Country

Country tradition has its roots in plantation songs, minstrelsy and the blues.

Long before the Great Depression the mountain people of the Eastern states were poor. They had always been poor. The new jazz music could be heard on the radios in the mountains, which pretty much became the biggest source of entertainment. The locals couldn't imitate it the costs of buying wind musical instruments was beyond their meagre lifestyle. However, many homes had cheap string instruments hanging on pegs - and players aplenty. The result was toe tapping 'Bluegrass' played with fiddles, banjos, guitars and simple rhythm instruments. A different kind of 'jazz' music, and still popular today.

The poorer Irish, Scots & English immigrants who were unable to compete with the plantation owners had travelled West from Pennsylvania through the Cumberland Gap to the Appalachians where they met up with runaway slaves & produced their distinctive music.

Rural Appalachian string bands using the fiddle, banjo and bones, playing 19th Century pops from minstrelsy and Americanised British folk songs with Afro - American rhythms and tonality. 

'Hillbilly' music focused on the fiddle in chordal / drone mode, with 'claw hammer' banjo and percussion.

The Carter family, were early practitioners clearly playing improvised blues lines - 'Keep on the Sunny Side' 'Worried Man Blues'.

Grand Ole Oprey, a radio barn dance, started broadcasting from Nashville in 1925.

Bill Monroe (1911 - ) joined the programme in 1939 with his 'Blue Grass Boys' and 'bluegrass' evolves, characterised by tight discipline, careful integration, driving, brilliant, high pitched, up tempo, instrumental virtuoso breaks, pinched nasal toned interpretations of GOSPEL, BLUES and sentimental ballads.

Earl Scruggs (1924 - ) played a characteristic 3 fingered syncopated banjo style.

Jimmy Rodgers (1897 - 1933) yodelled the blues, the mountain blues, 12 bars 3 stanza, and the easy swing of jazz, a blues singer who happened to be white.

Roy Acuff (1903 - 1992) sang mountain style with his 'Smokey Mountain Boys', tearful with his Dobro guitar with metal resonating plate. 'Wabash Canonball'.

Two sub traditions emerged shadowing the trend in mianstream popular music -

* Western Swing - in the 1930's as big band swing became popular, pop blues, jazz, saxes and drums, blended with the string band.

Bob Wills (?) - western swing, broadcast from Apollo 12! 'San Antonio Rose'.

* Honky Tonk - electric instruments started to be used as they became available.

Ernest Tubb (1914 - 84) - an ex country blues singer, the Texas Troubadour, became popular with Honky Tonk. 

Hank Williams (1923 - 53) - encompassed both subtraditions, with the 'Drifting Cowboys'. Blues strains and the spirit of rock 'n roll. Died of alcohol & pills at 29.

Arthel 'Doc' Watson ( ) - discovered at Newport in 1960, blind singer of everything, always swiped from the blacks.

Johnny Cash ( ) - married June Carter...

Musical Characteristics –

Instruments - 

1 Banjo - America's only indigenous instrument, out of Africa!! - plays the lead like a hot clarinet. 1820, Congo Square, New Orleans, 'clawhammer' 'drumming' on the strings with the back of the fingernails. Rolls breaking up the beat with subdivisions, 3 over 4 in the case of the Scruggs 3 finger style, the result, identical to jazz, is to superimpose a flexible 4/4 over rigid hillbilly 2/4.

2 Mandolin - cornet like busts on the offbeat

3 Fiddle - trombone like heavy bowing, flexible rhythm

4 Guitar - rhythm, heavily accented, basic pulse

5 Slapped bass - rhythm, metronomic line

Singing – Tenor a 3rd above the melody, frequently with sustained high notes, baritone a 5th below, bass on the octave. But the predicable triad is dispelled through anticipation, passing notes and ornamental slides/glissandi. High pitched, upbeat, flattened, tight integration, improvised, up tempo. Multiple parts in continual interaction, ensemble music

Rhythm – Europe v. Africa, the drum lines of Africa portrayed by melody instruments following the banning of 'talking' drums during slavery? Melody and counter melody. Basic pulse and counter rhythm. Melodic rhythms, playing the drums on the melodic instrument. A melodic image of the rhythm.

Blues and Latin rhythms

Two forms of counter rhythm - 
1 displaced accents = syncopation
2 cross rhythms = 4 on 2 and 3 on 4

the effect is a break-up of the metronome sense, crossing rhythmic waves sets the bars in motion, a linear roll or, more correctly, a 'rock' and 'roll', a to and fro, the syncopated 'backbeat' takes the bar back on itself only to urge forward again on the next downbeat, the fundamental beat is attacked where it hurts, under the beat itself, the beat is undermined and the rhythm lifted of its foundations in a state of buoyancy, the uncoupling of rhythm from the meter.

Scruggs used eighth notes, thumb, index and middle finger, 3 note 'rolls', creating the familiar 'secondary' rag of the Negro. Ragtime on the banjo, the 1st ragtime piano piece was, of course, a 'banjo' imitation. 5th string is not a 'drone' note but a chime! Breaks or 'scatters' the pulse.

Melody –acoustically pure notes:- octave 2/1 5th = 3/2 4th = 4/3 major 3rd = 5/4 minor 3rd = 6/5the ear recognises there ratios sympathetically, all other notes in the scale are culturally dependant. In our modern system the 'tempered' octave is divided into 12 equal intervals. The diatonic scale uses 7 of these intervals. Almost invariably folk music divides the octave into 5.

* the major pentatonic plus the flattened 3rd and 7th = the blues!

* the minstrel song is the 'dixieland' song, jumping up and returning to the tonic through the cadences of the circle of 4ths.

* the spiritual on the other hand goes below the tonic and returns with rising cadences.
typically, pentatonic verse with the start of the chorus moving to the subdominant, 'minstrel spirituals'!

* the blues phrasing is everything, the melody is preaching all the time

As with jazz the hot lick, the rolls, the blues, the way it is played, the ensemble, functional music, disciplined and spontaneous, records and imitations, mimetic, ex minstrelsy. There are many musical influences that have mixed together to form the musical style of Bluegrass music.

A few major sources -

Folk music of the British isles as transplanted in southern areas of the US, both the singing style and instrumental effects (drone sound for example)

Minstrel shows

Shape note singing

Barn dance instrumentals

Black rural blues

Ragtime sounds

Popular music of the 20s & 30s via radio and records

Field music including black spirituals

and a slight amount of jazz.

These influences came together in 1945 due to the efforts of the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe. The birth of bluegrass and the life of Bill Monroe are well documented. And unlike the mystery of Buddy Bolden and very early jazz, it is recorded for listening. Bill Monroe was raised on a farm in Kentucky. His first musical experiences were with a black blues guitar player with the unlikely name, Arnold Shultz. Monroe's family members were musically inclined and played for barn dances and social gatherings. When the three Monroe brothers left for Chicago (Bill was 18), they were fairly accomplished in the instrumental and vocal style that they had learned. And they earned money playing music while working at unskilled factory jobs. We don't know how much jazz from the active Chicago scene of 1929 to 1932 Bill Monroe heard. But some for sure. In a rare Southern California appearance in 1977, I heard him announce his next tune as "something I remember hearing when I lived in Chicago". I may have been the only one in the audience who recognized 'Milenberg Joys'. I doubt that Bill knew that the tune had a title or a famous jazz composer.

From 1932 to 1938, Bill and Charlie Monroe were very popular in the south as a brother duet. Bill on mandolin, Charlie on guitar. They both sang and played. Bill had developed a mandolin style that was much more sophisticated than the simpler styles of country musicians. They were NOT yet playing bluegrass.

From 1938 until 1945, Bill Monroe led a country style dance band that incorporated some of the motifs of popular music. To most of us, it was pretty corny stuff, even to incorporating some of the minstrel oriented comedy for popular appeal. It brought in enough money to live on, but it wasn't satisfying to Monroe's creative urges. He had a sound in his head that was finally realized when he heard a banjo played in the three finger roll style that had been developed by a very few in the Caroline region. He was able for the first time, to bring together the instrumentation and the skilled players to play the first identifiable bluegrass sound. A solid rhythm guitar (Lester Flatt), the "new" banjo sound (Earl Scruggs), a bluesy fiddle (Chubby Wise), a dance rhythm string bass (Howard Watts), and a virtuoso mandolin with some blues and jazz influence (Bill Monroe). 

Since that time, bluegrass music has branched out in various ways. Some of the current bluegrass is very much jazz oriented - toward the more modern areas of extended chords and complex rhythms. Traditional jazz and bluegrass only overlap in a few areas. They both are played best in small groups of 5 or 6 or 7. They both are best played without reading music and require ability to improvise individually and collectively. Both have popular appeal because of the 'happy' rhythm feel that is generated.