Is there any bright-line test? The Rolling Stones have written and performed country songs. Toby Keith has been known to rock out on occassion. Where do you draw the line? Especially since country is one of the roots of rock. Is it the presence of a slide guitar? Does a pickup truck have to be involved somewhere? Is the Marshall Tucker Band one or the other?
Cheesy lyrics about your dog. The line is Neil Young so don’t cross him.
the pang and the twang.
Rock evolved from country (for example, the Everly Brothers) as well as from rhythm and blues. The split involved different instrumentation and a more rebellious mindset; it could be argued that it was aimed at teens.
Country is older, developing in the 30s and 40s, but it remained a niche genre. While rock was catching on everywhere, country remained popular in just the south and some of the west. Northern urban audiences never took to it.
However, rock always had people who were close t country music. The Byrds did “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” in 1968 and Poco (and later, the Eagles) created country music that sold as rock. Nowadays, country has moved more toward rock.
There are differences in the themes of the songs, with country being more patriotic, more dealing with blue collar themes, but musically they aren’t that far apart right now.
The pedal steel.
The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers began recording in the '20s, and both were enormously popular. The Carters performed for years on border stations that broadcast across most of North America (bordertown Mexican stations were far more powerful than the 50,000 watt stations in the U.S. It was far from a niche genre. It’s important to remember that pre-war US was still mostly rural.
See above. Also, it was northern urban audiences that absorbed bluegrass and related subgenres into the folk-revival, extending their influence far beyond what it had been. Washington Square in Greenwich Village was a center of bluegrass activity at one point. The rise of the bluegrass festival in the '60s and '70s was largely due to the acceptance of the subgenre by northern audiences.
The best thing about rock is that it has no clear boundaries of any kind. It’s the mongrel accretion of every type of music before it, and it can incorporate any type of music that has come into being since. You can have country rock, rock-tinged country, rock with country influences, rock with country stylings, and rock with pedal steel. Rock is everymusic. It’s the Blob. It’s the Thing That Conquered the Earth. Some day rock will be the default word for “music.” It’s the ether of sound.
No, and I’m glad there isn’t. I like my music without borders.
I agree. What started this train of though (HO-scale) was a question that popped into my mind while taking a shower this morning. If a new artist released their first CD, and there was no input from the studio as to how to categorize it, where whould you file it in the store? Where whould you put Elvis if he just released his first CD today? (Besides in the Ripley Museum, him being dead and all.)
If the Sun Sessions were released today, it would be considered some kind of alternative country/blues/rock amalgam. It would also be considered almost unspeakably brilliant, as it is.
In addition to the presence of the pedal steel, country recordings usually have the vocals a little louder than their rock counterparts, and often have an acoustic guitar added, even in rocked out numbers.
An almost unbreakable rule: the singer has to have a southern accent, even if it’s faked like Shania Twain’s. You can sing rock in any accent from Tokyo to Liverpool, but you ain’t country without a country accent.
This may be a little controversial for CS, but IMO, an equally ironclad rule is that there are no black performers in country music. (I know there’s Charlie Pride, but he’s almost 70). There was a man from northern Virginia named Cleve Francis a few years ago. He was a cardiologist who landed a country music contract, and took some time off from his practice to try to make it big. He didn’t. There was discussion in the Washington Post over whether the fact that he was black hurt his chances.
Once, while running a treadmill in a gym, I saw a video that turned out to be Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me”. Everybody was wearing cowboy hats, there were lariats, etc. But since the singer did look like Madonna, I found myself wondering if it was in fact her, or a country singer who resembled her from a distance (I couldn’t hear the music). What convinced me that it was in fact Madonna was the appearance of a black cowboy.
I love country music, but it’s rooted in a segregated society, and it honors tradition more than rock does. Country has long had a huge African-American influence – bluegrass has clear blues influences. This goes back a long way – i.e., the aforementioned Carter Family recorded songs (e.g., “The Cannonball”) copped from Leslie Riddle, a black guitarist. But audiences prefer hearing it sung by whites, the way early rock audiences did. For that matter, there haven’t been too many ethnic white names in country music.
Based on a variety show I remember from the 70’s, they are sister and brother, respectively.
This is almost entirely due to marketing by record companies. It’s easy to see the influence of black music on white musicians, but the influence of white music on black musicians is almost always overlooked. The Grand Ole Opry was an enormous hit with all of rural America, white and black. The repertoires of black blues musicians from the '20s and '30s always included a significant number of tunes and influences from white musicians; e.g., Bing Crosby was a huge influence on blues singers (in particular his microphone-oriented singing style). White record companies weren’t interested in black musicians playing white music, so they never released records like that (“Just stick to the race music, boy”). This has led white musicologists to think of blues music as an analogue of early country music, a homegrown folk music rooted in an exclusively black rural culture. It wasn’t. It was a rather cosmopolitan and fluid pop music from which white record companies would select the most “racial” sounding of material for release.
A good book on this subject is Elijah Wald’s* Escaping the Delta*.
Except for Fool In the Rain, I always thought Led Zeppelin’s 1978 album In Through the Out Door was very country sounding.
And there are the crossover acts and Alt Country and people like Kieth Urban…
For what it’s worth, a black artist named Cowboy Troy made a splash a few years ago, combining pop-country (a la Big & Rich) with rapping. He called it “hick-hop.” Not sure if he’s still big, though.
First axiom: There are two kinds of music. Good music, and bad music.
Second axiom: It don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that swang.
That is all you need to know. Everything else is affectation.
I’ve always found the connections between music genres more interesting than the walls erected to segregate them. Old Time? String band? Bluegrass? Western Swing? Honky Tonk? Jump Blues? Rockabilly? Rock & Roll?
By the way–Pedal steel came from Hawaii.
A lot of the difference is simply subject matter. For one thing, country songs have maintained a certain sense of humor that has been almost completely absent from rock/pop for the last few decades. Even “serious” country songs will often include some clever wordplay that makes you chuckle. One of the first examples of this that I heard when I first got into country was in an early George Strait song (an album track, not a single). The singer has a friend who is verbally and emotionally abusive to his wife/girlfriend, and he’s giving a warning:
*I guess you think it’s funny to laugh at her expense
To point out each mistake she makes in front of all your friends
You figure she’ll let it go by, 'cause she loves you so
But don’t you know …
Every time you throw dirt on her, you lose a little ground …*
And Paisley’s new song, Ticks, is just plain funny:
*You know every guy in here tonight
would like to take you home
But I’ve got way more class than them
and that ain’t what I want
'Cause I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
And I’d like to check you for ticks*
Rock musicians, with a few rare exceptions (Bowling for Soup and Fountains of Wayne, for example), take themselves way too seriously.
Musically, typical country vocal harmonies are quite different from the types of harmonies you usually hear in rock. Different instrumentation has already been mentioned, but there’s also the matter of how the instruments are played. A four-piece country band consisting of two guitars, bass, and drums sounds different from a rock band with identical instrumentation, simply because the style of playing is different. Even when playing the same song.
A couple weeks ago at work, one of the managers was ribbing my coworker for listening to country music. He teases about it a lot. Hearing him, I wandered over and said to my coworker, “You know why he doesn’t like country music? Because it’s working man’s music!” Coworker cracked up, and the manager grinned and said, “That was actually pretty damned funny!”
As noted above, such categories are more for the convenience of marketing people. I perform pre-electricity music of various genres, and enjoy discussing these connections between songs – e.g., similariities between “Father of Country Music” Jimmy Rodgers’ yodeling and the singing of black Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson. When busking on a DC street corner, I was once bowled over to have a 70-ish black man request the Carter Family classic “Wildwood Flower”. He was equally surprised that I knew it.
Playing the guitar in the lap with a steel bar (whence the term “steel guitar”) was indeed invented (in the western hemisphere) by Hawaiian musicians. So all steel guitar can be said to have come from from Hawaii. The Hawaiians also invented the innovation of ‘choking’ the strings (pulling on them behind the bar) to raise the pitch. This led to the use of foot pedals to automate the process, which is now most commonly associated with the ‘crying’ pedal steel in country music (and the lesser known ‘sacred steel’ in black gospel music.)
Charley Pride well before him, as well, but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule.