Why does Europeans never want to listen to country music?

A+ classic batshit Geirsplaining itt

yeah I had totally forgotten about it. was this his last tour-de-geir?

he's been around

bernard was the bluegrass festival held in the Ulster American Folk Park by any chance?

https://www.nmni.com/uafp

Omagh, so I would imagine so

extra jealous if so, have long had a dream of seeing exactly how dour that place is one day

yeah it was in the Folk Park. not sure how it's "dour" tho? tbqh (unless you meant "dire", in which case

mostl y I appreciated the the signage (comically different from our own)

i dunno bernard me and my wife used to drive past the park on the regularly and we built up a picture in our heads of this tribute to grim hard-working Prods pioneering their way cabin by cabin for Jesus across Americay

like "folk art as expression of know yr place under God" kinda thing

oh wait I found my notebook from that day of our* trip!!! enjoy y'all:

A BILLBOARD:
don't get caught out by
out-of-date food!!

Radio 3 announcer
rolling, with obvious relish,
the R in 'Requiem'

Lonesome River Band:

"she always knew I'd
never change / Like i knew
she'd never stay"

Small boy in 'ULSTER RUGBY'
shirt holding head & crying

(sign above large stage,
Bluegrass festival)

OMAGH DISTRICT COUNCIL
Leading...
Delivering.....
Excelling........

* = me, my father, & his father before him

also recorded in my notebook: Stirling Castle tour notes; astonishment upon hearing new Rod Stewart single "Brighton Beach" at breakfast one morning; "fresh dulse = ??"

; idea for a TV show called "(The?) Castlecats"

ok "The Castlecats" sounds awesome

Duilsk is where we eat dried seaweed.

I dont know about europeans but I can say from personal experience that Mexicans love country music. The gambler might be the top song in a non spanish language that every mexican knows by heart.

I don't know why that makes me happy, but it does.

I was obvs talking out of my ass when I said The Chieftains were Ireland's country music. Sorry, everybody.

Probably cos I have a headful of cold I neglected to point out that there was a major influx of Irish people to America in the middle of the 19th Century escaping the 'famine'. Meant that there were other irish traditions entering play than Irish scots' music.
Not sure about distribution of where they headed to settle. Have heard that there were a large number fighting on the confederate side at least partially because freed blacks would have been going for the same niche in society in terms of work that they were trying to carve out for themselves.

Famine gets quotation marks since the idea that there was a famine is a misnomer, during that time landlords still managed to export large amounts of grain.

here now there was a famine and leave it at that or take it to the brits thread and lets really kick off

hey it's not really a famine if your colonial masters have got food

Probably cos I have a headful of cold I neglected to point out that there was a major influx of Irish people to America in the middle of the 19th Century escaping the 'famine'. Meant that there were other irish traditions entering play than Irish scots' music.

Well, true, but they weren't they mostly in the North? I actually don't know though, I just assume the South isn't really the place to be celebrating St Paddy's Day.

The early Ulster immigrants and their descendants at first usually referred to themselves simply as "Irish," without the qualifier "Scotch." It was not until more than a century later, following the surge in Irish immigration after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, that the descendants of the Protestant Irish began to refer to themselves as "Scotch-Irish" to distinguish them from the predominantly Catholic, and largely destitute, wave of immigrants from Ireland in that era.[14] The two groups had little initial interaction in America, as the 18th century Ulster immigrants were predominantly Protestant and had become settled largely in upland regions of the American interior, while the huge wave of 19th-century Catholic immigrant families settled primarily in the Northeast and Midwest port cities such as Boston, New York, or Chicago. However, beginning in the early 19th century, many Irish migrated individually to the interior for work on large-scale infrastructure projects such as canals and, later in the century, railroads

The Ulster Irish migrants from the first wave were mainly originally Hugenots iirc that were brought to Ireland for farming, so there's a Low Countries source of origin really rather than an Irish one.

Now it's getting even more complicated

FWIW I don't think there's a great deal of awareness of contemporary mainstream country here in the UK. When I tell people (music enthusiasts or generalists) I am interested in country, 99% of the time they say something like "oh Dolly Parton and stuff yeah?". Taylor Swift's pretty well known, past that I don't think anyone has much of a profile (a few really switched-on people will have a sense of Toby Keith as the dude who was all "put a boot in your ass it's the American way" but not many of those would have heard the record).

That's not to say there's no following for contemporary stuff - it's a big global pop music and that spreads through the usual channels of Vimeo and so on, people get to hear stuff, people like stuff. Kacey Musgraves's audience (maybe 300 people)at the Bush Hall the other month was mostly an enthusiastic and young pop crowd, and she's booked to play the (2000-ish?) Shepherds Bush Empire this month. Think she's getting some love as the next thing to listen to if you're into Taylor.

Nevertheless, it's my view that "country" as a concept still means as steel guitars and rhinestones to the massive majority over here, and much of what's in the country chart just wouldn't code "country" to British ears (if Jon Bon Jovi has a hit single here with a song that's charted Country in the US (this may have happened for all I know), virtually no-one would recognise that sound as country music. The fact that Lionel Ritchie gets on the country charts is met with genuine surprise and sometimes incomprehension!

Ronan Keating, bless his boring cotton socks, had some hits some years back covering the more ballady end of the country charts in pretty similar versions. Again, those records just wouldn't code as country over here as far as I can tell.

Please note: the above may be completely wrong in repect of under-25s, I don't know any of them.

AN ERITH singer is ‘on cloud nine’ after winning a national competition for the second year running.

Wayne Jacobs, Riverdale Road, has scooped the National UK Country Music Award again after getting the top gong last year.

The 51-year-old discovered he had won with song I Want my Daddy on Saturday (September 7) at the ceremony in Derby.

Mr Jacobs wrote the hit based on a true story about a firefighter who was hit by a truck on a highway in Kentucky.

strange last words for a 51 yr old firefighter but im not gonna judge we'll all be there or thereabouts someday and are like to say something as bizarre in such circumstances i'm sure

ctrl-f Mumford gives me no hits on this thread, so I'll just say that there are reasons we try to keep non-Americans away from banjos.

(not that Americans are all that reliable with them either)

Billy Connolly was damn handy on a banjo. My dad saw his and Gerry Rafferty's folk act The Humblebums many a time

Garthmania hits Ireland

Country music singer Garth Brooks starts a world tour this July with five sold-out concerts at Croke Park. That's 400,000 tickets - or nearly one for every 10 Irish citizens. Why does Ireland love Garth so much, asks comedian Colm O'Regan?