Listen to a curated playlist of the singers, songwriters, ballads and bands from Tennessee that started commercial Country Music from its very first recordings in 1927.
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TN Country Music History
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The seeds of Country music are heavily found in the songs of the people as a continuing strain of the love & outlaw ballads that had been brought over by the English, Irish & Scottish.
These would be played on the Irish’s fiddle & the African American’s stringed gourd—a precursor of the banjo, because guitars wouldn’t be popular or affordable for about two hundred years after settling in Tennessee. Guitars had been brought over by the Spanish in the 1500s, which is why many guitars still are
a Spanish model, or ‘S’ series, to this day. Fiddles were more widespread and banjos could be made by hand. In 1830, the first guitar manufacturing company is started in the states when German C.F. Martin immigrates to America. It is not until 1894 that guitars are more accessible, featured in Sears mail-order catalogs for as low as $4.50. It’s then that guitars become a more popular vocal accompaniment and string bands are formed by combining the fiddle, banjo and guitar.
If Folk is about preserving the song of the past, Country is about taking what was best from the past and evolving into the future. Its songs speak to the pioneering spirit with its experiences of loneliness, and the dawn of the industrial revolutions with their ambitions, challenges, progress and
tragedies. Country artists represented being between the two worlds of old and new.
Many country artists themselves lived two lives in a way: playing music on the weekends, in contests and festivals then going to their manual labor and agrarian jobs during the week. The modern American could be both, do both, as their songs reflected.
Country music is as much about the songwriters as it is about the people who sang them. The formation of publishing companies and copyright laws that reach back as far as 1790 show how respected this side of the creative process was. Musical compositions weren’t included until 1831, but it did immediately allow composers to receive royalties—2￠—from every copy of sheet music that was sold. ...
