The History of Country Music :: essays research papers

Country music was brought over by the first European settlers. In medieval times, storytelling was a tradition that allowed history to be enter when few were able to read and write. When the first British settlers came to America, they brought this tradition with them, on with songs that they had learned in Europe. The people who settled the Appalachian Mountains and the West did not have an easy life and their music gave them an outlet to express their hardships.When unsophisticated music bean in America, there were no professional musicians. The ordinary musician sang only to entertain himself, his family, or at local events. At first, most country music was sung unaided or played on a l unrivalled fiddle or banjo. At the turn of the century, Sears, Roebuck & Co. began advertising affordable guitars in its nationally available catalogs, as well as sheet music and songbooks. The mandolin also became available and in short string bands were being formed with different combinati ons of instruments. As vaudeville grew in the early 1900s, it was mainly composed of northern performers. However, their example showed southern performers that one could make music playing in public. This realization spawned the first multiplication of hillbilly performers. The term hillbilly was popularized in the 1920s after a musician by the squall of Al Hopkins. He told his producer to name his band whatever he liked because they were just a ball of hillbillys from North Carolina and Virginia. As the popularity of the phonograph grew, people across the countrybegan to buy their through the mail. Originally, the music consisted mainly of classical singers and orchestral agreements of stilted songs. One day in 1922 two Texan fiddlers named Alexander Campbell Eck Robertson and total heat Gilliland traveled from Atlanta to New York City to get their music recorded.