Point taken; my language was overly strict. Fewer blue notes, etc. Certainly any song with ‘blues’ in the title is blues-influenced.
His Buck Dancer’s Choice is more of what I was thinking of.
The Carter Family also absorbed blues influence when they started encountering it. They ‘borrowed’ material from Black musician Leslie Riddle, one example of which was The Cannonball.
This, at least in some cases. How else does one tell these two songs apart?
David Lindley, too.
Is “country” music the same as country western?
When we discussed the Burns series, I objected that it defined country a lot more broadly that I favored. Me, I’m all about the oldtime. Fiddle and banjo. No one will mistake that for rock and roll.
I would say yes. ‘Country’ is basically short for ‘Country and Western’.
‘Country’ originally referred to music descended from British/Celtic folk music. It was also referred to as ‘hillbilly’ or ‘mountain’ music. ‘Western’ music was more like cowboy ballads, ‘yippie kai-yay’, etc… Although there was some overlap (Jimmy Rodgers, ‘King of Country Music’, could yodel) the term ‘country and western’ was coined around 1950 by Nashville marketers, who figured the audiences of each would also like the other.
It’s been a long time since there were two distinct styles, hence the humor in the line from the Blues Brothers movie: “(B)oth kinds of music, country and western” marks the speaker as having really old-fashioned music tastes.
These days, ‘Suburban and Southern’ would be a more accurate term.
I thing most of these genre names are silly, but I’m not sure about this. Ken Burns calls everything including oldtime and bluegrass “country.” IF that is valid, I think it quite a stretch to call oldtime and bluegrass country western. Not saying CW HAS to have the big hat, but it strikes me as a kinda good indicator.
I was reading about the Dolly Parton song “Here You Come Again” on Wikipedia and I saw this anecdote:
Her producer, Gary Klein, who had heard the song on B.J. Thomas’s recently released self-titled album, reported that Parton had begged him to add a steel guitar to avoid sounding too pop, and he called in Al Perkins to fill that role. “She wanted people to be able to hear the steel guitar, so if someone said it isn’t country, she could say it and prove it,” Klein told journalist Tom Roland. “She was so relieved. It was like her life sentence was reprieved.”
So at least Dolly agrees with me!
Just ran across THIS and thought it fun. Of course, I wouldn’t feel comfortable hanging ANY particular label The Punch Brothers, but if nothing else, it shows that when you combine a great song with great musicians, labels don’t really matter.
And these guys just crack me up! 
The pedal steel is certainly one of the most distinctive features of country music. There were two versions of Shania Twain’s “Man I Feel Like a Woman”. The ‘international’ version had no pedal steel.
Amazed I got this far through the thread without this obvious inclusion in the list of distinguishing instruments. Of course there are a few anomalies, but for the most part rock doesn’t do fiddles or banjos and C&W commonly does.