Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music

Always lively and often surprising, this book is an authoritative survey of country music's 200-year precommercial legacy and its early popularisation through radio and recordings. Using the music as a kind of window on the South, Bill C. Malone views country's commercial rise within the context of other key developments in the region's folk culture.;Among Malone's insights is that early country music derived its forms and styles not only from the culture of the British Isles, but also from that of Germany, Spain, France, Mexico, Africa and the Caribbean. Malone also dispels the notion that the first country stars were coerced into assuming the personas of cowboys or hillbillys. On the contrary, they willingly joined their northern agents, publicists and Tin Pan Alley songwriters in exploiting the nostalgic preconceptions about the South held by many of their listeners.;Portraying a number of unjustly neglected figures, "Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers" is a study of the cultural milieu of country's pioneering fiddlers, pickers, balladeers and yodelers.