Country Music Genealogy
April 15th, 2008 by vincebates
In his comment on a previous post, Joe wondered how to define “country” music. As I understand it, country music never has been clearly separated from other popular musics and it has always been evolving. Rather than a presentation of country music’s history, country music education might involve more of an “exploration” and “discovery.” In my “Enjoyment of Music” course, for example, I give a music genealogy assignment that goes something like this.
Step 1: Choose a favorite current musical artist.
Step 2: Research this individual on the internet (wikipedia and youtube)
Step 3: Choose someone who influenced the music of the individual in Step 1
Step 4: Research the individual from Step 3 . . . choose one of their influences . . . and so on until you can’t go any further.
I have really enjoyed seeing the reports (some excellent slide shows) from these projects. The point here is that I think this would be an excellent way to approach the history of country music. There are no country music history textbooks as far as I can tell and so a country music curriculum would have to be developed from scratch (and maybe that’s appropriate relative to the “make do with what you have” spirit in much of country music) and, from my perspective, this is not necessarily a disadvantage. For some students this type of project can be a real eye-opener as they “discover” the diverse styles that contributed to country music.
I took a course on country music through my university a few years ago. Blase Scarnati was the professor and it was an online course. Amazing amounts of media content and, for a girl who doesn’t like country, very informative and interesting. Here’s his faculty page: http://www.cal.nau.edu/music/faculty/scarnati.asp. As far as I know the course is still available!
[…] The way Vince Bates understands country music it never has been clearly separated from other popular musics and has always been evolving. So how do you define “country” music? […]
I’m going to use this for my Music Appreciation class “final” project (expanded to include rock or alt or whatever the kids want to research). Thanks for the great idea!
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