re: Amazon Music Documentary Says Country Music is Black Music

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Country-Western - you know, BOTH KINDS of music

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Tip of my hat to you, sir. The first person in the thread to make THAT particular reference.

Little Richard was quoted as saying that country music was the white man's blues.

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You realize other cultures use those same notes and have different scales

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How much of that music is played on country radio?

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And some most early American folk musicians couldn’t read music and picked thing sup by ear. Leading to things like blues scales. Which weren’t an intentionally deviation of a European scale but reflections of other cultural influences.

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The progressions are still based on european standards and work the same way. 1-5-4, 1-4-5. The same things still work together, and the same things don't. It can't be changed, because that's how the instruments work. You can tune your guitar any way you want, but it's still going to work the same way, and if you want to play with anyone else, yall are going to get on the same program together, and that means tuning a certain way.

I thought Burns did a fair job with it. But you know with Amazon they will do it much worse and of course white man bad this and that.

Pretty close but it did pick up on some other cultures as it evolved.

Again, Europeans didn’t invent those notes to sound good together.

The tones harmonize and sound good together. Europeans invented a lot of the instruments we play music on (we are a
Western culture) but they tunes those instruments to notes that natural sound good together.

They people tuned them other ways and played them other ways because that sounded good.

But saying all music is European because we
Use European scales is a cause and effect mistake. Also there is no prototypical banjo in Europe. That’s an American south invention with African roots. Literally popularized in Europe by American minstrel shows who were white peoplempretending to be black and thus playing banjos.

So is all banjo music African? I would Say no.

But it’s worth noting origins.

Country music has been around since before America broke off from Britain. If anyone has read Hamilton's "Itinerarium" of 1744, he talks about the Scots and Irish immigrants playing the fiddle and singing folk songs. And this was in New England, not Appalachia.

Another interesting thing is he said Americans often greeted each other with "How dy'e" (Howdy). This was 1744 New England, not Texas.

When's the last time Garth Brooks ever called someone a ni... (you know the rest) in one of his songs?

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The tones harmonize and sound good together. Europeans invented a lot of the instruments we play music on (we are a
Western culture) but they tunes those instruments to notes that natural sound good together.

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Wrong. It is a mathematical formula. It's not random.
I have 5 guitars hanging here that I play every day. All 5 are tuned a different way, but every string still works the same way. Correctly tuned, each string will progressively get higher at each fret, exactly in tune with the keys on a piano. C-C#-D-D#-E-F... The String might be tuned to E, D or G when played open, but it's still going to progress in that same exact pattern. D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#...when it gets to the 12th fret, it just repeats the same thing an octave higher. The instruments are built that way on purpose, based on the European standard. Instruments from other parts of the world, didn't use that standard, although they probably do nowadays.

I’ve watched 2-3 different documentaries on the origins of Bluegrass and Country music and there were some black musicians that date to the origins of Bluegrass and Country music but I wouldn’t say they were sole originators of the genres.