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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...