Country music

Country music, one of the most popular musical forms in America, can not be clearly defined. It began as a means of expressing sentiments and changes that occurred among the white population living in rural areas of the west and south of the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

According to the famous country music historian Bill Malone, the folk musical form was commercialized and focused on the city, resulting in the emergence of a huge entertainment empire that embraced regional, social, cultural boundaries.

Stylistically, country music includes sub-genres: western, western-swing, polka, folk, dixieland and blues, jodl, pop vocals. In modern times, the term is used to describe many styles and sub-genres.

Music is performed mainly on stringed instruments: banjo, violin-fiddle, mandolin, acoustic and electric guitar. A labial accordion is also used.

At first it was called simply "folk music" (hillbilly music).

The term "country music" (rural) began to be used, beginning in the 1940s, to separate it from parallel developing folk music with the same roots - songs and ballads of Anglo-Celtic immigrants. While the south and north of America had the same external influences, in two regions completely different musical directions developed . In the south, people settled in the Appalachian Mountains and remote low-lying areas, keeping in their isolation folk traditions. Disadvantages in the field of education, entertainment, lack of communication with other areas people compensated for by music, singing and dancing. But they sang songs not only those who brought from their historical homeland. Based on their own experience, they created new songs in country style, the main themes for which were real events and idealized representations: hard work, Protestant motives, rural romanticism, love, the dream of beautiful times.

Since the southern and western regions of America are divided into several sub-regions, there is not only one southern style. White musicians were influenced by other cultures, in particular the Negro, Mexican, sub-ethnic group of Kashuns (in the south of Louisiana).

By the 1920s, "southern music" was still unknown to the rest of the world, despite the fact that it was intensively developing.

Only thanks to the invention the radio isolation was broken, and it sounded all over the country. Performers of country music performed with familiar songs, telling about simple and pleasant things. The first radio station, which broadcast "southern songs" in 1922, was located in Georgia. The first official song in the country style is "The little old log cabin in the lane", written in 1871 and recorded by Fiddin John Carson on a plate in 1924.

But most historians indicate 1927, when the future star Jimmy Rogers first appeared on the radio.

In the 1930s, when America was having a hard time because of the Great Depression and the terrible dust storms called "Dusty Cauldron", country music symbolized for people the dream of the times of the old Wild West, about romance, freedom.