country, then and now(ish)

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This week in The History of Rock & Roll we are learning about three types of music from the beginning of recording to 1955:  mainstream pop, country & western, and rhythm & blues.

I really liked a bunch of the mainstream pop.

Yesterday I listened to the lecture on country & western (and learned those two were two separate categories, until WWII).

Everything was much more regional in the beginning of the 20th century.  Essentially no cross-fertilization across regions.  Communication across any distance was so difficult that there wasn't much of it, compared to now.

(Digression:  this  is one of those things that makes perfect sense, but I never really thought about it.  The difficulty of communication meant that you were only aware of what was happening near to you.  In Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, we learned Tobler's First Law -- "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things."

In a time when communication across space becomes increasingly impossible as the distance increases, how much more true that is!  EVERYTHING is about what is next-door to you.  What happens several states away might as well not happen at all, because you'll probably never know.........  Especially with the kind of thing that needn't be synchronized to try to keep a country together, like music, or food...............

End of Digression)


The "country" region was Appalachian and deep south.  (The "western" region was Texas and Oklahoma, and California.  Which, now that I think about it, doesn't make sense as a "region" the way we've been talking about regions! -- California is rather far away from OK and TX!!!  Hmmmmm......)


Anyway.   Country music from the beginning of recording sounded like this:



We were told Jimmie Rogers was the first really big country star. 

Our prof told us Lynyrd Skynyrd covered that same "T for Texas" song..........



I have never listened to Lynryd Skynyrd, ever (before today).  I was interested to find that I could identify with this version of "T for Texas" in a way that I couldn't connect with the Jimmie Rogers version.  It's as though the LynSkyn version is the same language as rock&roll, but a different dialect, where the Jimmie Rogers version is a different language from anything I would normally listen to....  (And yet both versions of this song would be called "country"......)

I can really see what our prof meant about the HUGE difference made by the cross-fertilization that happens all the time, now.  LynSkyn performing "T for Texas" sounds a LOT like rock&roll from the same time period.  Early 20th-century country doesn't sound anything like early 20th-century mainstream pop!


One of the things I'm finding frustrating is that our prof doesn't talk about the music itself.  (He can't play the music for us; he'd have to buy it, and it would be grotesquely expensive.  We have to find and listen to the music by ourselves.)  I really wish he could play the music for us, and then talk about it...........

I am not learning any vocabulary for talking/thinking about the music, so I'm making up my own, and I don't find that satisfying.  If the purpose of language is communication, I'd rather learn the generally-accepted language for talking about this stuff than make up my own......

I have checked his textbook out of the library, but haven't read it.  I need to pull myself away from the music and go find it.  I hope there is discussion about actually listening to the different songs/performances in the book!

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