Ian Koll HIST4082 Wolf 9/20/2011

Similarities and Differences Between Hillbilly Music and Blues

The late 19th and early 20th century saw a large schism in the musical world with the advent of both the Blues, or Race Records, and Old-Time, or Hillbilly music. Both came from vey traditional roots, and expressed two vastly different cultures. The Blues, which was in part a response to social and economic oppression brought upon blacks, stemmed from slave work songs, drum circles, and field chants. This genre was largely influenced by traditional African music, and was immensely popular in the black community. There were two forms of commonly produced Blues music: Classic Blues and Country Blues. Classic Blues was sung from a more urban viewpoint, farther removed from the Mississippi Delta where Country Blues originated. Country Blues was a much more rural, expressive form of music that resonated with the hearts of the black workforce that consumed it, and predated Classic Blues by several decades. Hillbilly music, on the other hand, was based upon old ballads and folk songs of the British Isles, made by and marketed to predominately southern whites. Despite being stylistically different, both the Blues and Hillbilly music originated in the American South, and had strong connections to folk music. Both forms of music relied heavily on the concept of human emotion to make songs relatable- in Blues, songs typically focused on the social hardship blacks underwent while integrating into urban, white society, while Hillbilly music often focused on the urbanization and mechanization of the Souths traditionally agrarian society. Several resounding differences between the two genres, however, lie within the performers themselves. In Classic Blues, it was very common for women to sing and perform, which had until the 20th century been a

novel idea, as the music industry was almost exclusively dominated by men. On the contrary, though, artists such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were the driving force behind the popularity of the blues, earning titles like Blues Queens. Blues, unlike Hillbilly music, was not played on the radio, requiring those who wanted to hear it to invest in a phonograph. This was no deterrent, though, and race records sold at an astronomically high rate, with nearly 10 million records sold throughout the 1920s. Hillbilly music, in contrast, took off less quickly, but was firmly entrenched in the American Popular Music strata after the economic collapse and the Great Depression. Both Hillbilly music and the Blues, which represent two completely different cultures and ideologies, ironically could not have existed without one another. The two borrowed so heavily from one another that, despite their differences, the two genres capitalized on the popularity of its other counterpart and, in effect, contributed to one another. Because the record industry was so interested in catering to every possible market, they established both forms of music without much consideration towards the possibility of the two borrowing from one another. Nevertheless, two genres thought to be at polar opposites of the spectrum built upon the successes and weaknesses of each other and existed separately, but peacefully, together in the Popular Music arena.