019 Appalachia, Disaster Songs, and Fiddling Contests--Early Country Music

This episodes examines country music as a popular (mass culture) entertainment prior to the Bristol Sessions of 1927. I investigate three contributing streams into the country music scene: Appalachian music, disaster songs, and the fiddling music of the string bands. I tease out certain contradictions in each in order to demonstrate that country music is an "invented tradition" that relies upon the past but reinvents that past into an image useful to its own concern with creation.