Country music in America has long marketed towards and embodied an eclectic blend of common folk: typically, southern, lower-class, God-fearing, hard-working, blue-collar white men, found in Appalachian homes and hollers scattered well beneath the Mason-Dixon line. From the earliest decades […]
Bluegrass music spent about four decades doing its best to try to establish a unique genre fully separated from country music. The origin came, as this column has often pointed out, on Dec. 8, 1945, with the addition of Earl […]
Jim Reeves’ 1957 single “Four Walls”, the second genre-bending Nashville Sound hit to score with pop record buyers (after Ferlin Husky’s “Gone”), put him in a unique position that year. By fall, he was hosting The Jim Reeves Show on […]
About halfway through a 1959 set at Jordan Hall in Boston, Merle Travis introduces his best-known composition, “Sixteen Tons”: “I would love to impose on you to do a little tune that I made up way back yonder when the […]
