(Vocals, guitar, 1913–63) A talented Ohio-born singer and flat-top-style guitarist, Lloyd Copas was a regular performer on the Grand Ole Opry from 1944 until his death in the same plane crash that killed Patsy Cline. Copas is best known for honky-tonk hits like ‘Filipino Baby’ and ‘Tragic Romance’. Styles & Forms | War Years | Country Personalities | ...
The myths, legends and lore of the Wild West, for better or worse, have done much to shape the American character. They have given rise to the nation’s lingering infatuation with guns, outlaws, the rugged ethos of self-reliance, individualism and a world with simplistic definitions. These themes, usually portrayed in an earnest and nostalgic ...
When Vassar Clements formed a band called Hillbilly Jazz in 1975, Bill Monroe’s former fiddler pulled the cover off the hidden connection between country music and jazz. The two genres had more in common than most people thought. After all, Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Louis Armstrong early in their careers; jazz legend Charlie Christian debuted on Bob Wills’ radio ...
Almost no Texan musicians have ever herded cattle, but most like to think of themselves as cowboys nonetheless. They imagine themselves pulling out an acoustic guitar after dinner and singing a song about the adventures and frustrations they have known. And not just any old song – it has to be one they wrote and it has to be more ...
If you look for country music’s Big Bang, there is nothing more momentous than Bristol, 1927. Within four summer days, two stars appeared that would change the cosmology of country – remap the sky. And it all happened in a disused office building in a quiet mountain town perched on the state line between Virginia and Tennessee. Why ...
Country music today retains little of the regional identity that characterized it in its early days. There are pockets of resistance to this homogeneity and to the hegemony of Nashville – a honky-tonk dance circuit and a fiercely independent singer-songwriter tradition in Texas, for example – but overall the scene is one of major stars playing huge venues. The middle ...
The singing cowboys did not have the monopoly on country music on the silver screen, although it was their breed that first caught Hollywood’s attention. By the time the 1940s rolled around, several of Nashville’s top stars found that they could expand their careers by bringing their talents to the vast new audiences. Singing Stars In the earlier decade ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
It was Louis Armstrong (or Leadbelly, depending on whom you believe) who came up with the famous final word on the definition of folk music: ‘It’s ALL folk music … I ain’t never heard no horse sing.…’ The quote has been repeated ad nauseam throughout the years, but it has not prevented strenuous debate about the meaning of ...
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 ...
1900–90 American composer Born in Brooklyn of Russian Jewish parents (his surname is an immigration officer’s mishearing of the family name, Kaplan), Copland became the archetypal composer of the American West, his style much imitated by the writers of Hollywood film scores. Trained in Paris by Nadia Boulanger, he was strongly influenced by Stravinsky and began using jazz ...
Alabama, who appropriately came from Fort Payne, in Alabama, emerged into the spotlight in 1980, when ‘Tennessee River’ topped the Billboard country charts. Three group members – Randy Owen (guitar, lead vocals, b. 1949), Teddy Gentry (bass, vocals, b. 1952) and Jeff Cook (keyboards, fiddle, vocals, b. 1949) – were ...
(Vocals, b. 1945) Arguably one of Canada’s finest vocal exports, over 25 of Murray’s 50-plus country hits between 1970 and 1991 crossed over to the pop chart. Ten country No. 1s in that period curiously did not include her two million-selling pop chart-toppers – ‘Snowbird’ (1970) and ‘You Needed Me’ (1978). Apart from these, Murray delivered 1980’s ‘Could ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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