III.

Folk Music Origins

The roots of country music lie in the folk music that English, Irish, and Scottish settlers brought to the Appalachian Mountain region of the South in the 18th and 19th centuries. English ballads and Irish reels in particular had a major early influence. Such music was performed from colonial times in both religious and social contexts, including church services, weddings, and barn dances. In the early 1920s the first country recordings appeared, introducing the music of string bands. The string-band repertoire consisted mostly of traditional folk and gospel music and appealed mainly to people in the rural Southeast. During the 1920s the audience for this so-called hillbilly music expanded with the spread of small-town radio stations. With the wider distribution of music over radio, new regional styles, such as Louisiana’s cajun music, were incorporated into the folk and gospel core of country.

Important early country music artists included the Carter Family, a trio from rural Virginia, and the blues-oriented singer and songwriter Jimmie Rodgers, from Mississippi. From the late 1920s to the early 1940s the Carter family recorded old folk ballads, incorporating such instruments as the fiddle, banjo, and autoharp. Whereas the vocals in early folk and hillbilly music were usually of secondary importance compared with the instrumentals, the Carter trio used their instruments to provide a musical accompaniment that never took precedence over the simple harmonies of their vocal work. Rodgers, who recorded from 1927 to 1933, brought both folk and blues elements to country music through sentimental ballads and his so-called blue yodels, which introduced yodeling to a mainstream audience. Many credit the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers as the creators of commercial country music. Since the 1930s country and folk styles have continued to influence one another. Other major figures of folk-country music include singer and fiddle player Roy Acuff in the 1940s and 1950s, singer Johnny Cash from the 1960s into the 1990s, and country artists Lyle Lovett, the Judds, and Mary Chapin Carpenter in the 1980s and 1990s.