Origins of country music

Mark Butcher · From: Scotland

Researching for a college essay I realise I don't know much about the origins of country music going back to the teens and the twenties, can anyone enlighten me?

Stephanie Carta · From: Florida, USA

I'd say the only way you can write about it with authority it to listen first.

If you can get one of these boxed set linked below, you'll hear examples of the earliest recorded country music starting in the mid 1920s and going through the early 50s. I found it pretty fascinating. It's easy to debate about what makes a country song, but you'll find so many styles of music that were, and continue to be marketed as 'country', it is hard to define. I think of country as an umbrella more than a specific genre. There was probably more diversity in the 20s - 40s than their is today.

Western Swing, hillbilly, bluegrass, honky tonk, proto rock 'n' roll, boogies, blues, folk.. it's all here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Country-Western-Various/dp/B00005QTI4/ref=sr_1_12/202-9619823-4789458?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1193964241&sr=8-12
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Bill Dobkins · From: Rolla Missouri, USA

There are several threads on this site about what real country is , it might help you.
It has evolved from our ancestors who brought their different styles, when they migrated to America. The fiddle mostly came from Ireland and Scotland ect.
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Tom Olson · From: Spokane, WA

I think the "classic" country music has many influences. Traditional fiddle music (Scotch/Irish) was brought to America early on and as it was played and passed down and/or learned by other Americans, it gradually became Americanized, or metamorphasized, eventually mixing with southern blues sounds to result in the "high lonesome" sound of Bluegrass. Bluegrass music was an obvious influence on Country music.

Early Rock and Roll music also was a heavy influence on a lot of Country music and Country artists. Many Country artists performed Rock and Roll at some point in their careers, and many artists who were classified as "Country" actually considered their music to be more rock 'n roll than country.

Jazz, of course, was also a big influence on country music, especially "Texas Swing" and artists such as Bob Wills etc. You can also hear Cajun influences in country music.

Probably didn't help much, but hopefully this will give you some ideas for directions to look in your research. You could no doubt find more information than you could ever use if you were to do some in depth searching on the Internet.

David Doggett · Posted 1 Nov 2007 10:00 pm

Mark, ironically, being in Scotland you are at the source of American country music. Long ago the British put a bunch of Scots Calvinists in Northern Ireland to dilute the Irish Catholics. They intermingled and picked up Irish culture for a few generations, particularly fiddle and dance music. To further suppress the Catholics, the British passed a law that only members of the Church of England could own property in Northern Ireland. They didn’t bother to make an exception for the Scots-Irish Calvinists. The Scots-Irish came to America by the tens of thousands from the revolutionary period through the potato famines. Many of them came into the Southern coastal states, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Over the generations they kept migrating westward, spreading their Scots-Irish folk music across the Southeast and through the Southern Midwest. That was influenced by African-American music in the slave South. This produced Southern folk music and what is called Old Time music, which is mostly Scots-Irish fiddle music. The banjo came from Africa.

With the advent of radio and phonograph records, this Scots-Irish-African-American folk amalgam coalesced into the country music sung by people like Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family. Bluegrass was a later offshoot combining country, Old Time and blues. It is not a folk genre, but a commercial genre invented by Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. The latter introduced bluegrass finger picking, as opposed to the previous claw-hammer frailing of banjos in folk and Old Time music. Early country music was also influenced by Hawaiian steel guitar. From Texas and Oklahoma, across the Southwest to California, jazz was combined with country steel and fiddle to produce western swing. A more traditional country sound was nurtured by the music industry in Nashville. These eastern and western versions were together referred to as country and western.

Rock’n’Roll was invented by country artists like Elvis Presley and rhythm’n’blues artists such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Many of the earliest rock’n’rollers came from country music (Elvis, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, etc.), and early rock’n’roll was also called rockabilly. Some, like Elvis and the Everly Brothers stayed with rock’n’roll; others, such as Johnny Cash and Conway Twitty, went back to country music.

It all came from the Scots-Irish and the African-Americans. Every Scotsman should know that. Smile

Okay, I've simplified and skimmed, but isn't that the gist of it?

CrowBear Schmitt · From: Ariege, - PairO'knees, - France

Barry Blackwood · Posted 2 Nov 2007 6:58 am

I'm not sure about the origins of country music, but the way it's going, I feel like I'll live to see the end of it ..... Neutral

Darvin Willhoite · From: Roxton, Tx. USA

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Jon Jaffe · From: Austin, Texas

Dance Halls and Last Calls: A History of Texas Country Music
Author(s): Trevino, Geronimo, III
ISBN10: 1556229275
ISBN13: 9781556229275

A good reference from a Texas standpoint.

Les Anderson · From: The Great White North

If you want to hear the original style of Irish and Scottish folk music that is the roots of our modern country music, take a trip to Newfoundland on Canada's east coast.

They still hang on to and play those old Irish and Scottish jigs, reels and folk songs for hours on end.

Better still, go to a small town party or dance. At these, you will hear the way that music was played 2 and 3 hundred years ago in Ireland and Scotland.

John Steele · From: Renfrew, Ontario, Canada

I've always thought it was interesting to note the term "Country and Western" as a genre was not specifically used until 1948, when the Billboard music charts coined the new term for purposes of categorizing things.
It seems when looking at the early string bands, listening to the horns on Jimmie Rogers' recordings and Emmet Miller's, and consider the Texas influences on what we now call "country", that it started out as more of a Melting Pot thing.
The terminology seems like more of a marketing thing, and no previous generation viewed things through the marketing lens more than we do now.
-John

Jim Robbins · From: Ontario, Canada

Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, Riley Puckett, Clayton McMichon (sp?), early Carter family a little later on -- Ralph Peer from Okeh did a bunch of what was essentially field recording in the Southern U.S. in the 1920s many of which were commercially released and did pretty well. The so-called "first" country recording was a fiddler who went to New York in the early 1920's whose name escapes me; the first mega-hit is widely held to be Vernon Dalhart's "Wreck of the Old '97". They didn't call them "mega-hits" in those days, though.

Basically, like pretty much every other type of pop music whose "origins" appear around the early 20th century, the advent of recording and the development of a market for recordings in the 1920s and early 1930s took a bunch of fluid and interrelated traditions from the previous generation, and crystallized them in the form of recorded models that could be widely disseminated and imitated. In the case of "country music" it involved Anglo-Scottish/Irish -American balladry traditions (as some of the previous posters have noted) as well as lots of African-European interactions in the U.S., through religious music (camp meetings, shape note singing) and most importantly, black-face minstrelsy.

If you can find the Smithsonian "Anthology of American Folk Music" there is a lot of info and some good recordings. There is also a good recorded anthology by John Cohen of early recordings. Google John Cohen & country music and you'll find a bunch of sites. There's some books by Bill Malone. & James Sallis has a book called "The guitar players" with a chapter on Puckett. I don't know if he's the same Jim Sallis that was looking for info on the weight of steel guitars recently (although I'm kind of curious; and can tell you that my Sho-bud pro weighs a ton).

Jim Robbins · From: Ontario, Canada

the name that escaped me: Fiddlin John Carson. Very interesting story -- not the best fiddler around, but smart enough to go to New York and record. & someone was smart enough to record him.

Alvin Blaine · From: Picture Rocks, Arizona, USA

Jim Robbins · From: Ontario, Canada

Thank you Alvin, you're absolutely correct.

I think there is also a Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music with good notes. It's probably hard to find but enlightened university music libraries will have it.

David Doggett · Posted 5 Nov 2007 8:28 am

This may be getting beyond the original poster's question, but we should probably make a sharper distinction between folk, Old Time, and country. Folk was mostly vocal oriented with guitar and banjo accompaniment, and Old Time was fiddle oriented, and both come from the pre-recording, pre-radio era. Unless you want the term "country" to apply to any music played by rural Americans at any time, it really is a specialized commercial term applied to the commercial stuff that was popularized through records and radio by people like Gid Tanner, the Carters, and especially Jimmy Rogers. Folk and Old Time are more pure; that is, handed-down more or less unchanged (although there was some evolution). Commercial country came from those roots, but was also a new invention of the performers that mixed in more blues and jazz sounds, as well as sounds from Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, western, or whatever.

With that type of thinking, Alexander "Eck" Robertson and John Carson seem like they were probably Old Time practitioners. If you apply the term "country" to just any old style musician who got recorded, then the term has little meaning and could apply to anything going back to colonial times. Of course there way a lot of overlap, but what most people think of as country music was really something new that was invented out of all the stuff that was around at the beginnings of recording and radio. An aspect that encouraged and nurtured the inventive part was the financial rewards of mass appeal, and the newfound ability to become a full-time professional musician.

robert kramer · From: Nashville TN

Mark, The best source for your essay is "Country Music USA" by Bill C. Malone. It should be availible from your local library. It is $12.95 at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Country-music-USA-Bill-Malone/dp/B0007HNXCI/ref=sr_1_3/104-5868836-5515907?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194462153&sr=8-3

Jon Jaffe · From: Austin, Texas

I would like to add one more reference:

A History And Encyclopedia of Country, Western, And Gospel Music, Linnell Gentry,
McQuiddy Press, Nashville, Tennessee, 1961.

Second Edition Pictured Published by Scholarly Press, 1972:

Both are available on Amazon

Jon

Henry Nagle · From: Santa Rosa, California

I've always been under the impression that early country music was a blend of scottish/irish music and blues. Kind of like blues for white people.

To my ear: The Carter Family would be "country/folk". Hank Sr. would be country/blues. etc etc.... Merle Travis, Bob Wills, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline...... We're hearing a pretty diverse melting pot in all that. Totally different, yet there is a common feel among them - musically and lyrically. Maybe that's the gospel part.

Since the 1920s it seems like every generation of "country" music has taken what it pleased from all other American genres - jazz, cajun, pop, rock, r&b, folk.

Kind of a "ruralized" version of whatever's cool that's around.

No shortage of sub-genres in country music.

There have been more than a few good books on the subject in the last 10 years or so.

I've also noticed some similarities between country & western and a lot of Mexican music. I'd be interested in hearing about that from some one who knows what they're talking about. Smile