Sing, Sing a Song...

[dcseain]

Kenny Rogers' The Gambler came on the radio while i was on the way to work. Singing along with it took me back 16 years, to my many weekend visits to Cornell, where a lot of my friends went to school. Where I would stand in the stairwell of the North Campus student union and sing country and western standards while other danced. Happy times that. I don't get to sing enough nowadays.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

As you may know, I used to be a country and western DJ - and I've got a head stuffed full of just about every song (country, rock, and anything else) I've ever heard. Maybe next year at That Pagan Festival, we can go out into the woods and serenade the trees with old Hank Williams tunes...

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

That could be much fun. We'll see how next year works out. :)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

And I can always fake an alto part to just about any simple melody...

"The silence of a fallin' star
Lights up a purple sky,
And, as I wonder where you are,
I'm so lonesome I could cry..."

[forexample.livejournal.com]

While I'm not a country and western fan I can get into Hank Williams.

(What's the difference between country and western, by the way?)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Originally (from the very first recordings in the early 20th century, up through the 1950s), "country" was "hillbilly music" - Appalachian ballads, bluegrass, barn dancing, that sort of thing. "Western" was cowboy songs. There was enough overlap that they often got lumped together. Slowly, cowboy music went out of fashion, and country music absorbed more and more elements of whatever popular music was doing at any given time. However, country music would also go through periodic cycles of "going back to its roots", which usually involved re-introducing twangy guitars, pedal steel guitar, and fiddle, along with nasal hillbilly voices. (And an awful lot of heavy metal songs could be country songs with nothing but a change in the instrumentation - take away the fuzztone, add twang, maybe slow it down a touch.)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

You left out what, to me, is another key difference: Western yodels, Country doesn't.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I was about to say that that may have been true early on, but yodeling eventually crossed over into country as well. And then I remembered Jimmy Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmie_Rodgers_%28country_singer%29), sometimes also known as "The Father Of Country Music", who was known for his distinctive "blue yodels". So country music included yodeling from the beginning. I think even ole Hank yodeled once in a while, although that might have been in his "Luke The Drifter" persona.

(Incidentally, I can't yodel.)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Excellent point! I'd forgotten about Appalachie yodelling. Though Western yodel and country yodel do differ, if have overlap in TX/OK region. You won't get features like '...out in the West Texas wi-i-i-i-ind...' in country, that musical ornamation is a direct descendent of Westen Yodel. You'll find such features in Linda Ronstadt's work and in Mexican Mariachi and Folklorico works also, among others, which of course has a common root with Western. Blues/Appalacie yodel is more true yodel, but more of the Germanic tradition, or do you disagree?

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

It's unclear where the yodeling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodel) in both Appalachian and Western music came from. There were undoubtedly Germanic settlers in Appalachia... but Mexico was a German colony for a significant time ("¡Adiós, Mama Carlota!"). I suspect both American yodeling styles are ultimately Germanic in origin, but evolved along slightly different paths before converging again.