The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #95312 Message #1854307
Posted By: JohnInKansas
09-Oct-06 - 03:46 PM
Thread Name: What happened to Country Music?
Subject: RE: What happened to Country Music?
My own earliest recollections from the 1940s is that there were two kinds of music: Cowboy and Hillbilly. Mostly, Cowboy music was Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers, and a few similar, and was in the movies. Hillbilly was 'bout anything else that was on the radio.
Cowboy songs were all about horses, cows, sagebrush, sunsets, and being happy about lonesome.
Hillbilly songs were mostly about bein' drunk, chasin' women, and being broke, and bein' sad about bein' lonesome.
Toward the late part of the 40s, much of the hillbilly got called honky-tonk music, to separate it from the actual "hill country" music which later came to be called "Old-Time" and/or to some extent "1Folk."
Most of the lineage of artists people up above in this thread have called old-time Country got started at about the time that "hillbilly" became "honkytonk" in the minds of people in my part of the country.
The term "Western" came onto the scene at about the same time also, although for at least a time about the only one we knew of using the term was perhaps Bob Wills with his "Western Swing" band. Some of the recording companies sort of pushed the "Western" name, but it mostly splintered into a bunch of sub-types and was never used much - in my region at least.
Sometime in the early to mid 50s the "1Folk" stuff started to appear, but so far as most people could tell the main defining characteristic was it meant you had a guitar and could sing a little, but you couldn't afford a backup band. Instead of feeling bad about being lonesome, you just felt bad about everything.
Of course, as Mike Cross says, "that's where all that incest and inbreedin' comes from" so there has always been a lot of trading and mixing between styles and categories, and putting "labels" on them is mostly for the convenience of the record shops 'cause they ain't got enough bins to keep them all separate.
1 Neither of these usages of "Folk" has anything to do with the current concept(?) of "tradional and/or historically significant music reflecting the culture of an ancestral lineage."
Although it perhaps started with the Grand Ol' Opry, there has been a transition from music that most anyone could sing to "big entertainment" that's meant for numbnut listeners. Bluegrass came on the scene as a response to the public demand for "superstar performers" who were trained athletes we could hire to do things that you should be warned: "don't try to do this at home." A few do try, and some are injured - but it's the nature of the few lunatics to want to test themselves.
I don't know when the whole music busines turned to shit; but one can tell it's happened from the complete absence of an input jack (mic or audio) on the great majority of "music players" being sold today. In fact, for at least the last ten years or so, it's not assured that your new computer will have an input jack of any kind, although it probably will be called "multimedia" something or other.
So shut up and buy the DVD. (CDs are dead, since we demand ACTION now.)
John