNairy.