John and Alan Lomax identified the folk origins of country music in the 1920s and 1930s as vernacular hillbilly music recorded between 1924 and 1941, since the early musicians learned songs orally from family and friends. Commercial aspects of country music reflect a trend from 1880 to 1910 when Americans discovered nostalgia for the “simpler lives” of frontier folk like mountaineers and cowboys. “Hillbilly,” the term used for rural, mountain-dwelling Southerners living in isolation from metropolitan areas, appeared in print as early as 1900. Bluegrass music dates back to eighteenth-century Anglo-American traditions that were popularized from the mid-1800s to late 1880s, in which instrumentalists demonstrated virtuosity with breakdown improvisations. Bluegrass ballads, likened to gothic novels, provide folk narratives of the heartbreak, hardships, poverty, and personal failures found in ordinary lives in Appalachia, such as “The Nine-Pound Hammer,” which chronicled the life of John Henry. Bluegrass ultimately was derived from earlier music, including folk songs and the music of Appalachia, as well as ballads and dances carried to America by English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants.
Minstrel shows, vaudeville, medicine shows, ragtime, sentimental balladry, and gospel music all shaped country music over time. Songwriters for minstrel shows, including Stephen Foster, Daniel D. Emmett, B. R. Hanby, and Sam DeVere, set popular melody styles that inspired country music artists. The minstrel band, consisting of a fiddle, banjo, and light percussion-like tambourines, was the archetypal Southern band that was easily transportable for the internal migrations that carried country music to broader audiences.
Radio fanned interest in rustic country music across the United States. As popular music became more customized to urban audiences, radio station WSM in Nashville filled the void with a show called WSM Barn Dance that evolved into the Grand Ole Opry in late 1925. The Carter Family performed traditional American folk music from a variety of sources between 1927 and 1956, and this helped to popularize and standardize country and bluegrass music. Costumed in refined late-Victorian-era attire, this family group countered stereotypes of country music as rustic hillbilly music while creating a new style and sound for country songs. Maybelle Carter (1909–1978) used a distinctive and innovative picking style for the guitar that emphasized the bass strings and created a steady rhythm that became a hallmark for the group.
Country music as an industry genre dates back to recording sessions made in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927. In the post–World War II years, radio stations played bluegrass music with country western music. The Ozarks (lying across four states: Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas) became the epicenter for folk music during the 1930s when the National Folk Festival brought regional music to broader audiences. The ethnic core of Ozark music was predominantly white Anglo-Saxon music that migrated from the Appalachians as early as the 1820s, along with French music; into this mix were added traditions from Catholic and Lutheran German communities, as well as from transplanted Cherokees forced westward. Each group brought distinctive traits to the hill country.
Folklorist Archie Green (1917–2009), who specialized in the folklore of workers, wrote in 1965 about the vernacular songs of early country music in an article for the Journal of American Folklore called “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” describing hillbilly music as a hybrid of folk elements that were adopted into popular music during the 1920s. Green asserted that country music became a polite synonym for hillbilly music after its narrative content became more associated with bums and prison inmates rather than mountain folk who might be poor but lived with dignity. By 1930, the country music community dropped the derisive term “hillbilly” to demonstrate a distinct family-oriented culture. The Dustbowl brought Okies with their music traditions further westward to Southern California where they introduced plain-folks Americanism to urban audiences. After World War II, country music once again became another “rustic” entertainment for upwardly mobile veterans who attended “hootenannies” on college campuses.
Square Dancing
Rooted in early European folk dances—notably the French quadrille and cotillion, as well as English country dancing—square dancing developed into its uniquely American form partly through the addition of the function of the “caller,” the master of ceremonies at a square dance who calls out the moves the dancers are to make. The dancers were freed of the need to memorize complex sets of movements through this innovation, which also added the opportunity for each caller to add an idiosyncratic blend of personality and humor to every square dance. Made up of sets of four couples, these American dances literally form squares, rather than the lines many of their European counterparts do. Associated by many Americans with rural communities and county fairs, especially those in Appalachia, the Midwest, and parts of the South, square dancing is in fact popular in many cities and suburbs as well, and it has been the archetypal American folk dance for generations.
C. Fee
Meredith Eliassen
See also Ballad; John Henry; Lomax, Alan; Minstrel Shows
Further Reading
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. 2012. The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ellison. Curtis W. 1995. Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
La Chapelle, Peter. 2007. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax. 1934. American Ballads and Folksongs. New York: Macmillan.
Petrusich, Amanda. 2008. It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music. New York: Faber and Faber.