As is 6 guns and cows and the like? I really like the tune that starts up Firefly and the music in the game Gun is one of the few things it’s got going for it, but I don’t really know what kind of genre that music is so I can’t search out more of it.
You mean it’s not just “western music”? Isn’t western music a genre?
I don’t understand the question.
I like western music too. You can find it in western movie soundtracks, and from singers like Marty Robbins, Sons of the Pioneers, Asleep at the Wheel and a gazillion others.
IIRC, there are only a few “true” spaghetti westerns. If someone knows what they are, I bet they’d have soundtracks as a good jumping off point.
“Cowboy” music.
I thought it might be a subgenre of Country or something that I hadn’t heard of.
If you like that, try listening to some Western swing. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys combined cowboy music with the big band swing that was popular in the 1930s and '40s, and Asleep At the Wheel carries on that tradition today. Also, the vocal group Riders in the Sky blends traditional cowboy folk songs and Western music with acapella harmonies.
As for spaghetti Western music, that features a lot of twangy, reverb-drenched guitar (similar tone to instrumental surf music) and pounding drums, played in minor keys. Ennio Morricone is the absolute king of composing spaghetti Western music, and he is best known for scoring the Sergio Leone westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (all with Clint Eastwood), and Once Upon a Time In the West. The Kill Bill movie soundtracks feature spaghetti Western music samples from Morricone and his lesser-known contemporaries like Luis Bacalov.
Ahh. Understandable. (I hope my response didn’t sound snarky and if it did, I apologize.)
I grew up listening to western music and cowboy songs, and was always puzzled at the term Country-Western, because to me they weren’t all that much alike.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful but none of the suggestions so far are really the kind of music I was after – I was thinking more like guitar and fiddle based music. Basically, like the Firefly theme, but you know, more of it 
Alas, I don’t know what Firelfly is and have never seen/played Gun, but seeing as you’re not interested in the Bob Wills type western swing or the Marty Robbins cowboy music, I think you might be after saloon piano music, like Stephen Foster minstrel songs. You might want to check this out http://www.allthewest.com/proddetail.php?prod=DaveBourneOldWestSaloonMusic-VolOne.
I found an mp3 of the Firefly theme so now I don’t need to try and describe it. Just ignore the whooshing sounds since it was taken from the title sequence
You can get the Firefly soundtrack. It’s at Amazon, and while you’re there, maybe you could use the Search for Similar Items feature.
I like that music too, but the closest I can come to it has already been mentioned – Asleep at the Wheel. Listen to some samples and see what you think.
Some of Gatemouth Brown’s fiddle music has that kind of sound, but it’s bluesier. Maybe Mark O’Connor too.
For some good Surf/Western music, I highly recommend checking out The Hellbenders’ Today We Kill… Tomorrow We Die CD.
I couldn’t listen to the clip, my web marshall blocked it, but the last post made it sound like you’re talking more about surf punk, like in Pulp Fiction. The king of this genre is Dick Dale.
The line from the Blues Brothers notwithstanding, they were once two distinct styles, but marketing people realized that audiences who liked one would probably like them both, so ‘country and western’ was born.
Country (aka ‘hillbilly’) came from the Appalachia and Piedmont regions. The Carter Family were among its first big stars.
I am less familiar with western music, but I associate the term with yodeling and cowboy themes. Jimmy Rodgers is hailed as the father of country music, but I hear a lot of western elements in his music. FWIW, the Carter family once recorded a pair of spoken/sung novelty tunes in which they visited each other. The recordings played up the differences of their respective styles and locales (Rodgers did his distinctive yodel and remarked on how beautiful the mountains were, and the Carters remarked on how beautiful the Texas plains were, and how Rodgers was the first cowboy they’d seen in a long time).
Western swing combined western music with jazz chords, swing rhythmns and more lush instrumentation.
Country music on Valium.
And I actually like most western music,
Texas Blues or Country Blues.
Basically, that’s just what I was gonna say. Western used to be an entirely separate genre, but it merged with CW. Frankly, I think it “submerged” as I can’t for the life of me recall any music lately that is truly Western.
Technically, ‘country blues’ refers to acoustic music pioneered by black people in the southern US before 1940 or so. This would include artists from Texas (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb), but also others from Mississippi, the Piedmont Region, and points between.
Although when most people hear ‘country blues’, they assume it means some combination of country and blues, of which there are many.
True, but ‘pure’ country is just as rare.
Even bluegrass music is very blues-influenced – its rhythms are much more driving and modern sounding than old-time country. Bluegrass sounds ‘old-timey’. But if you follow a Flatt and Scrugges record with a number by the Carter Family or Roy Acuff, most will agree that "that’s really old timey!
Modern, Nashville-made country music has as much blues and rock influences as it does country. Elvis would sound country by today’s standards, but was definitely not when he emerged.
Looking over my mp3s (which includes the theme from Firefly) I would suggest the already mentioned Marty Robbins and, possibly, Dwight Yoakam. Maybe some Highwaymen as well?
Despite growing up listening to country, most of my knowledge is of the pop-rock variety exemplified by Garth Brooks and I’m even forgetting most of it since I stopped listening almost five years ago.
Yes, that is very true as well; good point.