The Origins and Evolution of American Country Music

 

American country music comes straight from the heart and soul of the everyday working men and women of the United States. It’s origins are in the deep south and it’s influences range, from old world folk music to the soul music of African slaves. The lyrics of American country music speak to the daily toil and hardships of life, the love and loss found in human relationships, and the pleasures to be found in simple country living.

Country music can trace it’s history to the 1920’s, when the technology of recordings and radio brought folk musicians across the United States the opportunity to have their music heard on a wider scale.  While the music industry often referred to these styles of music as ‘old time’ or ‘hillbilly’ music, they found that it’s popularity began to reach beyond it’s rural, small town roots. “The subsequent history of hillbilly music prior to 1941 cannot be neatly summarized nor really evaluated with any assurance. Even to sketch in its broad aspects is difficult. Too much of the information stems from the statements, activities, and opinions of recording and radio executives, and it is a proven fact that they were groping in the dark, did not know what they had… Early hillbilly music was strongly based in the country string band, frolic, and banjo-minstrel tradition, though the recording companies sampled almost every thing available, even the Sacred Harp … There was no stylistic uniformity, though to the outsider it seemed so. Instrumental styles ranged from simple to relatively complex, from self taught guitar strums to somewhat complex banjo styles. (Wilgus 162)

Through the 1920 and 30’s country music began to absorb the cowboy tradition giving uniformity and seriousness to country music, but it still lacked mass appeal and was seen as music for the lower classes. The population shifts of World War II boosted country music into the mainstream, and the mix of class and culture in the military gave it a wider exposure. In the 1940’s country music was recognized as a burgeoning genre by Billboard, and by the late 40’s country and pop artists began to cross genres.

The 1950’s brought a new style of country music, this new form infused country songs with the rhythms and vitality of rock and roll, while keeping the sound and lyrical styles that people had come to identify with country music. “First recorded in the North, it erupted in Memphis in the form of rockabilly, with Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins… Just as country-western music in the fifties was attempting to shed the last of its rural and low-class trappings and become urban middle-class music, national taste turned back to the grass roots, to the folksy.” (Wilgus 173)

Country music continues to walk a fine line between pop/rock and folk country, with many artists bouncing back and forth at will. “Within the hierarchy of American music, however, country perennially struggles for status and legitimacy.” (Tichi 01) This struggle is somewhat due to the fluidity of style and influences crucial to the genre and also in part to it’s continued categorization of being the music of the lower class. However country music continues to grow in popularity, and develop the nature of it’s sound with the fluctuations in the culture of it’s listeners. The country music of the 2000’s is a wild blend of folk, bluegrass, blues, latin, pop, hip-hop, rap, and R&B, showing the truth of it’s nature as the music of the common man

Fiddler Eck Robertson records “Arkansas Traveler” One of the first country music artists to make a recording 1922

Gene Autry “Riders in the Sky” 1949

Elvis Presley “Blue Moon of Kentucky”  1954

Johnny Cash “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” 1958

Dolly Parton “Islands in the Stream”

Garth Brooks “Friends in Low Places”

Jason Aldean “Hicktown”

Sam Hunt “Body Like a Back Road”

“Dolly Parton & the Roots of Country Music.” Special Presentation: Country Timeline (Dolly Parton and Country Music): Dolly Parton and the Roots of Country Music (Performing Arts Encyclopedia, The Library of Congress), memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/dollyparton/dollyparton-countrytimeline.html.

Flippo, Chet. “Country & Western: Some New-Fangled Ideas.” American Libraries, vol. 5, no. 4, 1974, pp. 185–189. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25619448.

Malone, Bill C. Singing cowboys and musical mountaineers: southern culture and the roots of country music. University of Georgia Press, 2003.

Peterson, Richard A., and Paul Di Maggio. “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces, vol. 53, no. 3, 1975, pp. 497–506. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2576592

Tahmahkera, Dustin. “‘An Indian in a White Man’s Camp’: Johnny Cash’s Indian Country Music.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, 2011, pp. 591–617. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41237568.

Tichi, Cecelia. “Consider the Alternative: Alt-Country Musicians Transcend Country Music Stereotypes.” The Women’s Review of Books, vol. 18, no. 3, 2000, pp. 14–15. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4023646.

Wilgus, D. K. “Country-Western Music and the Urban Hillbilly.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 83, no. 328, 1970, pp. 157–179. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/539105.