WESTERN MUSIC (NORTH AMERICA)

'Western Music', directly related to the old English, Scottish, and Irish folk ballads, was originally composed by and about the people settling and working in the American West and western Canada.^[1] Mexican music, especially in the American Southwest, also somewhat influenced its development. Country music had similar origins but developed in the Appalachians to suit the people of that region.

Contents

An account of Western Music

Western Music

List of singers

Listen to

See also

Notes

Bibliography

External links

An account of Western Music

In the Southwestern United States mix of ethnic groups from Mexico, the British Isles, Germany, and the Czech Republic created the music that became the Western music of the term Country Western. [1] Guitars, fiddles, and the accordion are the most common instruments used in Western music.
N. Howard Thorp's ''Songs of the Cowboys'' (1908) was the first book of Western Music published. Popular west of the Mississippi, it included many songs of unknown authorship, but it included the first popular cowboy song, ''"Little Joe, The Wrangler"'', which was written by Thorpe.^[2] The book, however, included no musical notation.
John Lomax, in his 1910 publication, ''Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads'', first gained national attention for Western Music. His book contained many of the same songs as Thorp's book (he collected most of them before Thorp's was published). However, Lomax's compilation included many musical scores.
With the advent of radio and recording devices the music found an audience previously ignored by music schools and Tin Pan Alley. Many Westerners preferred familiar music about themselves and their environments.
The first successful cowboy band to tour the East was Otto Gray's Oklahoma Cowboys put together by William McGinty, an Oklahoma pioneer and former Rough Rider. The band appeared on radio and toured the vaudeville circuit from 1924 through 1936. They recorded few songs however, so are overlooked by many scholars of Western Music.^[3]
With the romanticization of the cowboy in the following decades, the music attracted a much greater audience. Film producers in Hollywood and New York City began incorporating fully orchestrated four-part harmonies into their motion pictures and recordings, something far from its folk roots but still Western. In its heyday, the 1930s and 1940s, the most popular recordings and musical radio shows such as the National Barn Dance of the era were of Western music. Western swing also developed during this era.
By the 1960s, Western music was in decline. Relegated to the ''Country and Western'' genre by the marketing agencies, popular Western recording stars released albums to only moderate success. ''Rock and Roll'' dominated music sales and the Hollywood recording studios dropped most of their Western artists. Caught unawares by the boom in ''Country and Western'' sales from Nashville that followed, Hollywood rushed to cash in. In the process, ''Country and Western'' music lost its regionalism and most of its style. Except for the label, much of the music was indistinguishable from ''Rock and Roll'' or ''Popular''. Some Western music traditionalists resent the blurring of ''"Western"'' in a ''Country and Western'' category that no longer represents them, but the name is too well ingrained to be changed.
Still, many Westerners prefer music about themselves, their culture, and the land around them. Older music is still available at retail stores in major population centers, through mail-order, or by the internet. New Western music is constantly written and recorded, and performed all across the American West and western Canada.
Traditional Western Music used the voice, and the guitar, with other instruments as to the musician's taste, with one major exception: Percussion and percussive sounds were missing from most if not all performances. This article links to a very traditional version of ''Home on the Range'' that is done in traditional Western music style. Modern Western Music pays more heed to time signatures, emphasis and beat. Much western music with a percussive flavor is Western Swing, and not traditional Western. Many traditional performers tried to create the image of a working cowboy, and therefore avoided instruments that could not be carried on a horse. Today this has been diluted significantly, and even Riders in the Sky have a bunkhouse bass which carries some of the rhythm on their Western Swing numbers.
In recent years, Riders in the Sky have actively recorded a mix of Western and Western Swing and have won Grammy Awards for their work with Disney on ''Toy Story 2'' and ''Monsters, Inc''.

Western Music

Traditional ballads include; "Home on the Range", "Sweet Betsy from Pike", "Ceilito Lindo", "Red River Valley", and "Streets of Laredo".
Songs during the height of popularity include; "Cool Water", "Cattle Call", "Tumbling Tumbleweeds", "Carry Me Back to the Lone Prairie", "Happy Trails", and "Back in the Saddle Again".

List of singers

Artists include:

★ Bitoy

★ Francis Magalona

★ Gene Autry

★ Rick Devin

★ Girls of the Golden West

★ Patsy Montana

★ Bob Nolan

★ Riders in the Sky

★ Tex Ritter

★ Marty Robbins

★ Roy Rogers

★ Sons of the Pioneers

★ John I. White
''(these lists need expansion and clarification)''

Listen to

The Western Music Channel from Heartland Public Radio.
The Western Music Channel is the world's only radio station featuring commercial-free Western/Cowboy music 24-hours-a-day along with Marvin O'Dell's "Around The Campfire." The station features classic Western cuts from the likes of Gene Autry, Sons of the Pioneers, Tex Ritter and Patsy Montana along with the latest in contemporary Western music from greats like Don Edwards, Chris LeDoux, Michael Martin Murphy, Riders in the Sky and many others.

See also

★ Country and Western

★ Tejano

★ Western swing

★ Western Music Association

Notes

1. Lomax, ''Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads'', Collector's Note: "Out in the wild, far-away places of the big and still unpeopled west,—in the caňons along the Rocky Mountains, among the mining camps of Nevada and Montana, and on the remote cattle ranches of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona,—yet survives the Anglo-Saxon ballad spirit that was active in secluded districts in England and Scotland even after the coming of Tennyson and Browning. ... In some such way have been made and preserved the cowboy songs and other frontier ballads contained in this volume."
2. Thorp, ''Songs of the Cowboys'', 1921, p. 96: "'Little Joe, The Wrangler', by N. Howard Thorp. Written by me on the trail of herd of O Cattle from Chimney Lake, New Mexico, to Higgins, Texas, 1898. ... It was copyrighted and appeared in my first edition of ''Songs of the Cowboys'', published in 1908.
3. ''Early Cowboy Band'': "While Gray has long been acknowledged as an important figure, genuine respect for his achievements and acknowledgement of just how influential the Oklahoma Cowboys were has been grudging. This is partly due to the understandable tendency among country music historians to focus chiefly on recordings as a measure of an artist's importance."

Bibliography

★ Cannon, Hal. ''Old Time Cowboy Songs''. Gibbs Smith. ISBN 0-87905-308-9

★ Green, Douglas B. ''Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy''. Vanderbilt University Press, August 2002. ISBN 0-8265-1412-X

★ Lomax, John A., M.A. ''Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads''. The MacMillan Company, 1918.

★ O'Neal, Bill; Goodwin, Fred. ''The Sons of the Pioneers''. Eakin Press, 2001. ISBN 1-57168-644-4

★ Otto Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys. ''Early Cowboy Band''. British Archive of Country Music, 2006. CD D 139

★ Thorp, N. Howard "Jack". ''Songs of the Cowboys''. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908, 1921.

★ White, John I. ''Git Along Little Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West.'' (Music in American Life) series, University of Illinois Press, 1989 reprint. ISBN-10 0252060709

External links

★ Recording of cowboy singer and author Jim Bob Tinsley performing "Back in the Saddle Again" in 1984; from the Florida Folklife Collection (made available for public use by the State Archives of Florida)

★ The Academy of Western Artists

★ The Western Music Association

★ a lengthy online bibliography regarding the "singing cowboy" phenomenon

★ Cowboy Song Corral

★ 'Real Country Lyrics' Classic Country/Cowboy/Western Lyrics