Reviews for Singing cowboys and musical mountaineers

The average rating for Singing cowboys and musical mountaineers based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-24 00:00:00 Sameer Kagade Back in the 1950s, when they were collecting old 78s from the 20s and 30s from the ancient relicts of the Appalachians (and the suburbs of Washington DC) they found that most of the blues records were worn to buggery and had more surface noise than a nationwide bacon-frying contest, but most of the old timey records were in pretty good condition. Joe Bussard explains this strange discrepancy thus : black people played their records a million times each and when they got pretty worn out they used to put half a brick on the arm of the phonograph to encourage it to play the record just that one more time. The white folks played their records two or three times and by then they'd learned the song and didn't play it no more. This is a great little book on that early magical time in America when there was all this stuff and everybody played it. And the record companies were only just getting started and didn't know what was going to sell, so they recorded everything. It's wonderful when business people get all confused like that. It allows the lunatics to run in behind their backs and whoop it up a little bit before the janitor chases them all out again.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-03-25 00:00:00 Cynthia Hillman Country music's first great book-writing scholar does a superb job here of briefly exploring the Southern world that gave birth to commercial country and western music. He argues that true rural white Southern music was virtually given no consideration until the 1910's when John Lomax and Cecil Sharp released their folk song books, and so we have very little information on what rural white Southern music was truly like in the nineteenth century. He also argues that the "celtic" or otherwise European influence on Appalachian balladry is overstated in studies and that a great amount of material that mountain folk played for each other was simply the pop tunes of the day (doesn't that sound familiar). The third and final chapter on the symbolism embodied by country music's early and continuing obsession with the cowboy versus the mountaineer was a little more familiar to me, but still intriguing that we consistently play into these well-defined symbols. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what conditions led to country music's commercial development and its struggle for an identity.