MUS 114 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Alan Lomax, Country Music, Murder Ballads
Document Summary
Ray charles says country music and black music are the same. Country music sold for white consumers in predominantly rural areas, but there are a lot of influences coming from african american music. Many country performers learned from african american instrumentalists. Musical influences from african american music, esp. jazz and blues. Consumers weren"t all in the country, and weren"t all necessarily white. Nostalgia for the olden times before industrialization in the cities, before mixing of races in cities. Also draws heavily from music in appalachia, old-time music, rural areas. Scientific effort to catalog music in a specific way. Also researched folk music, travelling to remote locales to collect. Alan lomax and seeger family believed in the "purity" of music, that it can be untouched by industrialization. No particular one person who wrote it can be pinned down. It was "evaluated according to concepts of unchanging musical truth" Doesn"t sound like it"s connected to the modern world.
