As a service to Dad29, who doesn't know much about country music, a song. This one is by Hank Williams, Sr., when he was singing under a stage name ("Luke the Drifter"). You'll probably like it, both for the anti-Communist lyrics and the Western swing sound. Note the steel guitar. This was originally a Hawaiian instrument, but Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys introduced it into Western music in the 1930s. It was a very popular sound in both country and Western music through to the 1960s.
5 comments:
In addition to some of the more recent flavors/offshoots of the Country subset of C&W music, there's Bluegrass music.
Given the recent departure of Doc, I'll throw in this link.
This is apropos of a comment D29 made recently in a review of a Beach Boy's concert. Feel free to pitch in! It's an interesting subject.
Dang it! Too hurried lately to read/write accurately...
I think I meant my previous comment to allude to Bluegrass being the root stock, right beside Gospel music, of C&W.
And that being Scots-Irish traditional music being imported into Appalachia and morphing into what we now know as Bluegrass, eh what?
"This is apropos of a comment D29 made recently in a review of a Beach Boy's concert. Feel free to pitch in! It's an interesting subject."
Interesting? You bet that I agree, but I can't say I know what Dad said, so my contextual moorings might be a tad more loose than usual. Especially considering how busy Walkin' Boss has been keeping my antiquated, exoskeleton suspended carcass lately.
The cruel task-master has so harshly put upon me that I'm barely able to make it from dawn to beer-thirty of late. And then I can't recall much after beer-thirty. =;^}
Sorry, I should have looked the comment up when I cited it. It's from this post. It's regarding the obvious shift in rock-and-roll from positive, Beach Boys-style music in the early 1960s to the later 1960s' focus on more negative themes:
The Beatles, on the other hand, were at the very beginning of a much darker period for the USA: Viet Nam, Nixon, and the sex/drugs culture, all beginning (roughly) in the mid-1960's and only now coming to an end. Pop music reflected that change. The contrast in tone and style cannot be ignored; the music got darker. (Curiously, Country/Western never changed too much--if anything, the style and tone adopted some of the light-bright pops/rock, and of course, the technology.)
I was inclined to run through some of the history of country and Western music, just to show how the same forces were at work there. But that requires establishing a baseline: and really, if you're talking about country music in the late 20th century, that baseline has to be Hank Williams, Sr. So we start there, and then we see how things were before he became big; then how the field changed once his example was in place; and then I thought we'd look at Outlaw country, which is the analog to the phenomenon he was noticing in rock and roll. It's different from the rock of the period, though, because -- while still anti-authoritarian -- it remained anti-communist and in favor of patriotism and the fighting man.
OK, I'm learning.
Keep it up.
Post a Comment