Naming Country Music: An Historian Looks at Meanings Behind the Labels

Abstract

When most country music fans listen to music, they are probably not thinking of the history of the genre and the symbolism represented in the names country music has been called. Music educators, however, might wish to consider the symbolism behind the terms country music has acquired during its relatively brief history. As this new genre of American popular music started to develop in the 1920s, it grew out of many other vernacular forms such as British folk balladry as found in the Appalachians and the Ozarks. Other influences included African-American folk traditions, including blues, jazz, and ragtime; shaped note Protestant hymnody; nineteenth-century parlor songs; blackface minstrelsy, traveling medicine shows; the music of Hawaiian string bands; and vaudeville. Nurtured by the emerging radio broadcasting and recording industries, country music's development occurred in recent history. We who grew up in the midtwentieth century were able to watch it grow from an amalgam of folk and popular genres into a musico-industrial complex of enormous proportions. Country music is useful for the classroom in

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