Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Hillbilly Jazz: From the Blue Ridge to Blue Note
From All About Jazz
If you were to take the entire purview of American music, trace each form back to its roots, and compare those roots side-by-side, you would notice several very interesting things. For one, just how easy it is to manipulate you into undertaking a detailed, time-consuming activity with just a single sentence. You'd also notice that virtually all American music can trace their roots to Dixie. The blues, arguably the primer for the lion's share of our collective music, sprang from the fields of the agrarian South. From that source sprang jazz, R&B, rock-and-roll, and that song from that beer commercial that I really like.
Meanwhile, in the Appalachian mountains of the South, the common balladry of the Scotch-Irish settlers who had been settling the region since the early seventeenth century had been undergoing a slow process of assimilation and was developing into a distinctive form unto its own. Known as mountain, or country music, the form was primarily vocal and strings but did not yet closely resemble its modern form because canned beer, mobile homes and pickup trucks were yet to be invented.
With the advent of recording technology at the beginning of the twentieth century, traditional country music expanded beyond its established boundaries and found an audience all over the country wherever blue collars and red necks were allowed to roam free. Early pioneers of the recorded form included Virginia's legendary Carter family who rose from the hardscrabble coalfields to become internationally renowned thanks mostly to the talents and determination of Mother Maybelle Carter, one of the first strong female figures in music. It might be said that she was the Madonna of her age, except without the media whoredom, the crackpot views, and (thankfully) no book of featuring Mother Maybelle posing in erotic situations with Sidney Bechet and Hattie McDaniel.
Read the article
FAll About Jazz
If you were to take the entire purview of American music, trace each form back to its roots, and compare those roots side-by-side, you would notice several very interesting things. For one, just how easy it is to manipulate you into undertaking a detailed, time-consuming activity with just a single sentence. You'd also notice that virtually all American music can trace their roots to Dixie. The blues, arguably the primer for the lion's share of our collective music, sprang from the fields of the agrarian South. From that source sprang jazz, R&B, rock-and-roll, and that song from that beer commercial that I really like.
Meanwhile, in the Appalachian mountains of the South, the common balladry of the Scotch-Irish settlers who had been settling the region since the early seventeenth century had been undergoing a slow process of assimilation and was developing into a distinctive form unto its own. Known as mountain, or country music, the form was primarily vocal and strings but did not yet closely resemble its modern form because canned beer, mobile homes and pickup trucks were yet to be invented.
With the advent of recording technology at the beginning of the twentieth century, traditional country music expanded beyond its established boundaries and found an audience all over the country wherever blue collars and red necks were allowed to roam free. Early pioneers of the recorded form included Virginia's legendary Carter family who rose from the hardscrabble coalfields to become internationally renowned thanks mostly to the talents and determination of Mother Maybelle Carter, one of the first strong female figures in music. It might be said that she was the Madonna of her age, except without the media whoredom, the crackpot views, and (thankfully) no book of featuring Mother Maybelle posing in erotic situations with Sidney Bechet and Hattie McDaniel.
Read the article
FAll About Jazz
# posted by Dave Sichak @ 9:14 PM 
