Country music has produced two of the top selling solo artists of all time. Elvis Presley, who was known early on as “the Hillbilly Cat” and was a regular on the radio program Louisiana Hayride,went on to become a defining figure in the emergence of rock and roll. Contemporary musician Garth Brooks, with 128 million albums sold, is the top-domestic-selling solo U.S. artist in U.S. history.
While album sales of most musical genres have declined since about 2005, country music experienced one of its best years in 2000, when, during the first six months, U.S. sales of country albums increased by 17.7 percent to 36 million. Moreover, country music listening nationwide has remained steady for almost a decade, reaching 77.3 million adults every week, according to the radio-ratings agency Arbitron, Inc.
The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s when the earlier term hillbilly music came to be seen as denigrating. Country music was widely embraced in the 1970s, while country and Western has declined in use since that time, except in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where it is still commonly used.However, in the Southwestern United States a different mix of ethnic groups created the music that became the Western music of the term country and Western. The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres.
Early history Country music
Immigrants to the Maritime Provinces and Southern Appalachian Mountains of North America brought the music and instruments of the Old World along with them for nearly 300 years. They brought some of their most important valuables with them, and to most of them this was an instrument: “Early Scottish settlers enjoyed the fiddle because it could be played to sound sad and mournful or bright and bouncy”The Irish fiddle, the German derived dulcimer, the Italian mandolin, the Spanish guitar, and the West African banjo were the most common musical instruments. The interactions among musicians from different ethnic groups produced music unique to this region of North America. Appalachian string bands of the early twentieth century primarily consisted of the fiddle, guitar, and banjo.This early country music along with early recorded country music is often referred to as old-time music.
According to Bill Malone in Country Music U.S.A, country music was “introduced to the world as a southern phenomenon."In the South, folk music was a combination of cultural strains, combining musical traditions of a variety of ethnic groups in the region. For example, some instrumental pieces from Anglo-Celtic immigrants were the basis of folk songs and ballads that form what is now known as old time music, from which country music descended. It is commonly thought that British and Irish folk music influenced the development of old time music. British and Irish arrivals to the Southern U.S. included immigrants from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England.
Often, when many people think or hear country music, they think of it as a creation of European-Americans. However, a great deal of style—and of course, the banjo, a major instrument in most early American folk songs—came from African Americans. One of the reasons country music was created by African-Americans, as well as European-Americans, is because blacks and whites in rural communities in the south often worked and played together, just as recollected by DeFord Bailey in the PBS documentary, DeFord Bailey: A Legend Lost.
Throughout the 19th century, several immigrant groups from Europe, most notably from Ireland, Germany, Spain, and Italy moved to Texas. These groups interacted with Mexican and Native American, and U.S. communities that were already established in Texas. As a result of this cohabitation and extended contact, Texas has developed unique cultural traits that are rooted in the culture of all of its founding communities.
