As I said in the introduction, country music has its roots all the way back in the 1920s, which makes it almost one hundred years old as a genre. That’s impressive. Most genres from that far back, if they even survive today, will be relegated to “niche” or at least specialised areas, such as folk and traditional, both of which, while they do occasionally break out and cross some genre lines and occasionally bother the charts, tend to be fairly rigidly adored by just the fans of those genres. Of course, nothing is that straightforward, and a punk, pop or hip-hop fan could very well have some folk or trad in his or her collection (particularly the former, with the popular crossover into folk and Celtic punk) but there’s generally not the broad appeal among those genres that there is within country.
There’s a saying - don’t know where it came from; could be a song. I know I heard it first on
South Park - “I’m a little bit country”, and it’s true of most of us, to some extent. Certainly, there will be those who are huge, serious country fans, who know all the bands, the artists and can all but quote you the history of this music. They don’t have to be older people (though I would imagine most of them are), but those who are that dedicated to country seem to me to be more or less disinterested in other genres. A country fan listens to country, and that’s it. They’re very loyal to their music, and some of that I suppose comes from its being identified with and linked with the places they know: there are, I believe, places in rural America where all you can hear is country.
If you had slapped down a hundred Euro and bet me I couldn’t name the birthplace of country music, I would have snatched up that money and grinned “Easy. Nashville, of course!” And a moment later I would have been regretting my overconfidence bordering on arrogance, and handing back that money along with some of my own, because although this sounds as simple a question as declaring that the blues began in the Mississippi Delta or that the first progressive rock explosion was in England, it’s completely wrong. Right state, wrong city, apparently.
The official birthplace of country music is Bristol, Tennessee, where the famous Bristol Sessions were held, which made stars of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in 1927, as Victor Talking Machine Company executive Ralph Peer, of whom we will hear much more later, travelled across the country in search of new stars to record. Incidentally, Peer was the one who invented the idea of artists being paid royalties for their songs, so I guess if you’re an illegal downloader or hate the record companies for ripping you off, he’s the man to blame. I wouldn’t recommend dancing on his grave though, as I expect it’s a pretty revered site, given that he appears to be essentially the man who invented or discovered, or at least brought to the masses, country music.
Of course, we should not forget the original progenitor of country music, hillbilly music, nor its great-grandpappy, Appalachian folk music. The latter goes back as far as the seventeenth century, when settlers from England, Ireland and Scotland arrived in the Appalachia region of the USA, which covers an area from southern New York to northern Georgia and Alabama. Bringing with them their traditional songs and ballads, they influenced a new style of music in the 1920s which became known as hillbilly music. Something of a derogatory term these days, country music was all known as hillbilly music up until about the 1950s, and used primarily instruments such as banjos, fiddles and accordions in mostly lively, dancy type songs with relatively simple lyrical matter - simple music, you might say, for and from simple folks. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.
Interesting side note: hillbilly music that was infused with the traditional sound of African America and subsumed into pop music was called… rockabilly. And to some extent, that’s still around today.
With the formation of the Country Music Association in 1958, hillbilly music was renamed country, or sometimes country and western, and the only real styles still referred to, occasionally, as hillbilly these days are bluegrass and old-time music.
But back to our friend Mr. Peer, the possible godfather of country music, or at least its midwife. Offering fifty dollars a day to anyone who would turn up to his recording sessions and play, he eventually recorded a total of nineteen different artists singing over seventy songs over the course of two weeks in Bristol. The two major stars to emerge from these sessions were the aforementioned Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, and country (or as it was still to be called for some time, hillbilly) music was introduced to America. It’s never been quite the same since.