7. Hybrid sounds

‘Hybrid sounds’ highlights southern music. The first association of music with the American South came from the presence of African American slaves. The pre-Civil War blackface minstrel shows displayed southern connections in its imagery of the plantation. After emancipation, African Americans gained employment in such groups as the Georgia Minstrels, as they moved to New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis, where they adopted the trumpet, the piano, and other instruments that soon became familiar in the music of black southerners. Sacred music, blues music, jazz, and folk music were all important musical genres which shaped Southern culture and the importance of the commercialization of African American music played a role.

Race in Country Music Scholarship

This chapter reviews how country music scholarship deals with race. It then suggests how scholarship might move forward toward a more critical stance. While evidence points toward African American innovation at the origins of country, survey histories of country music trace the music’s origins to British culture in Appalachia. Revisionist scholarship attempts to uncover black contributions in most periods of country’s history. Its most common topics are the construction of whiteness by the country music industry and the segregation of southern music in the 1920s into “race” and “hillbilly” marketing categories. This chapter ends by suggesting that country scholarship focus on race as a chief concern of the field, complicate its view of segregation, and give more attention to musical sound.