If you are looking at that pre-industrial world -1600-1800, say- there were printing presses and sheet music, which made it possible to distribute songs and instrumental music, and as the Western regions were still largely rural, most of the music that would be heard would be made by people themselves. That meant there was both a need for written music and a means of distributing it , and a good bit of that written music survives.

One very common form of that would be singing. Broadside Ballads were common; songs would be written with amusing tales or on current topics ( like a murder) and set to popular melodies, and the printed copies often sold at markets. They can give an idea of what the typical villager might find interesting or fun. John Aubrey, the late 17th c. biographer, describes stopping at an inn with his friends, ordering a dinner, and then going into the common room ( which had a fire) and walking around reading and singing all the ballads stuck to the walls.

There were also various tunebooks and dance books. Some of those have continued to be reprinted, like John Playford's 1651 Dancing Master or his 1685 [ Division Violin](http://imslp.org/wiki/The_Division_Violin_(Playford,_John) which provided popular melodies, and then a series of variations on them.

Lastly , because although a town fiddler might know more than 200 tunes, it's nice to be able to depend on something more than memory, musicians would often make up their own music books for reference. Numbers of these have survived. Two random examples that come to mind would be the Winder family tunebook circa 1789-1849, a tunebook used and enlarged over a few generations of the same family , and the William Dixon manuscript, which is one of the earliest tuneboooks for bagpipes in England.

That's just England. I can't say much specifically about other countries, though I have run across similar music publications and tunebooks for Belgium, the Netherlands and France.