I recently caught up with Ken Burns’s latest documentary, Country Music, which aired this fall on PBS. Because I regularly participate in country western dancing, I was particularly interested in the initial episodes of the documentary exploring the genre's origins.

In general terms, what we know as country music is an amalgam of several kinds of music—among them, music associated with working-class Americans in the Appalachian region; Scottish, British, Irish and Celtic folk songs and fiddle tunes; ballads, minstrel music, blues, and the traditions of various immigrant groups who settled in the Southeastern United States. As illustrated by Burns, country music and its origins were never static but kept on evolving, continually influenced by a variety of musical sources.

How Country Music Is Catalogued

Exploring the origins of country music through a library catalog can be challenging—not only because of the amorphous and evolving history of the genre’s roots, or that the phrase "country music" was used infrequently before the 1950s. The challenge is also due to the way libraries organize and classify this music. Virtually all libraries in the United States (and many elsewhere) rely on the Library of Congress for guidance in organizing their catalogs. The overwhelming advantage of adhering to a single system is that, no matter where you are, library catalogs behave the same way.

Following the Library of Congress, libraries prescribe the subject heading "Country music" only for music after the 1940s.  For country music of earlier periods, the Library of Congress says the heading should be "Old-time music." The explanation they provide is as follows:

"Here is entered country music of the 1930’s and earlier periods played and sung in the old-time styles as well as music of later periods performed in those styles."

The unfortunate aspect of having two separate subject headings is that one cannot see the visual breakdown by decade for the entire century that catalogs typically provide for genres that have stable headings.  

Another hurdle is the Music & Recorded Sound Division catalog. More than 100,000 scores acquired before 1972 are not included in our online catalog. Instead, one must consult the 45-volume "black book" catalog to see our holdings of musical scores. (A number of items were recently cataloged specifically for this blog post.)

Following the Evolution of Early Country Music

It’s interesting to see how many early publications plant the seeds of what was to blossom as country music. The NYPL Music & Recorded Sound Division has a number of interesting items, some of which can be considered fairly rare (based on the lack of copies in other libraries). The material below provides interesting documentation of country music’s origins.

Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) was a British music teacher and folk music collector who spent decades researching the folk music of Great Britain. In search of this repertoire, he spent several years in the United States, exploring the Appalachian region for folk songs of English origin. Grove Music Online, the leading encyclopedia of music in English, credits Sharp with spurring interest among Americans to document and collect American folk music. The result of his work was the publication of several volumes of folk songs from Appalachia.  

The Music & Recorded Sound Division has Sharp’s publications and something more. During his American sojourn, Sharp collected and notated nearly 5,000 songs, which he entered into notebooks. While the original notebooks reside at Harvard University, the Music & Recorded Sound Division has photostats of this collection, bound into 13 hefty volumes. It is a treasure trove of material documenting the music sung in Southern Appalachia a century ago.

Perhaps one of the publications inspired by Sharp’s work was the 1917 publication, Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains by Josephine McGill.

Looking at the contents of this collection, one can clearly see the reasons for Sharp’s interest.  The use of appellations in song titles such as "Lady Gay," "Lord Lovel," "Lord Randal" and "Lord Thomas" strongly reveal British origins or antecedents. The collection also includes "Barbara Allen," a well-known song of Scottish origin.

A few commentators faulted Burns’s documentary for not focusing more on the African American origins of country music. One obvious influence is the blues, a creation of African Americans. With its meteoric popularity in the years prior to World War I, blues music migrated from the exclusive domain of African Americans to a genre of popular music. At one point, it seemed as if every popular songwriter appended the word "blues" to a title to be up-to-date with current musical fashions. (Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and many others all wrote songs with "blues" in the title, even if the songs were not strictly blues,) The genre has always been an essential influence on country music.  Many of the most famous blues songs, particularly those written by W.C. Handy, composer of "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues," and "Yellow Dog Blues" have been reprinted many times. Pictured below is Handy's "Memphis Blues" from 1912, with the copy below printed in 1914. The Music & Recorded Sound Division has many original or early editions, and many lesser-known blues songs, the genre representing a substantial contribution to country music. 

One of the more unusual collections of ephemera in the Music & Recorded Sound Division is a collection of posters advertising social dancing in New Jersey, which includes an item from 1932 that clearly illustrates what we recognize as country music: a barn dance with music played by a band known as The Jungle Hicks. (It’s amusing to see that, in 1932, the town of West New York was primarily farmland. Today, Wikipedia refers to it as "one of the most densely populated municipalities in the United States.")

The Influence of Broadcast and Recorded Media 

Until the 20th century, printed music served as the main vehicle through which music could be disseminated. The presence and growth of radio and recordings changed this equation. People no longer needed to know how to read music or play an instrument; they could simply turn on their devices and listen. Today, we take for granted easy access to recorded music.

The folios below capture aspects of the shift from a musically literate public to one that relied on the ubiquity and accessibility of recorded and broadcast media.

Broadcast and recorded media did more than simply provide accessibility. It is generally acknowledged that the merging of various genres into what we know as country music was the result of radio and recording companies’ desire to promote and increase the market for this music. Consequently, one often sees references to mechanical media on the covers of published music, both a desire to show familiarity and a subtle marketing device. Many of these examples show the tie-in between the published music and the way it was disseminated.

The Burns documentary appropriately gave much time to musicians The Carter Family, whose early popularity was due to the wide distribution of their recordings.

Underscoring the dependence on recorded media, the table of contents from the 1934 publication, The Carter Family: Album of Smokey Mountain Ballads lists not only the page number of the song, but the record number of the corresponding Victor recording.
 

The Burns documentary made it seem as if Johnny Cash was the main promulgator of the link between country music and prison, but this theme had long been associated with country music. Song collections from the early 1930s reflect the thoughts and feelings of the incarcerated, as illustrated in this 1932 folio, 33 Prison and Mountain Songs (for Home Folks), which reflects the intertwining of prison life with life in the Appalachian mountains.  

Here’s a similar publication from 1933, the Hill-Billy Prisoner and Mountaineer Song Folio, No. 1.

This publication,  which carries the words "prison" and "mountain," adds the word "hill-billy" or hillbilly. Though it's now considered a derogatory term, in the early 1930s, record companies, publishers, and promoters used "hillbilly" briefly as a catch-all word to describe the diverse body of musical sources that were eventually combined and renamed "country music."

What I find interesting about the publication Hill Billy Favorites from 1935 are the various references and descriptions on its cover. "Home and fireside songs that reach the heart"—in other words, song texts that are deliberately intended to move the listener, definitely a quality inherent in much of country music. (Many of the song titles listed in the catalog record can evoke particularly strong emotions.) The various song styles listed on the cover also shows how a variety of styles (including "Spanish tangos") existed under the umbrella of the genre eventually renamed "country music."

Another element revealed by the Burns documentary was how the designation of country music was a product of the media. The Carter Family folio above relied on recordings to assure familiarity. By the late 1930s, cover photographs often show personalities with a representation of radio or film, either with an explicit text banner or a microphone.

The cover of Frank & James McCravy’s folio show them as the public would know them, through the radio (with very deliberate product placement by NBC).

The cover of the Tennessee Ramblers' folio made sure to say "stars of radio, records & screen".

Another example is from the Rice Brothers, who were known mostly as a radio group, and the cover of their 1942 folio calls their backup group the "radio gang." (Side note: Paul Rice claimed to be the original songwriter of the well-known song "You Are My Sunshine," although this is disputed.) 

The cover at the top of this blog post, from Song Favorites of WSM Grand Ole Opry: America's Oldest Radio Program of Folk Music, conveys the power the media had over an entire industry. The Grand Ole Opry played a major part in the dissemination of what became known as country music, accomplishing it through regular radio broadcasts—the cover, from 1942, eschews any personality images in favor of a single WSM microphone. 

Additional Resources

There are more collections of country music and its origins available in the Music & Recorded Sound Division. Our huge collection of thousands of pieces of sheet music (available on microfilm, call number *ZB-768) has many individual songs from before 1951 that can be considered "country," including many by the prolific team of Boudleaux Bryant and his wife Felice Bryant. Watching Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary is also a great way to discover and learn about country music from its origins to the present day. 

 

Country Music, Volume 1 (episodes 1-4); Volume 2 (episodes 5-8)

Country Music: Based on a documentary film by Ken Burns, written by Dayton Duncan ; with a preface by Ken Burns

Library patrons can also explore much more of this genre through the Library catalog and by visiting the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.