My country western music roots go deep, way before I first picked up my first pistol-shaped stick (something about boys and stick guns) and started singing Tracey Byrd cover songs at the age of three. I’m talking about when it was known as hillbilly music. It all started in the Southern Appalachians when the inhabitants first picked up a fiddle (a violin has strings and a fiddle has strangs) and started putting their life experiences to music. These early songs were first recorded in the 1910s. The first commercial country music record was made by Eck Robertson in 1922 with Victor Records. The first national country hit was “Wreck of the Old 97” by Vernon Dalhart. However, hillbilly music came into its own when Victor Records began recording Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family.
Jimmie Rodgers is known as the “Father of County Music”. When he was once asked about that title, he drawled, “I know I’m the father of three girls but I don’t know about the father of country music.” He had the first million-selling single called “Blue Yodel #1” and his songs, recorded between 1927 and 1933 (the year of his death), established him as the first county music star.
The Carter Famly, comprised of A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and his sister-in-law Maybelle Carter flourished in the late 1920s and for decades thereafter. They were best known for two of their early hits, “Wildwood Flower” and “Keep on the Sunny Side” a standard in the recent movie, “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?”
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