HIST 390 Blog Posts

In a previous post, I mentioned my fondness for country music. This is no less true. For homework this class, we’ve been assigned a scavenger hunt to find the earliest reference of our favorite type of music. Thus, it was a given that I would choose country music.

In today’s day and age, it should be easy to find the earliest reference of “country music” by inserting the phrase exactly as written with quotation marks into the Google search bar. That is, if you don’t bother to read the passages it referenced.

Using the “Google Ngram viewer”, I search the popularity of the phrase throughout the years, discovering very few references, though some were mentioned as far back as somewhere in the late half of the 1700s. Imagine my jubilation and confusion when we learned in class that country music as we know it didn’t Come about until somewhere in the 1920s. My next step was to look for this early reference in Google Books. So, you know the little captions Google inserts next to the book you search, listing the word or phrase you looked for? Turns out, I didn’t even need to click the link to discover that this was not in reference to the country music I know and love. Here’s the quote: “This Rizzio must have come, so advanced in life as he did, from ltaly, and strike so far out of the common road of his own country’s music.” So as to avoid copyright infringement, this came from “The European Magazine, and London Review”, as it stated. The “country music” quote refers to an Italian man who played the traditional music of his county. Get it? Country music. Also, for those curious, ‘Rizzo’ is an Italian surname for someone with curly hair. Threw me for a loop first time I read this sentence.

My next order of business was to find a reference to ACTUAL country music, which took me a good hour and a half to find (mostly due to sorting through bad sources). In Google, the earliest reference I
found was published in a newsletter by the Country Music Foundation in the year 1970. A long way from the previous 1786 usage, right? Anyway, here’s the quote: “The Carters, A. P., Sara and Maybelle, and Jimmie Rogers were initially recorded in Bristol, Tennessee, in August of 1927. These recordings, August 1, 2, and 4, mark the beginning of modern country music”. Not only is this the first written reference (on Google) of country music, but it also states that country music was founded before 1927. The key phrase ‘modern country music’ suggests that there was an another, older version of country music, that which I could not find a reference for. Insert pouty face.

Next, and no, I’m not finished yet, I looked on another website my teacher recommended. This one had a lot of newspapers from the last 100 years! Unfortunately, there was nothing about earlier country music, but I did find this: “Other events of the day are an open house at the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, free boat cruise for the kiddies at Vereen’s Marina, a Phillip Morris Country Music Show at the Air Force Base at 6 p.m.…”. This was found on page 6 of the June 05, 1957 issue of the Tabor City tribune. It was the earliest mention of ACTUAL  country music that I could find, not “a country’s music”, or just straight up “In our own age and country, music…” or “…country. Music…”, etc.

I’d welcome any earlier finding of what we consider country music, just not a “country’s music”. Thus is the earliest online Google and “Chronicling America at Library of Congress” reference I’ve been able to find.

This entry was posted on October 30, 2018 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.