Country

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Country music has been euphemistically called ‘white man’s blues’ or ‘the poetry of the common man’. While both descriptions have elements of truth, neither is quite accurate. It is, in fact, a broad, nebulous, over-reaching category with no exact boundaries or parameters. Over the decades country music has grown to encompass a greatly varied assortment of music styles and sub-styles. These include everything from the keening old-time hillbilly music of Roy ...

Source: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, general editor Paul Du Noyer
1137 Words Read More

The roots of country music are entwined with the roots of America itself. What we call ‘country music’ today was planted some 300 years ago by the earliest European explorers of the New World. Adventurers and exiles, religious dissenters and slave traders, farmers, merchants, freemen and women, indentured workers, slaves, criminals and members of native tribes that had lived there for eons, but were to suffer decimation – all sowed ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
361 Words Read More

In the nineteenth century, country music belonged to fireside and family, to the frontier town and the backwoods hamlet. Four decades into the twentieth, it was utterly transformed, driven headlong into the new world of the new century. First, fiddlers’ conventions and other public events provided a context of competition and offered the musician the chance of going professional. Then radio and records carried the notes of old-time songs and ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
332 Words Read More

When Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family became country music’s first superstars in 1927, their audience was the farmers, miners, wives and other blue-collar workers of the rural South. It was an audience that left school early for a life of hard work in isolated communities. When those men and women gathered at a tavern or schoolroom on a Saturday night, they wanted their music strong and straightforward. Thanks to the ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
353 Words Read More

It is ironic that western music – be it cowboy vocal balladry or ranch-house dance fiddling – began seriously to engage the imagination of the American public as the real West slipped further and further into the past and the country became increasingly urbanized and sophisticated. This capturing of the public imagination was perhaps inevitable, too, not only because of the nostalgia for what was lost – and sometimes never was ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
318 Words Read More

Major changes occurred in country music during the 1970s and 1980s, and country icons came and went as the music escaped from the stereotypical image of the 1960s, when it had been gingham dresses for the ladies and rhinestone suits for the men. Now country music had a new face: Dolly Parton’s extravagant dress sense and the shaggy-haired Outlaw acts, coupled with Loretta Lynn, whose songs spoke of everyday life, ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
312 Words Read More

Before the Second World War, it was possible to live in certain areas of the USA in almost complete isolation. In the time of The Carter Family, many rural residents never travelled more than 80 km (50 miles) from their birthplace. But that began to change. The First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War took young men out of their small towns and sent them around the ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
327 Words Read More

After the 1960s heyday of the cultured Nashville sound, country music was all but swept aside. It had survived the lasting effect of 1950s rock – rock’n’roll and traditional old-timey music and bluegrass, especially – but it was now the turn of a musical hybrid, country rock, to lead the way for almost a decade. Country rock was originally played by bands boasting the look of rock acts and determined to ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
310 Words Read More

During the 1940s and 1950s country music coalesced from various and disparate sub-styles of regional music and emerged as a distinct genre. Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry was central to this newfound sense of identity, as it rose in popularity from an obscure local radio broadcast to a national entertainment institution. For decades, beginning in the 1930s, country music became almost synonymous with the Grand Ole Opry, as its weekly broadcast ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
313 Words Read More

Although one tends to think of Nashville as the primary source for country music, many other regions contributed to this music’s growth, especially the West Coast, where migrant workers from Oklahoma, Texas and other regions of the Southwest played a vital role in putting California on the country-music map. With Los Angeles as its focal point, the Golden State’s country-music scene blossomed. This was due to a number of factors: the ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
313 Words Read More

Hank Williams and George Jones would have found the whole notion of alt-country unfathomable. Why would anyone seek an alternative to bestselling country records? For these sons of dire southern poverty, the whole point of making country records was to sell as many as possible and maybe catch hold of the dignity and comfort that a middle-class life might afford. In fact, it was the hunger for such success that ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
362 Words Read More

The 1950s was a period of enormous upheaval and social change, as the world slowly recovered from the deprivations of the Second World War. Changes were apparent in every aspect of life, but perhaps the greatest was the rise of the ‘teenager’ as a distinct socio-economic class. For the first time, young people had money in their pockets and a desire to express themselves through their own music and fashion. ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
326 Words Read More

The 1950s and 1960s were milestone decades for country music. It was during these years that the stylistic tensions between traditional and contemporary, rural and urbane, became sharply delineated and the first ideological and aesthetic battle lines between the traditionalists and modernists were drawn in the sand. Out of this tension arose bold innovation and refreshing diversity. The 1950s saw the nearly simultaneous rise of styles as divergent as wild and ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
344 Words Read More

The legend of Sun Records seems to expand and shine brighter with every passing year, as successive generations discover the almost unbelievable array of musical gems that were created at that modest little studio at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis. Sun was the brainchild of one man and it is no exaggeration to say that without his contribution, not just country music but indeed all facets of popular music would have ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
715 Words Read More

Just as sports have their pantheon of greats, the country-music industry established its own Hall Of Fame in 1961 to honour its most influential figures and deepen public understanding and appreciation of the music’s rich heritage and history. A Pantheon Of Country Stars As of 2005, 62 artists and industry leaders – starting with Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933) and songwriter and music publisher Fred Rose, who both were posthumously inducted in 1961– have ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen
546 Words Read More
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An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...

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Classical, Rock, Blues, Jazz, Country and more. Flame Tree has been making encyclopaedias and guides about music for over 20 years. Now Flame Tree Pro brings together a huge canon of carefully curated information on genres, styles, artists and instruments. It's a perfect tool for study, and entertaining too, a great companion to our music books.

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