Old-Time Country Roots

Back in the '20s, Nashville might've considered itself the "Athens of the South," a bastion of high culture, but its surrounding hills and valleys were fertile ground for what was once called "hillbilly music." Backwoods pickers and singers hauled their raw, rural sounds out the hollers, packing the wallop of a jug of moonshine. So, you dug O Brother, Where Art Thou?, did you? Well, here's where it all came from.

Nashville's Grand Ole Opry radio show gave thousands of listeners their first taste of pure-as-a-rippling-stream mountain music — an infectious concoction of British folk songs, fiddle tunes, string-band music, and African-American blues. This old-time music still calls to mind barn dances, high-lonesome hillsides, whistling locomotive trains, and the down-home comforts of simpler times.

Jimmie Rodgers was a railroad brakeman who became America's first country star by immortalizing in song the backbreaking, heartbreaking life of the common man. Then there was the Carter Family who, with the plaintive harmonies of a kitchen-table song swap, introduced obscure Appalachian folk songs to the country repertoire. And they're just a toe-dip into the cool creek that is deep C&W.

By the '30s, C&W offshoots, such as cowboy music and the close-harmony style of brother duos like the Blue Sky Boys, celebrated and lamented the joys and hardships of family life, the old homestead, and endless dusty trails. The music of the Depression-era South reflected both the enduring hope and the deep despair of the times. To folks who spent long, hot days in the fields, old-time music offered a merciful escape from toil and poverty by making art out of that very same life.