Submitted by: Submitted by CortneyValentine
Views: 104
Words: 472
Pages: 2
Category: English Composition
Date Submitted: 04/23/2014 08:58 AM
My favorite type of music would be country music. Country music is a genre of popular
American music that originated in the rural regions of Southern United States in the 1920’s.
Country music took its roots from American folk music and Western music. It often consists of
ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonics accompanied by mostly
string instruments such as guitars electric and acoustic, fiddles, banjos and harmonicas. The term
country music gained popularity in the 1940’s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music, it
encompassed due to Western music, this evolved parallel to hillbilly music from similar roots,
in the mid-20th century. Country music is used to describe many styles and subgenres today.
Country music was the most listened to rush hour radio genre during the evening commute, and
second most popular in the morning commute in the United States during 2009. Kiera Butler,
said that “Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together
and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion,
and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music
was born.”(Butler, Kiera (23 July 2012).
Immigrants brought the music and instruments of the Old World along with them for
nearly 300 years, they also brought some of their valuables with them and to most this
was an instrument. “Irish settlers enjoyed the fiddle because it could be played to sound
sad and mournful or bright and bouncy.”(Gish, D.L. Country Music. North Mankato,
MN: Smart Apple Media, 2002.) The Irish fiddle, the German- derived dulcimer, and the
Italian mandolin, the Spanish guitar, and West African banjo were the most common
musical instruments. Folk music was a combination of cultural strains, combining musical
traditions of a variety of ethnic groups in the region. Example some instrumental pieces from
Irish...