Country music, one of the most popular musical forms in America, defies definition. It began as a means of expressing sentiments and changes that occurred among the white population living in rural regions of the west and south of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
According to the famous country music historian Bill Malone, the folk musical form was commercialized and city-oriented, resulting in a huge empire of entertainment that spanned regional, social, cultural boundaries.
Stylistically, country music includes subgenres: western, western swing, polka, folk, dixieland and blues, yodel, pop vocals. In modern times, the term is used to describe many styles and subgenres.
Music is performed mainly on stringed instruments: banjo, fiddle, mandolin, acoustic and electric guitar. harmonica is also used.
At first it was called simply “folk music” (hillbilly music).
The term "country music" (rural) began to be used, starting in the 1940s, to separate it from the parallel developing folk music with the same roots - songs and ballads of Anglo-Celtic immigrants. Despite the fact that the south and north of America had the same external influences, completely different
musical directions developed in the two regions
. In the south, people settled in the Appalachian mountains and remote lowlands, while maintaining their isolation of folk traditions. Deficiencies in education, entertainment, and lack of connections with other areas were compensated by music, singing, and dancing. But they sang songs not only those brought from their historical homeland. Based on their own experience, they created new songs in country style, the main topics for which were real events and idealized representations: hard work, Protestant motifs, rural romanticism, love, the dream of wonderful 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 Cajuns (in southern Louisiana).
By the 1920s, “southern music” was still unknown to the rest of the world, despite the fact that it was developing rapidly.
Only thanks to the invention of radio isolation was broken, and it sounded throughout the country. Country music performers performed familiar songs telling about simple and pleasant things. The first radio station to broadcast Southern Songs in 1922 was located in Georgia. The first official country song is The Little Old Log Cabin in the lane, written in 1871 and recorded by Fiddin John Carson on a record in 1924.
But most historians indicate 1927 when the future star Jimmy Rogers first appeared on the radio.
In the 1930s, when America experienced hard times due to the Great Depression and the terrible dust storms called the “Dust Cauldron”, country music symbolized for people the dream of the times of the old Wild West, of romance, freedom.