Country music has evolved over the years

It was the music we loved to hate. Or was it the music we hated to love.

It’s been tough all my life deciding where I really stand on country music but the thing I know for sure is I’ve been exposed to the genre in all its various iterations all my life.

I’ve been tuning into the Ken Burns PBS special series Country Music this past week and I’m not sure if it’s helped me work that out in my mind but it has brought up lots of memories.

I have to admit I was worried how well PBS might portray the subject. I really have liked and respected the work Burns has done in the past and this series is just as rich in feeling and history and just as well researched.

I knew, but I didn’t fully appreciate how intertwined all forms of American music were from their roots. Starting with the Carter family singing old time hill music mixed with Gospel to “The Singing Brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers who took on various styles in his short career to inspire generations of performers to come.

I remember listening to a lot of the music and artists featured on the first four episodes of the series on a record player at my grandmother’s. In particular Rodgers and those that followed closely in his footsteps. A lot of the old Gospel standards and those Gospel songs crafted during the depression along with tons of Bob Wills and cowboy music were all right there in stacks of 45s in that dusty middle room of the three-room house.

I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to that older country music of the 1930s and ’40s without my grandmother being willing to put those records on the player. At home, my parents didn’t buy many, if any records at that time in the 1960s but they had the radio on a very different kind of country music.

Wills and Hank Williams had faded from the scene. Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Charley Pride were hot and what my folks liked. I didn’t have any choice because I didn’t get to tune the radio and even if I had been entrusted with that task there was nothing else on where we lived.

I learned all the words to the country songs on the radio in that day and time but by the time I was a teen I wouldn’t have admitted it.

I had a few guilty country pleasures. I bought Dueling Banjos because it was cool. I liked the Eagles and I loved the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Turns out the guys from NGDB got this whole strand of country music history. They put out a set of albums that captured all the music going back to the Carters, even featuring the Carters and numerous other icons of what Burns reminds us was in the early days just known as hillbilly music.

The music evolved over the years and not always for the best. These days I find most of country music hard to tolerate. But I guess, like country music always has, the music is just following the market.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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