Western Music

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Be ready to:

- Classify and analyze country music as something that extends past typical definitions of white, southern music, to something that blends African-American as well as Euro-American and Hispanic-American, rural and urban, the Appalachian Mountains, and the American West.
- Examine the multiple definitions of country music, from a traditional "twangy" mountain repertoire of old world to American folk songs, ballads, and gospel music, event songs, the blues, fiddle tunes, and popular vaudeville and ragtime songs and music.
- Examine the origins of country music, from the 19th century use of fiddles, guitars, banjos, and mandolins in the music of Euro-American (often Irish) and African-American performers to its popularity in the 1920s and 30s, when radio and the first audio recordings developed and Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family were discovered by the embryonic music industry.
- Analyze the impact of country music in hillbilly southern culture, as well as its use in western films, honky tonk bars (jazz and western swing), mid-century blue grass, and Nashville.
- Analyze what to listen for in country music, including rhythm, form, harmony, timbre, and texture.
- Examine country counter-culture, through analyses of pop singers like Ann Murray, John Denver, and Olivia Newton-John, rockers such as Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds, The Band, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Buck Owens.
- Examine the rise of country in the 1990s when it became America's most popular music, according to a National Endowment for the Arts survey.

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References

Western Swing

Count Basie

Film cowboys weren´t the only country musicians to swing with the new sounds of jazz. The honky-tonk bars in Texas that filled nightly with people interested in "celebration and sin" brought to their rural dance floors rhythms found in the urban swing music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Early country star Jimmie Rogers had recorded with the young Louis Armstrong and routinely used a swing style in his music. In the 1930s, The Light Crust Doughboys, with singer Milton Brown and fiddler Bob Wills, borrowed ideas from the urban performers and began a new kind of country music that included string bands, jazz rhythms, danceable blues styles, pop song crooners, and eventually horns and the twangy electronic steel guitar.

Composer:

"black and Tan Fantasy"

Both Wills and Rogers soon started their own bands and developed even larger audiences as they combined most of America´s popular musics into their performances. Wills developed the improvisational skills and abilities of his Texas Playboys, encouraging country musicians to be as virtuosic as musicians in any other popular music. Other great honky-tonk bands of the day included those of Ernest Tubb and Ted Daffan, who wrote the cry-in-your-beer classic "Born to Lose" in 1940. Honky-tonk and western swing musicians of the 40s and into today include such greats as Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Lefty Frizzell, George Strait, Merle Haggard, Toby Keith, and Lyle Lovett, and bands like Asleep at the Wheel and The Dixie Chicks.

Kitty Wells

♫ New San Antonio Rose
Bob Wills

♫ Born to Lose
Ted Daffan's Texans

"Country music is still your grandpa's music, but it's also your daughter's music. It's getting bigger and better all the time and I'm glad to be a part of it. "

-Shania Twain

"If twang isn't what I do, I don't know what is."

-George Strait

Jimmie Rodgers is known as the "Father of Country Music."

Country Music Hall of Fame