H-Net Discussion Networks - Re: What makes Southern music "Southern"?

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From: Michael Bertrand <bertrand@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU>
List Editor: Michael Bertrand <bertrand@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Editor's Subject: Re: What makes Southern music "Southern"?
Author's Subject: Re: What makes Southern music "Southern"?
Date Written: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:57:03 -0000
Date Posted: Tue, 30 Jan 2006 19:57:03 -0500

I think Jeff and Adam make some good points here.
Fist of all, music that involves instrumentation
that has traditionally been associated with a
"Southern" sound, such as banjo and fiddle, can
often be heard all across the country but usually
not in the larger urban centers.  There seems to
always be a rural, small-knit communal quality to
what qualifies music as Southern or "country."

In addition, if one does a bit of research, one
would find that much of the earliest white
banjoists in the nineteenth century were not from
the South, but based in and around the Northeast.
A great book that deals with this is Karen Linn's
"That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American
Popular Culture" (1991).

David Leventhal
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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