Country Music Birthplace
Ironically, at the very time that Tennessee’s rural culture was under attack by sophisticated, urban critics, its music found a national audience.
In 1925, WSM, a powerful Nashville radio station, began broadcasting a weekly program of live music which soon was dubbed the "Grand Ole Opry." Such music came in diverse forms: banjo-and-fiddle string bands of Appalachia, family gospel singing groups, and country vaudeville acts like that of Murfreesboro native Uncle Dave Macon.
Still the longest-running radio program in American history, the Opry used the new technology of radio to tap into a huge market for "old time" or "hillbilly" music.
Two years after the Opry’s opening, in a series of landmark sessions at Bristol, Tennessee, field scout Ralph Peer of the Victor Company recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to produce the first nationally popular rural records.
Tennessee thus emerged as the heartland of traditional country music — home to many of the performers as well as the place from which it was broadcast to the nation.
Read more about this topic: History Of Tennessee
Famous quotes containing the words country, music and/or birthplace:
“I know our country disposition well;
In Venice they do let God see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience
Is not to leave’t undone, but keep’t unknown.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)