Why does Europeans never want to listen to country music?

maybe this is all over-inflated in my mind because of lolGeir, but at the risk of making a vast cultural overgeneralization it does seem to me like of all the types of music America has energetically exported to the rest of the world, country music is the one that never caught on. Jazz, rock, hip hop - all of these have their fanatical non-American devotees. It's roots are, like numerous other more popular American musical subgenres, a combination of African-American and European immigrant cultures. Lyrically it covers all kinds of universal themes. It's more often than not populist and catchy. But country seems to occupy a peculiarly all-American place in global culture, and I'm not sure why this is. All answers/speculation that are not from Geir are welcome...

and I think this applies to non-European countries too. I don't think Hank Williams is huge in Brazil, although there may be some subculture in Japan that is obsessed with Buck Owens, I dunno...

the Brits adored country music

uh this should be on I Love Music. shit. mods!

There have been plenty of country singles that have made #1 in the UK charts.

now or 40 years ago?

It was the BBC who made that excellent Lost Highway doc series on country music.

Garth Brooks was (is?) massive in the UK and Ireland

Need I remind you of the Stones' fascination with country? Or the English folk movement?

there's a show on one of the satellite channels that features Irish, UK and American Country. it's not really singles chart massive over here but there's a huge fanbase still. and the Germans seem to be pretty keen too, there's a bunch of German country bands.

They just don't have their own country traditions over there, though. I mean, Irish country music is analogous to something like The Chieftains.

"For us, 'American' represents the westerns, Texas, the Indians, freedom," said Dominique, who lived near Dijon and was dressed in jeans, boots, a shirt emblazoned with American flags, a cowboy hat and carried a pistol strapped to her hips. Her husband, a retired railway worker, was outfitted in similar garb. "For decades we've only listened to country music," she added. "No French music, only country music and bluegrass."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/travel/08iht-festival.1.7019482.html

there's a bunch of German country bands

This is fabulous news. I'll be on youtube if anyone needs me.

i used to know a little drunk guy who wore a stetson and called himself Tex btw.

Country and Irish is its own, terrifying thing. It's basically all my hometown radio station plays

germany LOVES country music.

country music and Manowar.

i mean, there is a reason that the bear family exists in germany and not here. they are addicted over there.

Scandinavians are pretty good at cranking out alt.country now and then.

given that Tejano music is a fusion of German & Mexican musics, I'd think there'd be a way for that kinda rootsy thing to cross over there. At a festival in Munich one summer I heard a local oompah band cover "Mendocino", a start.

i mean, there is a reason that the bear family exists in germany and not here. they are addicted over there.

― scott seward, Monday, April 25, 2011 11:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

otm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAE9Hylcj48&feature=related

Hull Trawlermen were often into their cowboy culture, i guess they thought of the sea as being like the open range, which accounts for our Rugby club's theme song.

5 CDs and a 120 page book. wow. want. go germany.

http://www.bear-family.de/out/1/html/0/dyn_images/z1/bcd16094.jpg

http://cdn.healthhabits.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/myth-busted.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1BDRerUtMQ

Need I remind you of the Stones' fascination with country?

yeah and Jagger's take on it is ... conflicted to say the least. also Stones/Beatles not necessarily representative of general populace music-tastewise.

Or the English folk movement?

uh, I'm gonna let this one go lol

i mean, there is a reason that the bear family exists in germany and not here. they are addicted over there.

this is a good point, hadn't occurred to me!

Happy to learn that I am just wrong and Geir is weird. Am currently surveying my Hungarian in-laws for how they feel about it.

English:
5-CD boxed set (LP-size) with 120-page hardcover book. 124 tracks; playing time approx. 6 hrs 25 mns. -- 'The single most important event in the history of country music.' (JOHNNY CASH, on the 1927 Bristol sessions). This is the foundation of country music! An unsurpassed storehouse of traditional American music, featuring the first recordings by the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The legendary sessions issued complete for the first and only time, including the ultra-rare follow-up sessions from 1928! -- The recording trip made by Victor Records to Bristol, Tennessee in July-August 1927 was a defining moment in country music. Producer Ralph Peer found two acts that acquired national and international fame: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. But more than a hundred other recordings were made at the Bristol sessions of 1927 and '28. There were ballad singers, street evangelists, string bands, gospel quartets, harmonica virtuosos, Holiness preachers, blues guitarists and rural storytellers. A snapshot of rural American music was caught in an era of rapid change: pictures of a past almost beyond recall, but preserved for ever in these magnificent recordings. -- The five CDs in this set gather every surviving recording from these sessions, including alternative takes. The accompanying 120-page, LP-sized hardcover book contains newly researched essays on the background to the sessions and on the individual artists, with many rare and unpublished photographs. Also included are complete song lyrics and a detailed discography, illustrated with reproductions of the original recording sheets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_l9T1iM84k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTfWTqQ0dM

Read the "Herre" of "Hot in Herre" in German in my head

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERVZYGAzJcU

Never heard of these particular artists, but this displays most of the defining characteristics of Country and Irish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP5n0yflDZo

My aunts in Kerry would be so down with this.

Scandinavians are pretty good at cranking out alt.country now and then.

Yeah, whatserface from Bettie Serveert had a side project called Chitlin' Fooks that were pretty much this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcs7loUWwzo

sorry but the Netherlands isn't in Scandinavia iirc?

Not that this says anything representative about national taste, but Germany did send a decent pop-country song to Eurovision a couple of years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQqRNq9YqYw

Ah, for some reason I was confusing Bettie Serveert w/ The Cardigans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbi2i0j0k9M

mo dutch country

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ8mY1C89po

I like the skiffle beat of that German Eurovision song but it's not really...country? That Dutch business qualifies just fine. I think it's in the swing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Ly_b6rS-g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js

I guess that skiffle was coming straight out of country, so you could argue that it's actually deep in the dna of british rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbAh1DvvtL0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qjNyHsWD7g

Whoever moved this thread I haet you because you're making me read ILM. Also I just tried to post 3 times and couldn't figure out why I only got a blank screen.

SO ANYWAY. That Pussycat song is great, AND youtube tells me they're playing in Brooklyn in May...??

The skiffle-style beat is way prevalent in country music up until the last 30 years or so.

Friend of mine linked this on Facebook the other day. More Country & Irish hotness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KulZbuZFet4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8HnzjBXG9k

IT'S NOT THE SKIFFLE, IT'S THE LACK OF SWING. Although thanks for all these youtubes because they are a treat.

Country clearly came from the Irishes and Britishes that settled in Appalachia a couple centuries ago, right? Especially Irishes. It's no wonder there are a lot of traditional Irish touches in early American country, and it still carries over in some smaller ways now.

Yeah, I take Appalachian clogging and highland dance classes, I am somewhat aware of these ties. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh4rJaXmF7I

the scots and irish all grew up on john wayne films it seems

no fucking examples i said

Don't think this hasn't been mentioned yet:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_xOcdlFOsr4s/S9QNa5tXSPI/AAAAAAAACTE/smCvkjrqB1U/s1600/oprygovan%20%281024x768%29.jpg

Sydney's signature tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9-X2BQioSI

Scandinavia also has a lot of "Dance Hall"-bands, originally a Swedish concept, I think. Popular primarily with older people, and in rural areas. Some of it sounds like really, really bad country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wsdRwylUu4

Less country, more dance hall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r_qVUCYkN0

It was interesting to hear the Proper farewell To Ireland box after familiarity with more popular bits of country and rock'n'roll and hear where certain elements come from. & most of that is 1st and 2nd generation Irish so hasn't had a chance to morph into something else like rural hillbilly and other regional forms had after a few generations. & that would be more the source of Irish music into the roots of country I would assume though probably find with a bit of research that the influence & interplay with both more modern forms of Irish/Scottish/other national forms was more complex.
Just thinking that a lot of folk and blues songs had roots in tunes actually written for stage performances/musicals that had become pretty much folk through popularity of playing. & after several years people forgetting that the source was originally more artificial. That is to say music written specifically for stage performance becoming leaked and brought into almost a folk canon by being played by people who weren't referring back to sheet music and possibly weren't aware of such a thing existing.
Also wondering what the crossover between players in bands that had been playing Irish music and those later playing country etc. In the case of the bands on Farewell To Ireland set at the time, the 20s and 30s those recorded seemed to consist to a great degree of people in Police and I think Fire Brigade bands. But I'd wonder about people being able to go professional which at the time didn't seem to be as yet an option but might become one as recording became more popular and then being the people being brought in to back early country/western artists. Not really sure where the pool of players for country music came from in the early days.
Also that in reading the Hank Williams book that I'm currently reading there is a distinction being made between country players & western players. Country is more rural, like fresh off the farm whereas Western is more sophisticated. & there was a major move of people from very rural areas towards living in local towns in the early years of teh 20th century, maybe more after WW1 or the depression, leaving more urbanised people looking down on them. I think you seee examples of this in cartoons/films from the era where you do get characters introduced as out and out hicks/country bumpkins.

Which in short was my rumination on the idea that country in Ireland was represented by bands like The Chieftains. Very much the wrong direction of influence I would think.
& I am aware of artists like Big Tom and several others who do represent what Country & Irish actually means. Very maudlin side of country.

Not bad for my fluey head, grammar not perfect.

Interesting to note that people like Blixa Bargeld of Einsturzende Neubauten are major country fans. Not sure what the story is on Country-rock bands elsewhere in Europe. I think the Rockingbirds were quite popular when they were around in the mid 80s. & there have been waves of country/Western related bands in the UK pretty much ever since the style codified.

sorry there should have been a break after the sentence about Blixa. I heard he was studying pedal steel guitar a few years ago.

Before the Irish start getting the credit for everything, as usual, I don't think the Irish settlers in those places in the US where C+W developed were very Irish.

It just happened that the early recordings set I had was Irish, early 20th century. There are other bits in the make up of the musics like German and other folk musics, hymns etc. But there are recognisable elements you hear in bits of that music that you do hear in later c&w and rock'n'roll.

Also that the thought was triggered by the reference to the Chieftains not somebody like Ougenweide or Malicorne or Battlefield band or whoever.

xpost tell me more!!

tangential to thread subject, I was in Omagh earlier this year for the bluegrass festival (which is apparently the largest outside N.A.?)—quite surprised, then amused, to see Irish blokes dressed up as Confederate soldiers (who were, I take it, no less impressed to meet REAL LIVE AMERICAN SOUTHERNERS)—I also became #1 superfan of a shit-hot band of siblings who looked to be barely secondary-school-aged; asked the youngest how an irish kid gets into bluegrass music and she replied "well, our mum's been bringing everyone to the festival since before I was born, so..."

(bluegrass music, in case anyone's confused about it, is not actually 'traditional' here or anywhere else, but the WW2-era result of jazz influence on appalachian string bands... frequently appears alongside 'celtic' on radio programs & in record stores, tho)

to see Irish blokes dressed up as Confederate soldiers

Well you were in Ulster after all

xpost tell me more!!

Well, you know how in the US there's the Irish and the Scotch-Irish? And everybody seems fine with the Irish, 'cos they're all cute and twinkly and put-upon and oppressed, while the Scotch-Irish are all sort of grumpy and intense and rebarbative (a bit like Van Morrison)...

are they the same as ulster-scots tom? i'm guessing so but i don't want to ignore a vital splinter section anywhere

What, a bunch of headbangers from Ayrshire? Probably.

are they the same as ulster-scots tom? i'm guessing so but i don't want to ignore a vital splinter section anywhere

― Victims’ tears deter rodent paedophiles (darraghmac), Thursday, October 3, 2013 8:43 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes. and most of appalachia was settled by these folks

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?