Top Country Songs

“Alone with You” is a new hot country song performed by Jake Owen. The song is the eighth single in the American country music artist’s career. “Alone with You” is included in the album “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” that was released in August, 2011.

Jake Owen is a 30-year-old American country music artist whose debut entitled “Yee How” peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. More successful was the second album “Easy Does It” that debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums and #13 on the Billboard 200. “Don’t Think I Can’t Love You” from this album peaked #2 on the Top Country Songs chart in April, 2009.

His song “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” from his third album with the same name became Owen’s number one single on the charts of top country songs. Released in October, 2011 another single “Alone with You”, that debuted at #56 on top country songs charts, peaked the number one in March, 2012.

The song “Alone with You” was written by Catt Gravitt, J. T. Harding, and Shane McAnally. Producers: Joey Moi, Rodney Clawson, and Tony Brown. The director of the music video is Mason Dixon.

Though not everybody gives applauses to the song. Billy Dukes gave 3.5 out of five claiming “Alone With You’ is miles from contrived, Owen does not own this as he has his more successful hits”…”With somewhat thin lyrical content, the song needs that genuine delivery to push it to colossal levels of greatness”. More generous was Bobby Peacock who gave 4 stars to the song saying “With the song’s darker melody and Owen’s slightly softer-than-usual performance, the internal conflict and emotions of temptation are in full force. It’s overall a very different sound for the usually upbeat Owen, and he pulls it off.”

The song already has more than 2 million views at Youtube.

“You Gonna Fly” is a number one from top country songs of 2012. The authors of the song are Preston Brust, Chris Lucas, and Jaren Johnston. It was recorded by Keith Urban for his album Get Closer. Keith Urban is an Australian country singer whose commercial success has been mainly in US and Australia.

Keith Urban performs other top country songs such as Somebody Like You, Stupid Boy, Once in a Lifetime and others. He is a four-time Grammy winner and his albums earned Platinum certifications.

Preston Burst and Chris Lucas who are famous with their country song LoCash Cowboys comprise the song with the Jaren Johnston of the rock group American Bang. In accordance with Burst, it was a suggestion of the representatives of a Sony/ATV Music Publishingto write with Johnson. Johnson chose a lyric about a “blackbird with a broken wing hiding from the world”, and they wrote a new composition that is leader of top country songs charts. The new top country song is about a man convincing a woman that she “gonna fly” with him.

Despite of the popularity of this new top country song, “You Gonna Fly” deserved some critical reception. For example, Billy Dukes of Taste of Country gave the country song 4 stars out of five saying that the new piece of top country songs was much alike to Urban’s other uptempo hits. The appreciation of Tara Seetharam of Country Universe for this country song was a B+, calling his delivery “so three-dimensional that it practically pulls you into the bed of his truck.”

“You Gonna Fly” debuted at #45 on the U.S. Billboard Top Country Songs chart for the week of November 5, 2011. It debuted at #91 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart for the week of December 24, 2011. It debuted at #89 on the Canadian Hot 100 chart for the week of December 31, 2011. In February 2012 it hit #1 on Top Country Songs.

Largely as a result of Hollywood exploitation, the idea of “western music” became fixed in the public mind. Following the heyday of Gene Autry who performed some of the top country songs by that point the term “western” came to be applied even to southern rural music by progressively more people, especially by people who were ashamed to use a pejorative term “hillbilly”. Not only did the public accept the projection – most country singers captivated by the western image and finally came to believe their very own symbols. Autry was the first from a long type of country singers who clothed themselves in tailored cowboy attire; within the following decades the costuming became more elaborate and gaudy, using the brightly colored, bespangled and sequined uniforms produced by Nudie the Tailor in Los Angeles being the most favored fare. Most country performers, whether he came from Virginia or Mississippi, adopted cowboy regalia – usually of the gaudy, dude cowboy variety.

Along with the clothing, country bands and singers – specifically in the Southwest as well as on the West Coast – adopted cowboy titles. Singers performed top country songs by that point with names like Tex, Slim, Hank, the Utah Cowboy, Pasty Montana, and groups with such titles as the Cowboy Ramblers, Riders from the Purple Sage, Radio Cowboys, Swift Jewel Cowboys, Lone Star Cowboys, and the Girls of the Golden West, (Dolly and Milly Good) abounded on radio stations (and recorded labels) all around the nation. Radio and recorded promoters, of course, were very much alive to the appeal of the western myth, plus they often encouraged musicians to adopt appropriate western monikers. Millie and Dolly Good, for example, were farm girls from Illinois who sang and yodeled in sweet, close harmony. Their agent advised them to dress like cowgirls, gave them the romantic title Girls from the Golden West after which, after scanning the map of the western Texas, mounted on their promotional literature the statement that they were born in Muleshoe, Texas. The Girls very carefully preserved this fiction towards the end of their performing career. They performed some of the top country songs by those years.

Patsy Montana’s career (the singer who performed the top country songs of all time) was similarly shaped by romantic conceptions of the West. She was a singer and fiddler from Arkansas named Rubye Blevins, but about the West Coast in the early thirties Stuart Hamblen renamed her Pasty Montana, and she thereafter cultivated carefully the performing picture of the cowgirl. Although much of her career saw her appearing like a “girl singer” with such groups as the Prairie Ramblers, Patsy made dramatic history in 1935 when “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (see video) became the first top country song by a woman country singer, along with a virtuoso yodeling piece that still influences the style of women singers (Austin country-rock singer Marica Ball, for example, made the song and yodel standard parts of her repertory in the late 1970s). Generally, her style influenced almost every top country songs performed by the women singers.

Most of the “western” entertainers performed country songs, usually highly romanticized, but more often their titles and attire were the only ties they had with the “West”. Several groups, however, stayed rather close to the cowboy repertory. Some of them have been in existence long before gene Autry achieved Hollywood fame, and many of them, such as “Haywire Mac” McClintock and also the Crockett family (John H. “Dad” Crockett and the five sons, originally from West Virginia), had performed on California stereo since at least 1925. Other early California groups included Len Nash and the Original Country Boys, broadcasting from KFWB, Hollywood, as early as March 1926; Sheriff loyal Underwood’s Arizona Wranglers; Charlie Marshall and the Mavericks; and perhaps the most important (and certainly probably the most interesting), the Beverly Hillbillies.

Like, the South itself, hillbilly music suffered and profited from a conflicting set of images held by Americans that ranged from stability and enchantment to decadence and culture degeneracy. The music took shape as a commercial entity during a decade when the South’s seemed at a particular low ebb. To many people hillbilly music was just one more example, along with Ku Kluxism, Prohibition, sharecropping, racial violence, and religious bigotry, of the South’s retarded and degenerate culture. On the other hand many people no doubt responded positively to the South as a bastion of traditional values and orthodox religion in a nation given over to rapid and bewildering change. The role that hillbilly, or old-time, music played in the revitalization campaigns in the 1920s may never be realized conclusively. We simply do not do not know who the audience was, or why it was attracted to the music. Recording companies and producers seemed to assume that the passion for “old-familiar” music was strongest among conservative southerners. Consequently, it has been assumed that hillbilly music was a bit more than a vigorous expression of a regional culture, and that such song as “Why Do You Bob Your Hairs Girls” appealed only to fundamentalist citizens south of the Mason-Dixson Line. But how widely did hillbilly records circulate among northerners, and what impulses motivated those Americans, North and South, who bought the records and listened to the radio barn dances?

The most famous example of the political uses to which old-time music could be put was Henry Ford’s highly publicized campaign to revive old-time fiddling and the dances of his youth. Ford’s mixture of technological curiosity and commitment to tradition was not at all odd; it was in the American grain, and if the efforts made by this technological innovative industrialist to recover an imagined “American innocence” seem strange, they nonetheless reflected an illusion which many of his compatriots shared. Ford was appealed at the ragtime and jazz rhythms which had engulfed American music since the turn of the century, feeling that a similar in morals was somehow related. His concern for “pure”, white Christian America spilled over into the nativist feeling expressed by his magazine, Dearborn Independent, and yet this same impulse has its positive manifestations. He sponsored the publication of a book describing old-time dance steps, invited traditional musicians to Dearborn, and sponsored fiddle contest throughout the United States. In 1926 Ford encouraged his dealers, principally in the East and Midwest, to hold a series of local, state, and regional contests to determine the final entries who would compete for the national championship in Detroit. Uncle Bunt Stephens, representing the South, won the championship played “The Old Hen Cackled”. Uncle Bunt won a new car, 1000$ in cash, and a new suit; Henry Ford received the wonderful publicity as the champion of common men and common values; and old-time fiddling gained wide coverage in the national press.

Country music history since the early seventies continues to be one of unqualified commercial success. The music’s ascent in mainstream American culture, however, has been accompanied by internal debates concerning definition and future direction. Musicians, industry leaders, and fans happen to be confused about what country music is and where it should go. The country music industry has learned that its welfare lie within the distribution of the package with clouded industry, possessing no regional traits. The industry has striven to provide a music that is all things to any or all people: middle-of-the-road and “American”, but also southern, working class, and occasionally youth-oriented as well as rebellious in tone.

The Grand Ole Opry’s move in 1974 in the Ryman Auditorium to the spacious and modern accommodations from the new Opry House about the outskirts of Nashville was an event which was a lot more than symbolic of country music’s ambivalence about its rural past. The Ryman has been the site from the Opry since 1941, and many people had arrived at look upon the historic old building – the “mother church of country music” – as almost sacrosanct. Reverence, however, was tempered by disquietude when one reflected upon the particular conditions from the building. Audience handled excessive heat throughout the summer, draftiness throughout the winter, impaired vision most of the time because of the supportive columns that ran in the floor towards the balcony, and limited parking abilities all the time. While the acoustic were very good, performers needed to contend with cramped and modestly furnished dressing rooms. The auditorium was located a run-down section of downtown Nashville filled with souvenir shops, adult bookstore, and pornography movie theatres. At the concluding show at the Ryman on March 16, 1974, Minnie Pearl cried unashamedly on stage as she reflected about the abandonment of the building where such hallowed as Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, and Hank Williams had once held sway. Even though departure from the old auditorium inspired such songs as Tommy Howard’s “Goodbye Dear Ole Ryman”, applauded to maneuver to the spacious, comfortable, air-conditioned Opry House, and huge numbers of people have since gone there, and to the 110-acre Disneyland-like complex which surrounds it.
Country music demonstrated its prominence in American life in a variety of ways. In 1973 Loretta Lynn appeared on the cover of Newsweek and was central focus of the magazine’s coverage of country music. One year later Merle Haggered enjoyed similar exposure over time and the sympathetic music he and also the music received probably reflected the nation’s shift from conservatism and also the music’s identification with white working-class culture (an ironic rise in that the similar “discovery” of white folk music in the thirties had been fueled by an awakening of liberal sentiment). Within the proliferating published material that handled country music, the phenomena was rated having a seriousness that held seldom been witnessed. References to “corn”, “hillbillies”, “twang”, and “nasal” which had dotted the usually condescending or hostile treatments of country music were missing and were replace by attempts to understand the origins and contemporary concept of music. Producer Robert Altman might have had little affection for country music as an artistic medium, but he was sufficiently impressed with its influence to really make it the centerpiece from the movie Nashville in 1975. The Nashville music world was depicted like a metaphor for modern American culture, and the movie garnered great critical acclaim and public response. Many country fans perceived the movie not as a fable of a society but a frontal attack on the music and culture that embodies it. The movie, though, probably won a new audience to country music, and thus many people went away intrigued by their ingenious expression of feeling conveyed the songs.
While reactions to Nashville were mixed, few country fans had reservations about the movie depiction of Loretta Lynns’ life, Coal Miner’s Daughter, a critically acclaimed adaptation of her autobiography along with a vehicle for Sissy Spacek’s Academy Award – wining performance. The movie didn’t tell the entire story of Loretta’s life – it curiously omitted the important role played by Wilburn Brothers within the furtherance of her career – but it did present around a vivid account of life in the mountains while also providing glimpses of both the euphoria and also the frustrations from the music business.
Loretta Lyn enjoyed enormous public visibility in the wake of the movie’s success. Movies, in fact, became major vehicles for the mass exposure of country entertainers, otherwise always for country music itself. Jerry Reed and Mel Tillis were one of the most active entertainers who profited from “good old boy” movies that began appearing in the seventies, and, of course, from their associations with such superstars as Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood. The enormously popular Smoky and the Bandit was the prototype for shows in theatres as well as on television which featured hedonistic, simple-minded young men and their sexy girlfriends riding in fast cars or trucks having a backdrop of country music. Most country entertainers who ventured into the movie business rarely got beyond the status of supporting actor, but Dolly Parton became children name around the world and exhibited the natural comic flair in such popular movies as Nine to 5 and Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Dolly’s prominence in personality would be a major factor in her success as an actress. While Willie Nelson profited from a similar aura, ha also showed greater potentiality as a character actor than did Parton, first inside a supporting role to Robert Redford within an Electric Horseman, after which in lead roles in Honeysuckle Rose and Barbarosa.
Most of the movies had no real impact on American popular culture, but Tender Mercies in 1984, possibly the finest movie available about country music, garnered several Academy Award nominations, including one for Robert Duvall as a best actor. Urban Cowboy in 1981 (based on an Esquire article about alienated oil workers in the Houston area) generated a boom for ersatz cowboy material – designer jeans, hats, boots, mechanical bulls, and western dance steps. Gille’s club in Pasadena, Texas, self-styled “the biggest honky-tonk in the world” and the principal site from the movie’s action, became known to the world, as did its singing proprietor, Mickey Gilley, and also the house-band leader, Jeremy Lee. The soundtrack however carried hardly any that was really indigenous to the Texas honky-tonk scene and instead featured country pop and rock material. Johnny Lee’s “Looking for Love”, for instance – a lilting little pop song – became the featured song from the movie, along with a huge commercial hit.

Although the rockabilly obsession and also the subsequent country-pop emphasis were relatively short phases of country music history, they have to have seemed like eternities to partisans of traditional country music. But as a matter of fact, the rockabilly craze brought to music a large number of young adults who later took their guitars and energy into the country field. In some instances, their styles of country music took on the manifestations of rock; in other cases (such as Conway Twitty and Lee foundation Lewis), they revealed that they could perform hard-core or honky-tonk country as well every of the old-timers. The country-pop urge, however, sometimes bred boredom, just as homogenization of any type often does, and also the more tradition-based country styles steadily began to reappear.

Commercially, country music continued to burgeon. All-country radio stations proliferated. When WHN in Nyc adopted the format, country music had indeed become chic. Perhaps more significant, though, than radio programming was the blossoming of country music on tv. Country and cowboy singers had already appeared on early television experiments. Tex Owens, for instance, claimed to have appeared on the tube as early as 1935; Bobby Gregory made an appearance on a New York demonstration sometime in the thirties; Red River Dave was on the show at the 1939 World’s Fair in Ny; and he and several other entertainers appeared on local country shows when television stations appeared within their cities (Red River Dave, for instance, had a popular show in San Antonio within the late forties).

The barn dance format began to appear on television almost as soon as the medium became institutionalized after the second world war. The Midwestern Hayride debuted on local television in Cincinnati in 1948 and secured NBC affiliation in 1955. The Grand Ole Opry did not permit the televising of its regular programs (this was not done until the late seventies, when public television aired a couple of the shows within their entirety), but Al Gannaway did produce an extensive number of thirty-minute shows featuring Opry talent; they’ve been revised and newly syndicated in the 1980’s. The king of the televised barn dances was the Ozark Jubilee, from Springfield, Missouri. The show itself had begun in 1946, but it assumed network status on ABC on January 22, 1956. It was hosted by Red Foley and featured previously or another such performers as Brenda Lee (as a child star), Leroy Van Dyke, Sonny James, and Porter Wagoner, along with the comedy team of Uncle Cyp and Aunt Sap Brasfield (tent vaudeville veterans who took their routines into country music).

Numerous tv shows were syndicated and sold to some wide variety of markets round the nation. These shows were targeted at the hard-core country audience, but, of course, were sometimes watched by the casual or curious spectator (sometimes secretly). Among the more important were the ones from Ernest Tubb (often featuring a neatly dressed and clean-shaven Willie Nelson), Buck Owens, Flatt and Scruggs, the Wilburn Brothers, and Porter Wagoner. Both last-named programs were oases for “traditional” country music, humor, patter, and advertisements. Each show preserved a lot of the flavor of initial phase and radio performances,
along with a large sampling of down-home traits that country music appeared to be in danger of forgetting. Individuals who watched the Wilburn Brothers Show could hear the Wilburns (Teddy and Doyle) sing old-time gospel and country songs such as “Farther Along” and “My Little Home in Tennessee,” along with the modern hits. Born in Hardy, Missouri, the Wilburn Brothers began as child singers within their family’s band but started to create an identity as a brother duet when they signed with Decca in 1954. Tours with Webb Pierce and Faron Young contributed immeasurably to their wider exposure. The Wilburns, in turn, furthered the careers of other entertainers who appeared on their television segments; Loretta Lynn, for example, began her rise to superstardom while singing about the Wilburn Brothers Show in early sixties.

The Porter Wagoner Show became part of Americana, deeply beloved by those who cherished the rustic imagery it conveyed, and ridiculed by those who recoiled from its hayseed trappings. Wagoner’s television program was probably the most widely syndicated country show in the nation and was the most important haven available for the older types of country music. Wagoner grew up on a farm near West Plains, Missouri, and in 1951 began singing every morning from 5:30 to 6:00 A.M. on a local radio station that could be heard for only five or six miles. After a bus driver heard his program and passed the word on to the station manager, KWTO in nearby called Wagoner set for an audition. He gained additional exposure on the Ozark jubilee and in 1955 signed an agreement with RCA. His successful recording in 1956 of “Satisfied Mind,” one of the most finely crafted songs in country music, was his main ticket to the Grand Ole Opry, which he joined in 1957. As a hillbilly in a time of stylistic cloudiness, Wagoner definitely didn’t fit into RCA’s vision of the country-pop compromise. Nevertheless, the organization recognized his commercial appeal and kept him on its roster. While resolutely remaining faithful towards the hard country sounds and image, Wagoner more than repaid RCA’s trust by recording a few of the major hits of country music, including the classics “Green, Green Grass of Home” and “Carroll County Accident.” Wagoner’s television show, introduced in 1960, was sponsored by a firm long familiar to rural southerners: the Chattanooga Medicine Company, the maker of Black Draught and Wine of Cardui (for “women’s complaints”) and the distributor of the famous wall calendars that were once found in almost all rural homes. The thirty-minute television segment was a showcase for other talented performers besides Wagoner. Norma Jean Beasler (known simply as “Miss Norma Jean”) was a sweet-voiced singer from Oklahoma who served as the show’s “girl singer” until replaced by Dolly Parton in 1967. Parton, of course, rose to national fame about the strength of her appearances on the show and in concert with Wagoner up to 1975. Parton’s and Wagoner’s duet recordings for RCA were consistent award winners through the late sixties and early seventies. Comedian Speck Rhodes provided a light-hearted contrast together with his baggy pants and burlesque style of humor, and Mack Magaha, who previously had been a member of Don Reno and Red Smiley’s Tennessee Cutups, contributed some of the best old-time fiddling heard on any country show within the sixties. Buck Trent, a gifted instrumentalist who played both guitar and five-string banjo, probably made country music history when he successfully converted the banjo into an electrical instrument-a development that could only bring dismay to tradition-minded enthusiasts. His innovation had the dubious distinction of creating the banjo sound like an electric guitar.

Despite the presence of a lot of gifted individualists, the dominating presence of the show was Wagoner himself. Wagoner cut a striking figure, to say the least, in one of the many colorful, rhinestone-studded cowboy suits which Nudie Cohen had begun providing for him in 1953 (Wagoner’s first suit cost $350; they now average about $5,000). Along with Hank Snow, Wagoner was mostly of the country entertainers who persisted with such costuming at any given time when everyone else was adopting office attire or modish attire. Making over 200 concerts a year, appeared regularly about the Grand Ole Opry, and entering millions of homes via his syndicated tv program, Porter Wagoner brought renewed strength and vitality to hard-core country music. Neither wealth nor success caused him to forget his rural origins and the people who had nurtured both him and his music.

The uncertain serenity that followed World War II ushered in a period of unparalleled prosperity. Freed from wartime vices, anxious Americans right now sought the stability and material abundance that were denied them in earlier eras. The pursuit of pleasure and amusement proceeded apace, and country music profited as a result. People the dawning period was to be the real “golden age” of country music. Later on decades would provide greater material benefits to country musicians, but no period would experience the happier fusion of “traditional” sounds and commercial burgeoning than did the immediate postwar era.
As the nation transformed successfully to a civilian, domestic economy, the background music industry, unhampered by war time restrictions, geared itself for a highly profitable period. Records might now be produced in quantities above their prewar levels, and an entertainment-hungry public was ready to get them. Country music, which in fact had prospered despite (or perhaps due to) defense regulations, had been giving signs of increased national recognition. Songs like “Oklahoma Hills,” performed by Jack Guthrie (soon to die in a veteran’s hospital), Spade Cooley’s “Shame on You ,Inch Wesley Tuttle’s “Detour,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” as well as Merle Travis’ “Divorce Me C.O.D.” had been jukebox favorites all over the country in 1946. Bing Crosby, furthermore, crossed once more to the country field as well as recorded the biggest song of all, “Sioux City Sue” (carried out the previous year by Penis Thomas). At the conclusion of the war at least sixty-five documenting companies, fifteen of these on the West Coastline, were releasing nation records. Radio stayed an indispensable means of taking advantage of hillbilly talent.

By 1949 a minimum of 650 radio stations used live country entertainers. In the early commercial many years most of the hillbilly shows had been broadcast at noon or during the morning hours, since plan directors felt that only early-rising farmers paid attention to the programs. However with their newly found popularity, country artists were scheduled at more advantageous hours and were produced with the same care given to other musical offerings. In addition to established exhibits like the Grand Ole Opry the time saw the emergence of regional barn dances like Atlanta’s Barn Dance, Virginia’s Farm and F un Period (heard each day at noon over a five-state area), Dallas Big D Jamboree, Los Angeles Town Hall Party, and Dinner Bell Roundup, and most important of, Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride. In addition to providing nearby entertainment, these exhibits started many profitable country musicians on the path to wider fame.
Country music, therefore, is at the midst of the burgeoning commercial success that was most evidenced, perhaps, by the growth and development of the personal-appearance field. Billboard claimed that country entertainers were major box-office points of interest almost anywhere in the United States, even in “ New England.”’ The South, as usual, was a lucrative area with regard to hillbilly entertainers, but PA, Ohio, and the state of michigan were recognized as important markets for nation music. Country music even ventured in historic Carnegie Hall in October 1947, when a Grand Old Opry unit headed by Ernest Tubb performed two nights for a gross of over $9,Thousand. The most vigorous area for live country performances may very well happen to be California, where major emphasis was dedicated to ballroom performances and also the big radio barn dances that began in the mid-forties. When Bob Wills relocated in California in Sept 1943, the dance corridor business had already begun to thrive, however he soon grew to become a major musical pressure in the state, busting attendance records almost everywhere he went, operating a club in Sacramento known as Wills Point, and occasionally making cross-country tours. His Texas Playboys had relocated away from their previously emphasis on horns and had once again become basically a fiddle band. Wills himself was devoting much more attention to fiddle hoedowns, and he acquired two brand new fiddlers, Johnny Gimble (from Tx) and Keith Coleman (from Oklahoma), who were at home in a style. Wills had additionally added another twist to his band by adding a female singer, Laura Lee McBride, the first showcased woman singer within the western swing genre. McBride was well-connected in the country Held; she was the daughter of stereo cowboy Singer Tex Owens, the actual niece of Texas Ruby Owens, and the wife of band leader Dickie McBride. The era of country ballrooms had begun in 1942 when Foreman Phillips opened up the Venice Pier Ballroom, catering to transplanted Okies, protection and servicemen.

The emergence of the western image within country music was probably inevitable; throughout the twentieth century the cowboy has been the object of unparalleled romantic adulation and interest. Given the pejorative connotations that clung in order to farming and non-urban life, the ownership of cowboy clothes and western themes was a logical action for the country singer. The increased emphasis on traditional western themes and behaviour came unsurprisingly within the westernmost southern states-Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas-and within California. In these places country music thought forms differing through those in the more easterly southern states. Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas were part of the southern tradition yet also significantly different. All three were touched by the oil growth of the early twentieth century, and each possessed population groups that stood apart culturally, while also impacting on the dominant “Anglo” component of the state. Oklahoma as well as Texas were resolved, for the most part, by former residents of the old southern states, that had brought with them their values, customs, and institutions. Louisiana, on the other hand, was a land of two great cultures: a Roman Catholic, “Latin” culture within the South, and an “Anglo” Protestant culture in the north. Immigrants brought slaves and the 100 % cotton culture to all parts of the Southwest, producing Texas and Louisiana areas of the southern economic and political orbit. Additionally they transported their evangelical Protestantism to southwestern soil and brought many options that come with their folk history. Some of the old British ballads survived the westward migration, whilst they had lost many of their former features. In some Texas communities, particularly in remote Eastern Texas areas like the Big Thicket, the old ballads and old styles of singing endured well to the twentieth century. Many of the Eastern Texas communities were, and are, replicas from the older southern atmosphere. And, in many of these, folk traditions died slowly. Texas people music, then, was basically southern-derived. Texas non-urban musicians used instruments common in the remaining South, sang in designs similar to those of other rural southerners, frequently attended house parties exactly where old-time fiddlers held sway, and learned to read music at the shape-note singing schools. But despite its close cultural connection with the South, TX had a culture all its own-a culture produced by the mingling of diverse ethnic strains: southern “Anglo,” black, German and Central Western (in the south-central region of the state), Mexican, and Louisiana Cajun (in the area extending through Beaumont to Houston). A passion for dance was common amongst all these groups, and in this heterogeneous society music styles and tunes flowed freely from one group to another, modifying the old southern rural style. Rural songs was prevalent and pervasive, but it was substantially different from which produced in the Southeast or perhaps in the Deep South. The discovery of essential oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont, in 1901 was the first of a series of finds in southeastern Texas, southwestern Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, in the years extending upward through World War I. The discovery of the great East Texas oil area in the early 1930’s, along with the quick industrialization that began during World War Il, further set Texas in addition to the other southern states. While these elements contributed to Texas’ uniqueness, they are probably less important than the proven fact that it was also part of the West. ln fact, to many Americans Texas was and is the West. And this West would be a glorious land peopled by cowboys. The romantic concept of the Western, shared by the majority of Americans, has a history virtually as old as the nation itself. James Fenimore Cooper’s early books describing the regenerative qualities of the frontier weren’t substantially different, nor less romantic, compared to themes emphasized later on in Bret Harte’s stories, within the western “dime novels,” or in such publications as Owen Wister’s The Virginian. The actual cowboy and the West had been subjected to the actual romanticizing process long before Artist and the television business began their exploitations from the theme. And, too, the American people experienced long demonstrated an over-all interest in the songs of the cowboy (you start with Nathan Howard Thorp’s Songs of the Unqualified, 1908; and John A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs along with other Frontier Ballads, 1910). Although concert-musician Oscar Fox (through Burnet, Texas) adapted a few of the cowboy songs for high-art purposes, the traditional western theme did not help to make any significant effect on American music before thirties. But when this did, even Container Pan Alley reverberated using the melodies of the grams range. The farther Americans became removed from the cowboy past, more intense became their interest in unqualified songs and lore. Hillbilly performers and musicians do much to implant the romantic unqualified image in the mind of their American audiences.

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