Country music

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Country music, one of America's most popular musical forms, defies definition. It began as a means of expressing the moods and changes that took place among the white population living in the rural regions of the western and southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

According to renowned country music historian Bill Malone, the folk music form has been commercialized and targeted at the city, resulting in a vast entertainment empire spanning regional, social, cultural boundaries.

Stylistically, country music includes subgenres: western, western swing, polka, folk, dixieland and blues, yodel, pop vocals. In modern times, the term is used to describe many styles and sub-genres.

Music is performed mainly on string instruments: banjo, fiddle, mandolin, acoustic and electric guitar. a harmonica is also used.

At first it was simply called "folk music" (hillbilly music).

The term "country music" (rural) has becomeused since the 1940s to separate it from the parallel developing folk music with the same roots - songs and ballads of Anglo-Celtic immigrants. While the American South and North had the same external influences, the two regions developed completely different musical trends. In the south, people settled in the Appalachians and remote low-lying areas, preserving folk traditions in their isolation. Shortcomings in education, entertainment, lack of connections with other areas, people compensated with music, singing and dancing. But they sang songs not only those that they brought from their historical homeland. Based on their own experience, they created new country songs, the main themes of which were real events and idealized representations: hard work, Protestant themes, rural romanticism, love, the dream of beautiful times.

Since the southern and western regions of America are divided into several sub-regions, there is not only one southern style. White musicians were influenced by other cultures, in particular the Negro, Mexican, Cajun sub-ethnic group (in southern Louisiana).

By the 1920s, "southern music" was still unknown to the rest of the world, despite the fact that it was developing intensively.

It was only thanks to the invention of the radio that the isolation was broken and it sounded all over the country. Country music artists performed with familiar songs that talked about simple and pleasant things. The first radio station to broadcast "southern songs" in 1922,was located in Georgia. The first official country music composition is "The little old log cabin in the lane", written in 1871 and recorded on a record by Fiddin John Carson in 1924.

But most historians point to 1927 as the year future star Jimmie Rogers made his first radio appearance.

In the 1930s, when America was going through hard times due to the Great Depression and the terrible dust storms called the "Dust Bowl", country music symbolized for people the dream of the days of the old Wild West, of romance, freedom.