Evolution Of Country Music

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The History Of County Music Genre By: Taylor Shaw Music Appreciation Professor Locke September 10, 2012 When people hear country music, they think of “Rednecks” or “Hillbillies” out on the country side singing songs about losing their wife, dog, best friend or any other sad subject. This is not true and it showed by becoming one of the most popular music forms of the 20th century. Country music is one of the best-selling genres after rock and pop. Country music was brought over by the first European settlers. In medieval times, storytelling was a tradition that allowed history to be recorded when few were able to read and write. When the first British settlers came to America, they brought this tradition with them, along with…show more content…
Peer's field recording work was complemented by the rise of the radio and the hugely successful radio "barn dance" programs, of which Nashville's Grand Ole Opry is the most famous. As America pitched into the Great Depression in the early '30s, radio sustained the still-young country music industry and strengthening signals carried the barn dance programs to listeners and fans across the country. The '40s, then, proved to be a pivotal period in shaping the future of the music and the business for decades to follow. Power and profits shifted to Nashville, already home of the Opry, with the founding of country music's great publishing company, Acuff-Rose, in 1942. A country music establishment of sorts, a stable of local talent, and even a fledgling style that would become the heralded "Nashville Sound" began to coalesce in the town. Bluegrass came into its own, and country's greatest icon, the doomed legend Hank Williams, arrived in Nashville in those years.By 1939, the Grand Ole Opry had become the most popular and important music show on the radio. Hiram King "Hank" Williams is born in Olive, Alabama. Hank Williams will become country music's greatest icon and most imitated performer. The four-and-a-half hour program was condensed into three hours. The people on the Opry were not paid very well if at all. Prior to 1938, the show's management preferred just instrumentalists to perform…show more content…
Feiler, Bruce. "Gone Country." The Presence of Others. Eds. Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz. Boston: St. Martin's, 2000. 422-432. 2. Marks, John. "Breaking a Color Line, Song by Song." U.S. News Online. 12 April 1999.

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