For a thing which is now considered to be such a vital part of American culture, country music has an interesting history with regard to the concept of being \"mainstream.\" At its beginning, commercial country music was thought nationally marketable precisely because of its regional specificity. Some of the best early country music worked because it was so distinctive.
The blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers and the mountain music of the Carter Family didn't resemble anybody else. These performers and the larger musical contexts that surrounded them were predicated on a kind of difference, an identity that was defined in opposition to another thing.
The genre tag \"country\" comes from the Billboard chart designation of \"country & western,\" a kind of catch-all meant to somehow differentiate music coming from a more urban, citified sound-to acknowledge a stylistic in addition to geographic and cultural difference between the East (particularly the music publishing mainstays of Tin Pan Alley in New York) and also the rural South and West. Before \"country,\" the music was called \"old familiar\" or \"hillbilly,\" both of which get at a similar quality that is essential to country music. \"Old familiar\" ties the music to a sense of the past, of a culture established on tradition instead of on hit records.
And \"hillbilly\" likewise tags the music as homespun and decidedly rural in way that sets it apart from the sound of urban, industrial America.
Happily, country music always had its rogues, and followers have maintained their identification with outsiders. In the 1940s, Hank Williams, a brilliant songwriter and serious alcoholic, came to personify the harsh and lean honky-tonk style (named for working-class, edge-of-town type Texas juke joints) that had been gaining notice with its bouncing rhythms and electric guitar leads. Williams cut just 66 songs under his own name, 37 which you will find that became hits. His spare, emotional style, troubled personal life, and mysterious drink and drug-related death at age 29 have combined over time to make him probably the most iconic figure in all of country music. Williams is country music similarly that Kurt Cobain is 1990s grunge and for similar reasons.
The blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers and the mountain music of the Carter Family didn't resemble anybody else. These performers and the larger musical contexts that surrounded them were predicated on a kind of difference, an identity that was defined in opposition to another thing.
The genre tag \"country\" comes from the Billboard chart designation of \"country & western,\" a kind of catch-all meant to somehow differentiate music coming from a more urban, citified sound-to acknowledge a stylistic in addition to geographic and cultural difference between the East (particularly the music publishing mainstays of Tin Pan Alley in New York) and also the rural South and West. Before \"country,\" the music was called \"old familiar\" or \"hillbilly,\" both of which get at a similar quality that is essential to country music. \"Old familiar\" ties the music to a sense of the past, of a culture established on tradition instead of on hit records.
And \"hillbilly\" likewise tags the music as homespun and decidedly rural in way that sets it apart from the sound of urban, industrial America.
Happily, country music always had its rogues, and followers have maintained their identification with outsiders. In the 1940s, Hank Williams, a brilliant songwriter and serious alcoholic, came to personify the harsh and lean honky-tonk style (named for working-class, edge-of-town type Texas juke joints) that had been gaining notice with its bouncing rhythms and electric guitar leads. Williams cut just 66 songs under his own name, 37 which you will find that became hits. His spare, emotional style, troubled personal life, and mysterious drink and drug-related death at age 29 have combined over time to make him probably the most iconic figure in all of country music. Williams is country music similarly that Kurt Cobain is 1990s grunge and for similar reasons.
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