Anyone here listen to any of the above genres? If so, what are your favorite bands?
My parents created a home in which it was forbidden to express emotions, so naturally the only one that I ever heard was anger, the one that cannot be suppressed.
Then one day I turned the radio dial (this was 1958 when radios still had dials and vacuum tubes) and I heard people singing about feelings I didn't even know existed. Longing, betrayal, regret, passion, wistfulness, revenge... I was still a rock'n'roller at heart but I became an instant fan of country music. Those people saved my life!
I haven't stuck with it over the years, if only because it has become so "cityfied" to attract a wider audience, that it sounds like a watered-down version of the old stuff. Banjos and pedal steel guitars are rare now, and the lap steel ("Dobro" is the most famous brand) is seldom heard on the radio. But sure, the best of the lot are still great: Garth Brooks, the Dixie Chicks, Gretchen Wilson, Shania Twain.
There's always been a strong Canadian presence in country music, going back to Hank Snow and beyond. How many people realize that Alannah Myles, who sang that wonderful song about Southern culture, "Black Velvet," is from Toronto!
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was not a strong distinction between rock'n'roll and country music. Johnny Cash, Don Gibson, Patsy Cline, Johnny Horton, the Everly Brothers, Jim Reeves, Sheb Wooley, Skeeter Davis, Homer & Jethro, even Elvis: there were many singers who straddled the line and were popular on both rock and country stations.
There are a lot of downright silly country songs today that I really enjoy. If you haven't heard Hayes Carll's "She Left Me For Jesus," it's a real hoot as well as fine country music. And catch the video for Joe Nichols's "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off"--it puts the lyrics into a whole different space when you finally realize who "she" is. Hank Williams Jr's "Family Tradition" is also a good time.
But they ain't got it like the old songs. Dave Dudley's "Six Days On The Road" was a truck driver singing about taking amphetamine to stay awake and dodging the scales because his rig was overloaded!
Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Kingston Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, Harry Chapin, The Lovin' Spoonful, Taj Mahal, The Everly Brothers, Johnny Cash
Folk music was really big from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. As the rock stations began to shun country music (Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" may have been the last country song to make a splash with rock fans, especially with its strong sentiment that "real" country music people looked down on us hippies, pot-head Willie Nelson notwithstanding
), a lot of folk singers popped up to take its place. Phil Ochs, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Three's a Crowd, Buffy Ste. Marie and many others, in addition to the ones you mention.
Bob Dylan was excoriated by the true folkies when he showed up with a rock band instead of by himself with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, but soon "folk-rock" was a genre unto itself. Mary Travers died a while ago and I sang "Puff the Magic Dragon" in her memory--even though she didn't sing lead on that song.
The first concert I ever attended was Josh White, an old bluesman with an acoustic guitar, in 1960. But the second one, a couple of months later, was the Kingston Trio. What a night! I've seen many more since then, probably hundreds, but one that I will always remember was Linda Ronstadt opening for Kris Kristofferson at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, circa 1970.
Since I started playing guitar in 1958, naturally I became a folksinger. I now play bass in rock bands, but occasionally I give the singer a break and do one of my old songs, like Hank Williams's "Cold Cold Heart," Jim Reeves's "He'll Have to Go," Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans" (made popular by Arlo Guthrie), Ronstadt's "Long Long Time," and Kristofferson's original version of "Me and Bobby McGee." I loathe Janis Joplin's cover. The song was a Rhodes Scholar's epitaph to the 1960s, explaining why that era simply had to come to an end. Us guys--we'd still be out there panhandlin', ridin' our motorcycles, gettin' high all the time, and sleepin' in crash pads, but OUR WOMEN GREW UP. Their bodies force it on them. I don't know if in the entire history of the human race there was ever a woman who let a man get away because HE wanted to settle down and SHE didn't! Some songs have lyrics that cannot be gender-bent, and this is one of them.
Bluegrass? Sure! The country station in my old hometown used to play Flatt & Scruggs tunes before the station breaks. I enthusiastically bought a banjo, but I never got any good with it. I saw the Dillards a few times and today there's a band named Cornmeal that plays "electric bluegrass" and it really works: amplified instruments and a drummer so they can play large halls full of rock'n'rollers, but except for their songs being four or five times as long and complex as bluegrass tunes were in the 1950s, they're otherwise fairly faithful to the genre.
