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• Personalities
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

(Fiddle, banjo, vocals, 1885–1960) An old-time fiddler and comic singer from Dacula, Georgia, Tanner gave his name to the most famous of old-time string bands, The Skillet Lickers, though his medicine-show routines were regarded as an embarrassment by younger members of the band, which included fiddler Clayton McMichen (1900–70), who was determined to ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

(Vocals, harmonica, guitar, autoharp, 1893–1968) Stoneman might be considered the first fully professional country artist. He saw the music’s potential and was involved in it from the 1920s to the 1960s, spanning music technology from the cylinder recording to the stereo LP. In the 1920s and 1930s, singing and playing harmonica, guitar and autoharp ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

(Vocals, guitar, 1894–1946) Much of the success of The Skillet Lickers, the north Georgia string band led by Gid Tanner, was due to the warm, friendly singing of the blind Riley Puckett, who also anchored them with eccentric single-note guitar runs dictated by his own sense of time and melody. In 1924, he and ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

Uncle Dave Macon (1870–1952) was the first star of country music. Other artists got on disc first: men like Eck Robertson, Henry Whitter, Fiddlin’ John Carson, Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett. Uncle Dave didn’t enter a recording studio until July 1924 – whereupon he proved to be quite productive – but he had another route to the affections ...

• Styles & Forms
• Country
• Early & Old-Time Country

There is no distinct boundary line between the early​ and old-time country era, when the music was still relatively unshaped by the American mainstream, and the modern age, when country music’s popularity and ubiquity have made it very much a part of the mass culture. But it was in the 1920s, due to the emerging radio and ...

• Styles & Forms
• Folk
• Neo-Traditional Folk

In 1996, the Californian singer Gillian Welch released her debut album, Revival. Her unassuming, folksy songs and plaintive, old-time singing could have come straight out of the Appalachians at any time in the last hundred years. With guitarist David Rawlings, Welch came to pinpoint and define a new style of folk music: the neo-traditional performer. Welch personified ...

• Styles & Forms
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

‘The fiddle and guitar craze is sweeping northward!’ ran Columbia Records’ ad in Talking Machine World on 15 June 1924. ‘Columbia leads with records of old-fashioned southern songs and dances. [Our] novel fiddle and guitar records, by Tanner and Puckett, won instant and widespread popularity with their tuneful harmony and sprightliness… The records of these quaint musicians which ...

• Styles & Forms
• Country
• Roots of Country

Country music is identified with the American South and West, but its roots were established on the Atlantic seaboard, from Cape Breton to New England, then filtered into the lower-central USA through the 2,400-km 1,500-mile) Appalachian mountain range. Eventually it proliferated everywhere. And if such a reach seems so vast as to defy a single culture ...

• Styles & Forms
• Folk
• Traditional Folk

Traditional is the term given to folk music so old its origins have been long forgotten. Different songs are often performed to the same tunes and sometimes the same ballad is played with various tunes. Songs with the same story pop up on both sides of the atlantic with different treatments, after being transported by emigrants and adapted through the ...