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:
“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?
It sounds no more.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)