The Steel Guitar Forum

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I always looked at "Country" as more urban - you know,cheatin' and drinkin' down at the trailor park etc. and "Western" as cowboy music with 3 or 4 part harmony singing about ropin' cattle in wide open spaces,gunslinger tales etc. Then you got Western swing(Texas or California - there's a slight difference)which is really just 40s-50s pop jazz with a cowboy hat. Then you got all kinds of sub-genres like Bakersfield which is more like Nashville but flashier with an attitude and Bluegrass and Appalachian which are more closely related to Celtic music. There's a ton of crossever genres like Cajun,Rockabilly,Cowpunk,Cowglam(a Hollywood thing)and Country-rock. These subtleties tend to escape the grasp of lots of folks and to them it's all just "Country & Western". -MJ-

It was always my understanding that Appalachian music was originally termed "Hillbilly", but as it started to become a viable genre, that term was considered denigrating and it became "Country". Of course, anyone successful in Country now wants to be considered "Pop"- so the cycle continues...

Just consider yourselves lucky that you don't get involved with Dance music and electronica. There's a genre for every song there, and heaven forbid that your Jungle track should be at the wrong BPM, or your acid jazz use the wrong sort of trumpet sample!
More on topic, would you agree that melodically Country music has musical roots in a Celtic/Nordic hybrid, whereas Western shows a much stronger Spanish/Mexican influence?
Cheers
Dave

Jeff,

I think there is at least enough contoversy in the categories of country, western and country-western music to maintain a perpetual debate on this Forum.

I've seen videotapes of opry-like country music TV shows from the 1950s where they consistently called it "folk music."

As for anecdotes, I recall an interview with one of the former Texas Playboys who said many band members played the jazz of the period when taking solos. He said something to the effect of, "Wills didn't care what we played for our solos as long as we wore those cowboy outfits."

Just what is bluegrass and what ain't is another continuing debate. When living in south Florida a refrain I often heard at bluegrass gatherings was, "That ain't the way Mon-roe played it." By the way, Bill Monroe disdained including his music in the hillbilly stereotype. His band always dressed up.

In his book "Narcocorrido," Elija Wald said he struggled with defining "corrido," a Mexican topical ballad form. He finally decided that a song was a corrido if the people who listened to and played corridos said it was. The same idea could be applied to other musical genres.

Categorization always brings controversy.

It's an unfortunate side effect of communicating about and, now, marketing music that it needs to be categorized in some way to even be able to describe it to folks! The people deeply interested in a musical style can understand the subtleties of the many sub-genres while those less informed are satisfied with vague categories. Fascinating! Many of the folks I know who are denigrating the current crop of Country Radio Fodder as "ain't country" are not at all interested in the various older styles of Celtic, African, Spainish, Scandinavian and etc. music that evolved into the "classic country" they so admire. I've also heard the howls of "That ain't bluegrass" from the Monroe devotees who seem to forget that he really invented his whole style as an outlaw amalgam of several separate genres by breaking tradition and pissing off a whole bunch of his contemporaries. Hopefully there will always be "rulebreakers" to forge ahead and provide us with stimulating new musical adventure.

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C'mon by and visit!- www.markvanallen.com

My Band: www.sugarlandmusic.com

I always thought...C&W was big band...like Spade Cooley and such...country was Hank Williams Sr. to Johnny Cash...as far as Steel goes...play C&W slow enough...it becomes Hawaiian Music (or vice versa)...and C&W uses Electric Steel...country can use anything...but acoustic string music w/ banjo and dobro is Bluegrass...but...MUSIC IS MUSIC...no pigeonholes, please...Just my 2 cents..
Mike

There's already a long thread on this topic in the Music section. Lot's of people have weighed in and, yes, country is really in the ear of the listener and it can cover everything from raw music played on a groundhog skinned banjo to Bob Wills and his big road bands. I'm betting that some record executive from New York City came up with the term.
RB

NEW YORK CITY!!???

This easy:

Style Beat p. min Dress Drug

Bluegrass 120+ informal amphetimine

C&W 60-120 boots +hat beer

Hawaian slow hawaian shrt macadamias

Rock just no 3rds anything everything
in the chords

Jazz all speeds smthing cool (see Rock)

hope that clears it up.

I was in a band and the lead was asked what he played..
" Both kinds of music ; Country And Western"
I held my peace.
Anything else for him was city slicker trash.

I am very pleased at the acoustic roots movement in "contemporary country", Nice to have something good to play on the back porch that wasn't done 50 years ago.

If it's "down home", has strong feeling and is done, who cares what the lable is... that's for the radio programers to squable over.<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by David L. Donald on 16 March 2003 at 03:26 AM.]</p></FONT>

Just another opinion .... (from an earlier thread)

<I>In the beginning the "Western" in Country & Western refered to what was known as "cowboy" music, i.e. Gene Autry, Sons of The Pioneers, etc ....music about cowboy themes in the old west.
The "country" evolved from early musicians like Jimmy Rogers, and later those who were associated with the Grand Ole Opry such as Roy Acuff.
The "western" in western-swing however came from the big-band swing music of the 1930s and 40s. The original western-swing music was essentially the same as the big-band swing music....only with different instrumentation....It was primarily instrumental dance music with a vocalist singing occasionally, but certainly not on every song, and many times not even considered necessary. Frank Sinatra can be credited with making the vocalist an important member of a band, and Tommy Duncan and Hank Thompson can probably be credited with doing the same for western-swing.
The original western-swing musicians were snobbish about being mistaken for what was back then called "hillbilly musicians" because they played many of the same instruments, Guitar players for example were overly sensitive that someone might mistake their jazz-oriented bar-chords on something like "How High the Moon", with one of those "open chord hillbilly players". Thankfully, the passage of 50 years has removed those perceptions of superiority among musicians. (it has, hasn't it)
Music has become so homogenized since those days that it's hard to find agreement about what music belongs in what classification. Just try to get a dozen musicians to agree on what comprises "country" or "pop" or "jazz" today!</I> www.genejones.com

Well said Gene..

You told the story as it should have been told.

BRAVO Cowboy..

I think Bob Hoffnar said it best on a past thread...."It's just notes."

See what I mean Jeff. This is only the beginning.

By the way, try Nick Tosches' "Where Dead Voices Gather" for a very interesting exploration of the influence of blackface minstrelsy on country (Lovesick Blues, Anytime, etc), western swing (Right or Wrong), and virtually every other genre of American popular music (including hapa haole). A fascinating read guaranteed to generate controversy on many levels. The Emmett Miller CD (find it on Amazon) is a mindblower too.

Page, how dare you refer to country music as "hillbilly". My mountaineer father, who saw his first cartridge rifle when one of his brothers came home from WWI, insisted that we were high class and should be referred to as "Mountain Williams"! Seriously, he called himself a "hillbilly disc jockey" during the 1940's in So. Calif. and played everything from Jimmy Rogers, the Delmore Brothers and Roy Acuff to Merle Travis, Bob Wills and Gene Autry.

Rumor has it that Ernest Tubb,(Ernie Tubbs for you people up in the N.E. ),coined the term,"Country & Western".

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Hey Gene, good post.
I like to think of hillbilly / blugrass / folk as "back porch music". If you can be sitin' and pickin' with friends and no wallwarts, that quaifies. What songs you play are your choice.