Country music originated from blacks?
- Thread starter Ezekiel 25:17
- Start date
At most the Europeans added the fiddle, but even then the Blues men revolutionized the playing of the fiddle. From that standpoint Appalachian folk music is almost entirely the Piedmont Blues, which is directly off of the plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The music off of those plantations gave rise to the fiddling, harmonica playing, jugs, washboards and the banjos that was prominent in music of that era. White people adopted that music, but make no mistake about it; that was mostly Black music. Bluegrass music (which is a spin off of Country music) is probably actually the closest thing to the Piedmont Blues. Bill Monroe who is the alleged father of "Bluegrass Music" acknowledge as much and he admitted that his biggest influence was a Black Blues musician he grew up around by the name of Arnold Schultz. This is what Bill Monroe said about Arnold Schultz:
"The first time I think I ever seen Arnold Schultz … this square dance was at Rosine, Kentucky, and Arnold and two more colored fellows come up there and played for the dance. They had a guitar, banjo, and fiddle. Arnold played the guitar but he could play the fiddle-numbers like “Sally Goodin.” People loved Arnold so well all through Kentucky there; if he was playing a guitar they’d go gang up around him till he would get tired and then maybe he’d go catch a train …. I admired him that much that I never forgot a lot of the things he would say. There’s things in my music, you know, that comes from Arnold Schultz-runs that I use in a lot of my music (Bill Monroe, quoted in Rooney 1971).1"
Arnold Shultz: Black fiddling and bluegrass music - Pete's Place
Rural Black String Band Music by Charles Wolfe | Native Ground
Classic Appalachian Blues from Smithsonian Folkways | Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
https://www.allaboutbluesmusic.com/piedmont-blues/
Discovering the Roots of Appalachian Music - The North Carolina Arboretum
Appalachian Tradition Music, A Short History by Debby McClatchy | Native Ground
This is a picture of Arnold Schultz:
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
To answer your question, yes, country music is basically the white performance and rebranding off black, blues and string band music
guitar blues = guitar country music
black banjo fiddle music = white old-time music = proto bluegrass
The term "Country" was a marketing term for the music that was essentially white people playing blue music. so it could be marketed to and for other white people
read
.
.
not quite perfect comparison for reason's I'll explain but country music is basically blues/string band music performed by white people that got branded as "Country" of "Hillbilly" for marketing reasons. Country music is actually "white blues" and Hillbilly is old-time/string band music. For one, there are 3 branches strands of what came to be called "Country" music
1. Appalachian balladry:
this is the most european one since it's not a performance style but simply ballads (folk songs) they carried over to the USA from the British Isles. This style is usually considered folk, rather than country
example
Barbara Allen (song) - Wikipedia
.
.
2. Old Time Music aka HillBilly aka String band music (fiddle + banjo) (proto-bluegrass)
This music was first played on plantations by Aframs.
Read
white people had fiddle music from europe it was totally different from the style you get in the USA/Appalachia because of the African banjo/syncopated bowing patterns
see
.
.
.
.
and the last
3. Guitar based music, that was primarily blues guitar.songs mixed with black songster tradition (bad man ballads, spirituals, secular pop songs from the minstrel era) + white minstrel songs/hymns/pop songs
Read more:
guitar blues = guitar country music
black banjo fiddle music = white old-time music = proto bluegrass
The term "Country" was a marketing term for the music that was essentially white people playing blue music. so it could be marketed to and for other white people
read
.
.
not quite perfect comparison for reason's I'll explain but country music is basically blues/string band music performed by white people that got branded as "Country" of "Hillbilly" for marketing reasons. Country music is actually "white blues" and Hillbilly is old-time/string band music. For one, there are 3 branches strands of what came to be called "Country" music
1. Appalachian balladry:
this is the most european one since it's not a performance style but simply ballads (folk songs) they carried over to the USA from the British Isles. This style is usually considered folk, rather than country
example
Barbara Allen (song) - Wikipedia
.
.
2. Old Time Music aka HillBilly aka String band music (fiddle + banjo) (proto-bluegrass)
This music was first played on plantations by Aframs.
Read
white people had fiddle music from europe it was totally different from the style you get in the USA/Appalachia because of the African banjo/syncopated bowing patterns
see
.
.
.
.
and the last
3. Guitar based music, that was primarily blues guitar.songs mixed with black songster tradition (bad man ballads, spirituals, secular pop songs from the minstrel era) + white minstrel songs/hymns/pop songs
Read more:
Last edited:
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
...nah. The facts about the origins of county music are out there which include tons of first hand interviews from the pioneers of country openly admitting to them.
T'krm
Superstar
What in the hell!!!
Country music IS a direct Black genre that
Ezekiel 25:17
Veteran
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
that part of the article is false.
early blues was played on besides the guitar, it was played on fiddle
and even mandolin
@IllmaticDelta sent you a PM. Please check it out. Important.
Even Classical String Music was inspired by the Moors who brought the first iterations of guitars up to Spain
Blacks created country music
Yup the Berber people (Moors) took the guitar to Spain. But you can even go back further than that. The Harp, flute and lyre are out of Egypt.
ShaDynasty
Chaos Theory Part 1 - The Album
Interesting thread. I think a reasonable response is that both black people and white people influenced each others music. Black people definitely seem to have created more musical movements though.
I never thought about the origins of Country before, its interesting that African-Americans had a big hand in it. I suppose blues became the cool thing for a few years, then Rock N Roll and by that time Elvis had kind of brought the 2 styles back together.
Whats interesting to me is what happens now. We're in an age of hyper globalization thanks to the internet. It'll be interesting to see what influences the next generation who've grown up with the internet and can pull and draw inspiration from potentially anything in human history.
I never thought about the origins of Country before, its interesting that African-Americans had a big hand in it. I suppose blues became the cool thing for a few years, then Rock N Roll and by that time Elvis had kind of brought the 2 styles back together.
Whats interesting to me is what happens now. We're in an age of hyper globalization thanks to the internet. It'll be interesting to see what influences the next generation who've grown up with the internet and can pull and draw inspiration from potentially anything in human history.
Rock and Roll is the Blues. Elvis didn't bring anything together. He was like Vanilla Ice in that he exploited the music of Black people; and he played the shyt for White people and they lied to themselves believing that it was something different than what Black people were playing. Fwiw, the Blues are from the South and there were made up different genres of stuff like "Country Blues" etc., that are just labels; but people like Ray Charles went between all the Black genres of music way before Elvis.
Rock and Roll is basically from Jump Blues. Oddly enough it was a gospel musician (Sister Rosetta Tharp) that White American Rock musicians and Country musicians (Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis) emulated. The White British Rock musicians seemed to stay along the line of Delta Blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf.
Jump blues - Wikipedia
https://www.theroot.com/sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-queer-black-woman-who-invent-1823198999
NPR Choice page
Last edited:
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
another white american myth. Rock n Roll was around way before Elvis came on the scene. Even within white america, rural white musicians had been blending their world with black music for decades prior. which lead to Hillbilly boogie and Western Swing. An old post I made explaining the full history transition
The basic Rock beat aka the "Backbeat" came straight out of the Black Church. It went into R&B and started the "Rocking" era which then became known as "Rock N Roll". This is why white racists called Rock n Roll jungle music from the African jungles because they knew the "beat" was black in origin.
Birth Of Rock Drumming: Backbeats & Straight Eighths
"
When rock and roll first hit the scene in the early 1950s, it was hailed as a musical revolution, but also caused a lot of controversy. Teens loved the big sound and crazy energy of rock, while many of their parents were horrified by it. So what made rock so different from its predecessors that it caused such strife? Answer: big changes in the groove. The next few MIH columns will focus on these various changes, and show how the turbulent early years of this new music craze created a drumming blueprint that we follow to this day.
The first rock element we’ll explore is the backbeat, the accented stroke that you hear on beats 2 and 4. Backbeats had always been a part of the drummer’s vocabulary, and you can hear examples in early jazz, swing, and bebop. In all these cases, however, the drummer would only lay down backbeats near the end of a song, at the emotional high point. Generally, it was considered bad form for a drummer to play loud all the way through, not to mention unmusical.
By the end of the 1940s, some early R&B recordings, most famously “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris, started to break these barriers by incorporating backbeats from start to finish. The risk paid off, as kids actually preferred dancing to a heavier beat, and kept “Good Rockin’” at the top of the charts for six solid months. The die was cast, and within a few years, continuous backbeats became a defining element in rock and every other pop style to emerge thereafter. It’s a trend we still follow today.
Another important rhythmic milestone that led to rock’s dominance was the shift from swung to straight eighth-notes.
Previous forms of American popular music – including New Orleans jazz, swing, and rhythm and blues – all had their rhythmic foundation in the “swung” eighth-note, a bouncy feel based in triplets. In the mid-’50s, however, certain R&B musicians found that by speeding up the feel of a boogie-woogie shuffle, you could “straighten out” the bounciness and create a relentless, driving “chuck-chuck-chuck” of eighth-notes that is now the recognizable trademark of rock.
Interestingly, the move toward straight eighths did not originate with drummers, but with other instrumentalists, notably piano player Little Richard, and guitar players Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Earl Palmer, who played on many important early rock recordings, described it thusly:
“The only reason I started playing what they come to call a rock and roll beat came from trying to match Little Richard’s right hand. With Richard pounding the piano with all ten fingers, you couldn’t very well go against it. I did at first – on ’Tutti Frutti’ you can hear me playing a shuffle. Listening to it now, it’s easy to hear that I should have been playing that rock beat.”
Fred Below, who played on most of Chuck Berry’s hits, did just the opposite, playing a shuffle against Berry’s straight-eighth guitar strumming on tunes like “Johnny B. Goode.” The result is an unusual “in-between” feel that has also come to be associated with the 1950s rock sound, and can be heard on the likes of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” and Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.”
As the 1950s wore on, the straight-eighth feel became increasingly popular with teens, and by the arrival of The Beatles, in 1964, it had become the dominant groove in rock."
Birth Of Rock Backbeats & Straight Eighths - DRUM! Magazine
Black Gospel music from 1930 w/ heavy backbeat and piano that sounds alot like some50's Rock n Roll
.
.
.
.
.
.
Read this
Rock and Roll A Social History
...even fats domino told white people this back in the 50s
Last edited: