Roots
1920's
30's & 40's
50's & 60's
70's, 80's, 90's

What Is "Country"?
Old Time Music
Western Swing
Bluegrass
Honky Tonk Music
Nashville Sound
Cajun Music
Country-Rock or Modern Country
Main Song-Types: Love Songs, Train Songs, Trucker Songs - and Examlpes

Hank Williams
Johnny Cash
Garth Brooks

When John Laydon arrived in America in 1607 together with 100 other men from London, he didn't only take clothes, knives and cereals to the "new world". He also had a fiddle among his luggage, a piece of European culture, of traditional folk music. And with traditional instruments also traditional music came to the new country with those immigrants. As it was one of the few things which reminded them of their home country, they stuck to it and "conserved" it. Still today you can find parts of original Scottish music in some southern states of the USA. Old dance tunes, in which the fiddle had to replace and imitate the bagpipes, have been preserved for centuries though the texts were adapted to the new lifestyles and the new surroundings. And still they aren't dead: In 1992, one of those old tunes called "Cotton Eyed Joe" appeared in a "dancefloor" version from the Swedish group "Rednex" in pop charts all over the world.

The music of those days reflected, like Country Music nowadays, the daily life of ordinary people. In this point you can see a great difference between Country and, for example, a lot of Pop songs: Country Music doesn't simulate a dream world, it shows reality and true experiences of the song writers.

Of course a reduction of early Country Music to Anglo-Saxon immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland would be false: In the South there were Spanish-Mexican influences, in Louisiana most of all French and in between some German, Swedish or Polish influences. Nevertheless British (and Irish) elements were at this early stage the most important for Northamerican folk music.

With urbanization, folk-musical activities in the north of the USA were decreasing and so the rural south became the center of this music style. Musicologists assume that there were early contacts between this folk music and the music of the Black slaves, so that white people began to play the originally African banjo. On the other side, folk musicians took over the steel guitar from Hawaii-bands which were touring through the country with "Medicine Shows" or Circuses. Surprisingly the originally Spanish guitar seems to have joined white folk music very late, even after joining Black music.

Until 1922, folk music, which also took over some elements and songs from jazz and blues music, stayed quite isolated from music industry. But the year 1922 suddenly changed this situation: For music industry only recorded music, sheet music and live music had been important before, but a new kind of media was now added: radio. While for country people recorded music was quite unimportant, radio grew really important for them. In December 1922 there were 510 radio stations in the USA, 89 of them in the South, where Texas held the record with 25. In those years, radio programs consisted almost only of live performances, and as rural people wanted to hear folk music (called "Old-Time-Music"), this was also broadcast.

Because of the boom and the higher quality of radio, sales figures for records were decreasing in 1923 and 1924, and so industry had to find new markets. First studios didn't want to record Old-Time-Musicians. Nevertheless they produced records of a few of them and when they saw the success of those first records of Eck Robertson, "Fiddlin'" John Carson and Henry Whitter ("The Wreck Of The Old 97", 1923), they started recording folk music more and more.

When a group without a name was recorded in 1925, they said: "Call us like you want, we are only some Hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia." So those musicians were called the "Hillbillies", later the "Original Hillbillies" and "Hillbilly" became the name for this white folk music.

Because of the boom of Hillbilly music, artists had to write new songs, and so the first stars came up: Jimmie Rodgers and the first famous Hillbilly group, the (Original) Carter Family.

During the worldwide economic crisis there was no depression for Hillbilly music, because the rural Southerner preferred having less luxury and fewer new clothes to hearing less music. Production prices for Hillbilly records were low, so they were a success if they were sold more than 5000 or 10000 times with prices much lower than for pop records. For example, in 1934, the new company Decca sold 35-cent-records! But the depression didn't go by without consequences: Between 1929 and 1932, industry workers and miners, the so called "Underdogs" or "White Trash", wrote the first protest songs, which were taken up later by the students' folk and protest movement of the 60's.

In Nashville the first "Barn Dance Radio Show" was broadcast by WSM already on November 28, 1925. Moderator George D. Hay created a new name for this show 2 years later saying: "In the last hour you've heard music from the 'Grand Opera', now we'll present 'The Grand Ole Opry'!". This radio show was a great success and so a lot of fans wanted to come to the studios and see those live shows. So WSM built the new "Studio C" for 500 people, then they broadcast the show from the "Hillsboro Theatre", an old cinema. When also that got too small for The Grand Ole Opry, WSM went to the "War Memorial Auditorium" in 1939 and started to charge 25 cents for admission. In November of 1939, the Opry was presented the first time on NBC-Radio. In 1943, The Grand Ole Opry moved another time: to the "Ryman Auditorium" in Nashville's downtown, which got a kind of "Mekka" for Country musicians and Country Music fans. Since 1950 the Opry is also presented on TV (nowadays WSM, ABC, TNN, CMT), and in 1974 the show moved the last time - to the "New Grand Ole Opry Building" in "The Opryland Theme Park". This building is nowadays the biggest TV and radio studio in the world with a capacity of 4400 places for fans. In 1981, a new cable TV station was founded by the "Opryland Production": TNN - The Nashville Network.

But back to the 30's and 40's:

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936, the depression was forgotten, and Bill Cox's song "We've Got Franklin D. Roosevelt Back Again" was a great success. Because of Western movies Hillbilly music got a new image in the 1930's from which Country Music suffers even today: the cowboy image. There were almost no real singing cowboy in the USA, there is no typical cowboy music style, there is no typical cowboy instrument, but there are cowboy movies, and Hollywood needed songs for those movies. So Hillbilly artists who never rode a horse for "cowpunching" (work of a cowboy) wrote and recorded "cowboy songs". Gene Autry was called "Oklahoma's Singing Cowboy" or "America's Number One Singing Cowboy" and a lot of other single artists and groups took over this cowboy image. A lot of movies, co called "B-Westerns", showed the following: A cowboy was singing in every possible and impossible situation, suddenly he replaced his guitar by a pistol and shot a wanted bad guy who was sitting beyond the listeners. A lot of those pseudocowboys sang good songs, but in the late 40's they got less important and "Country & Western Music" was now only called "Country Music".

The 30's and 40's were also the "birth years" for two new styles of Country Music: Western Swing, influenced by Jazz and Blues, and Bluegrass, which developed from Old Time Music. For more details about that styles see chapter 2 - "Styles & Song-Types".

In those years another type of songs was created in the saloons and honky tonks of Texas and Oklahoma, where farmers, oil workers, truckers, and industry workers met for drinking, amusing and forgetting their sorrows. Normal, acoustically played Country Music was too silent for those bars, so guitars were amplified electrically and the electric steel-guitar and drums were more and more used there. The songs' texts were also adapted to those surroundings and so they expressed the problems of the bars' visitors.

When World War II started for the USA in 1941, young men from the North went to Southern military camps and civil workers from the South went to Northern armaments factories, and Southern Music was suddenly played all over the USA, even by Northerners - the "Golden Age Of Hillbilly Music" had finished, and the "Golden Age Of Country Music" had started. With American soldiers Country Music finally found its way (back?) to Europe, too. And after World War II Country Music found its way to the big cities.

After 1945, especially Nashville boomed because the now higher quality of Country Music needed good studios also in the South. Before "Talent Scouts" were sent to the South with primitive mobile studios or artists had to drive to New York to make their records. The new studios were placed beneath radio stations which made Country shows, and so a lot of those studios were built in Nashville, where the most important show, WSM's "Grand Ole Opry" took place. The most important style was now Honky Tonk Music.

But with a new boom of Boogie Woogie also Country Music got Boogie elements, which was also reflected in the song titles: "Mobile Boogie", "Freight Train Boogie", "Smokey Mountain Boogie" etc. In the Country Boogie Woogies there were already such a lot of Rhythm & Blues elements that the step to "Rockabilly", which was later called "Rock 'N' Roll", was only a little one. Hank William's "Move It On Over" contained already in the 40's the typical Rock 'N' Roll melody patterns. The start of Rock 'N' Roll with Elvis Presley in 1954 and its following boom (Bill Haley etc.) was only a consequence of this Country Music development.

Hank Williams was in the early 50's the most important Country artist, and he was also the last artist of the "Golden Age Of Country Music". After Hanks death on January 1st, 1953, Ernest Tubb sang the song "Hank, It Will Never Be The Same Without You". That was also true for Country Music, because after that year really everything changed. Of course, there was no direct connection between Williams' death and the changes in Country Music, but it wasn't long after this year that they took place. Rock 'N' Roll, which contained a lot of Black elements, got more and more interesting for young people and with Elvis there was also a man to represent this kind of music. "Rock 'N' Roll", originally an expression used in Blues songs for "sex", was first used by Bill Haley to describe this music style and replaced the word "Rockabilly", which was used by Elvis Presley's producer Sam Philips. Because of its great success Rock 'N' Roll seemed to replace also Country Music, so music industry tried to form a new Country Music to make a difference between the two kinds of music, and the "Nashville Sound" was born. This new style showed almost no difference to old pop songs: fiddle, banjo and steel guitar were replaced by piano, string orchestras and background choirs, studio musicians replaced the artists' bands, and Country Music became an assembly-line product, and - the most horrible thing - it was successful.

Almost only Johnny Cash, who started his career a short time after Elvis, could hold his own, timeless style with a hard drive but also great traditional influences. But also the Nashville Sound found its end when people remembered non-commercial Hillbilly songs in the 60's. The search for their roots made also different social classes meet, it inspired almost everybody and they came together to listen to it and to discuss.

In this movement Cajun Music, which was the French influenced music of Lousiana, and Bluegrass saw a revival. Stars like Pete Seger and Robert Zimmermann, also known as Bob Dylan, helped Country Music finding its Roots again and record companies started to release old recordings on LPs.

In the early 70's the situation hadn't really changed in Nashville: artists were without any freedom, Country Music had lost all of its liveliness. But with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings a rebellion of Country musicians was started also in Nashville and slowly but surely real Country Music came back to Nashville, especially in the early 80's. Today's Country Music consists of a lot of different styles because real mainstream Country died with the Nashville Sound and all other styles were reactivated, but to that styles also a new one was added: Country-Rock is a mixture of Country and Rock 'N' Roll and has a lot of young fans. Especially this style started a revival of Country Music now but also new traditionalists came up, and women found Country Music again. Reba McEntire said one time: "It's still pretty unusual to hear a woman sing about having an affair or standing up for herself in this world. To me that's one of the things that hard Country is all about - the freedom to say things that you can't say in the other, more pop-orientated kinds of Country Music."

We know now a lot about the history of this kind of music, but what exactly is "Country Music"? Kris Kristofferson said one time: "If it sounds Country man, then that's what it is, it's a Country song." You see, also from this statement, that "Country Music" isn't easy to define. Because of its complex development with a lot of different influences, Country Music consists of a broad range of different styles. In this chapter I'll present the most important Country Music styles.

As told in chapter 1 - "History Of Country Music", Old Time Music is the early form of Country Music. It was played all acoustic and without drums, the fiddle was the only important solo instrument, and voice and fiddle were accompanied by banjo and different forms of guitars ("normal" guitar, mandolin, "autoharp", steel guitar).

The most important artist of Old Time Music was Jimmie Rodgers, the first star of Country Music, who combined also Black blues melodies with Swiss yodels and created "Blue Yodels". When he started his career with his first record in 1927, everybody knew it wouldn't last very long because he had been suffering from tuberculosis since 1925. In 1933, he finally died at the age of 35 years. He had recorded his last 4 songs only one day before. Before 1925 he was a train worker, and so trains were present in most of his songs. As the songs were about his own problems, also his disease was an important topic in songs like "T.B. Blues" or "Whippin' That Old T.B.". Later great stars like Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow were inspired by Jimmie Rodgers, and he also showed the way for Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, because he was the first example for a poor country boy who got to the top.

The "first family" of Country Music, the "Original" Carter Family, consisted of A.P. (Alvin Pleasant) Carter, his wife Sarah, and cousin Maybelle Carter. This family was the most famous Old Time Music group. After A.P.s death Maybelle's family group with her 3 daughters (Helen, June and Anita), before called "Mother Maybelle And The Carter Sisters", changed its name to "The Carter Family". June Carter, the nowadays most famous daughter of Maybelle, married Johnny Cash in third marriage.

Western Swing, a very popular style of Country Music, developed in Texas and Oklahoma in the 30's and saw enormous popularity in the 40's. The style is a blend of Big Band, Blues, Dixieland, and Jazz among others. It brought drums to Country Music and started a boom of the steel guitar, but also sax, trumpet, and piano were used. This music really combined the style of Jazz and Big Band, typically urban elements, with the culture of the Southwest, which was a rural one. It was very often used for Saturday night dances. After Prohibition was lifted in 1933, big dance halls and honky tonks (bars) were built and "danceable" music was needed. "Okie Jazz" (Okie = inhabitant of Oklahoma), "Western Jazz", "South-Western Swing", or simply "Western Swing" was exactly the right music style for that.

Bob Wills is known as the "King of Western Swing". His band, the Texas Playboys, (and also others) played everything, from good old Western songs to Blues and Jazz songs, in their own Swing style.

After a little revival with Merle Haggard in the 70's and Wills' death in 1975, Western Swing only continues living with a little number of musicians, for example Asleep At The Wheel or the Charlie Daniels Band.

Bluegrass is not only, like it is written in this or that encyclopedia, a kind of interpretation of Hillbilly or Old Time Music. This style developed from Old Time Music. While in the 20's and 30's only the fiddle was used as a melody instrument and guitar and banjo had to accompany the voice and fiddle melodies, Bluegrass was more "democratic". Each instrument was allowed to, and had to, play parts of the melody and every musician had to be able to improvise, also the bass had to play solos.

The name "Bluegrass" derives from Bill Monroe And His Blue Grass Boys, which were the most famous performers of this style. The "Father of Bluegrass Music", like Bill Monroe is often called today, stays unforgotten, because this music never died. In the USA there was a big revival in the 60's, and also in Europe there are a lot of Bluegrass bands, especially in the eastern states (this styles doesn't need electricity!), and there mainly in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Those bands are often heard at Austrian Country Music events, too.

While Western Swing and Bluegrass can be seen as "sidestream" styles, Honky Tonk Music is and was really mainstream Country. No other style had a greater influence on later artists and even on today's artists than this one.

It developed in the 30's in the saloons and honky tonks (a kind of bars) of Texas and Oklahoma and was influenced musically by Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills' Western Swing. Its lyrics were written about what an internet site calls "the spirit of dancing and drinking, and loving and then losing the one you love". So at this time the "typical Country song" was born: a song about losing money, the car, the house, and finally the wife and then - using a song title - "Drinking My Baby Good-Bye". This music style was also the first one in Country Music which used electrically amplified guitars, because of loudness in those honky tonks.

One of the first famous Honky Tonk artists was Ernest Tubb, who arrived at the Grand Ole Opry from Texas in 1941. Lefty Frizzell started recording in 1947 and in 1951 he had four songs in the top ten. During that time, he was the country's most popular singer. His first great hit was "If You've Got The Money, Honey, I've Got The Time".

An icon of Country Music was Hank Williams. His hit "Honky Tonkin'" says all about where he used to play in his short life. More about him in chapter 3 - "Three Important Artists".

The time of the Nashville Sound, a blend of pop and country with string orchestration and background choirs, is for many fans probably the saddest chapter in the history of Country Music. The other side of the coin is that Country Music never was as popular as in the late 50's, the 60's and the early 70's, when it consisted almost only of Nashville Sound, which was also called "Country Pop". That music became an assembly-line product, as also the artists' band members were replaced by studio musicians to increase the music's quality.

The most important performer of this style was beneath Hank Snow and Sonny James (first "Country"-No.1 in Pop-charts) Jim Reeves, the "King of Country Pop". The first female stars of Country Music were Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. Their style was also part of the Nashville Sound, but their songs were not as schmaltzy as their male colleagues' music, they were more a blend of Nashville Sound and Honky Tonk Music. Dolly Parton was one of the latest and probably the most successful Country Pop star, but she never got out of this music style.

Also Bobby Bare and George Hamilton IV didn't really get off of the Nashville Sound movement, though they tried to with their "Folk-Country" style. Only Kris Kristofferson could go new ways with lyrics that were really Country, which were taken from real life, so that instrumentation didn't matter any more. His songs like "Me And Bobby McGee", "Sunday Morning Coming Down" or "Help Me Make It Through The Night" are known by a lot of people even nowadays.

The roots of this music reach back to French immigrants in Louisiana. Those "Cajuns" lived isolated a long time, until streets and radio connected them with the rest of America in the 60's. Their old French music was mixed up with American Country Music, and the result was called Cajun Music. Distinguishing marks of this music are waltz and two-step rhythms, influences of Jazz and Blues, the small Cajun-accordion, triangles, and often partly or totally French lyrics. Its most important artists were and are Doug Kershaw and Jimmy C. Newman.

This music style, a blend of Rock 'N' Roll, modern music styles and Country Music, is a development of the last decades. It was the final step to bring life back into Country Music after the "depression of Nashville Sound". Today Country charts are full of Modern Country or "New American Music", a new name which was found in the last years, and I could not finish a list of its important artists. A few names are Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Tanya Tucker, Billy Ray Cyrus, Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, John Michael Montgomery, Carlene Carter and Dwight Yoakam, but if I said only those were the most important, I would be wrong. Those names are only a collection of the artists who are important in MY opinion (It's a personal selection - like in every chapter of this paper).

Garth Brooks, which is probably the most successful Country star today, is described in chapter 3 - "Three Important Artists" and it's hard to imagine today's Country Music without Clint Black's hits like "A Better Man" or "Killin' Time". Tanya Tucker is, I guess, the most famous female artist of Modern Country with songs like "Delta Dawn" or "Strong Enough To Bend". Sometimes those artists have also success in pop charts: Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" was even in the Austrian charts for a short time in 1992, and John Michael Montgomery's song "I Swear" was a No.1-hit all over the world in the version of "All 4 Men", a Black pop band. And on Austrian radio "Ö3" you could hear the songs "Every Little Thing" and "Sweet Meant To Be" by Carlene Carter, the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, very often in the last years.

You see that Country Music is still alive nowadays, and I hope that'll never change...

As love is one of the most interesting topics for people, it is an interesting topic for a lot of music styles, especially for Country Music. And so love songs were present in this music every time, you find old traditionals (i.e. "Oh, Susanna") like Honky Tonk songs (i.e. "Lovesick Blues" by Hank Williams) or Country-Rock songs (i.e. "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus).

Trains are a typical Country Music topic, which was important in most of the history of this music. Already Jimmie Rodgers, the first Country star, who was a railroad worker himself before his disease started, sang a lot of train songs. When Merle Haggard dedicated a double LP to Rodgers, he named it "Same Train, A Different Time", which shows again the connection between trains and Country Music. One of the first famous train songs was "The Wreck Of The Old 97", but "Wabash Cannonball" and especially "Orange Blossom Special" got the most famous train songs. And songs like "The City Of New Orleans", "The Folsom Prison Blues" and "The Lord Made A Hobo Out Of Me" are more or less train songs, even if their titles don't sound like that.

In the 60's another topic got more and more important: truck driving. As the number of truck drivers grew, also their problems became more important: they had to leave their family, their wives and their children back home when they went "working", that meant driving through the USA for days or even for weeks. So in 1963 Dave Dudley had a Country-top-ten hit with "Six Days On The Road", and a short time later he wrote "Truck Drivin' Son Of A Gun" and "Trucker's Prayer", and other artists followed, for example Red Simpson with "Roll, Truck, Roll" or "I'm A Truck" and C.W. McCall with his world hit "Convoy". The three most famous trucker songs, I guess, are nowadays "Take Me Home, Country Roads" from John Denver, "On The Road Again" by Willie Nelson and Roger Miller's "King Of The Road".

My first example song isn't a typical love song because I'm convinced everybody knows lots of typical love songs. So I took a song which deals with problems in a relationship in an ironical way:

Put Another Log On The Fire
(Words & Music by Shel Silverstein)
Put another log on the fire, / cook me up some bacon and some beans,
then go out to the car and change the tires, / wash my socks and so my old blue jeans
come on, baby, you can fill my pipe and then go fetch my slippers / and boil me up another pot of tea,
then put another log on the fire, baby, / and come and tell me why you're leavin' me!

Don't I let you wash the car on Sundays, / don't I warn you when you're gettin' fat,
don't I take you fishin' with me somedays, / well, a man can't love a woman more than that.
Ain't I always nice to your kid sister, / don't I take her driving every night?
So sit here at my feet 'cause I like you when you're sweet / and you know it ain't feminine to fight.

So put another log on the fire, / cook me up some bacon and some beans,
then go out to the car, lift it up and change the tires, / wash my socks and so my old blue jeans
come on, baby, you can fill my pipe and then go fetch my slippers / and boil me up another pot of tea,
then put another log on the fire, baby, / and come and tell me why you're leavin' me!

The next song I want to present here, is a train song, called "The Wreck Of The Old 97":

The Wreck Of The Old 97
(Traditional)
Well, they gave him his orders in Monroe, Virginia, they said: "Steve, you're way behind time.
This is not 38, this is old 97, put her into a span there of time."
Then he turned 'round and said to his big greasy fireman: "Hey, shovel up a little more coal,
and when we'll cross that white ole mountain, watch old 97 roll!"
It's a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville with a line on a three mile grade.
It was on that grade that he lost his air brakes, see what a jump he made.
He was goin' down the grade makin' 90 miles an hour, when his whistle broke into a scream.
He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, scalded to death by the steam.
Then a telegram came to Washington station and this is how it read:
"Oh, that brave engineer who'd to run old 97, he's lying in old Danville dead."
So now, all you ladies, you'd better take a warning from this time on and learn:
Never speak harsh words to your true lovin' husband, he may leave you and never return.

The third (and last) song, called "On The Road Again", can be, with this title, only a trucker song.

On The Road Again
(Willie Nelson)
On the road again, I just can't wait to get on the road again,
the life I love is makin' music with some friends, I just can't wait to get on that road again.
On the road again, goin' to places I have never been,
seein' things that I may never see again, I just can't wait to get on that road again.
Chorus:
On the road again, like a band of gypsies we go down the highway.
We're the best of friends, insisting that the world keeps turning our way,
and our way
is on the road again... (verse 1, then repeat chorus and verse 1 another time)

Hiram "Hank" Williams was born on September 17, 1923 in Alabama. His parents were more than only poor, his mother said one time: "The only thing we could give him was our love." Even though, for his 7th birthday he got a 3.50-$-guitar from his mother. His first chords he learned from "Tee-Tot", a colored street singer, and at the age of 12, after he moved with his parents to Montgomery/Alabama, he founded his first band, "Hank and Hezzie's Drifting Cowboys". Playing in bars and honky tonks around Montgomery, he also got to know his later wife Audry.

In 1949, he played the first time at the Grand Ole Opry, and a short time later, his song "Lovesick Blues" got a No.1-Country-hit and millionseller. So far, so good. But the other side of the coin looked worse: Nobody knew really when Hank had started drinking, because nobody could remember a time when he had not been drinking. But drinking was only a reaction to his problems: his back pains (after he took part in a rodeo), his inferiority complex (got worse with increasing success), and finally his unlucky marriage with Audry. And his songs can only be understood by interpreting his problems. Music was the only way for him to express them.

Hank Williams' great career lasted only for about 3 years, he had 12 millionsellers, 7 No.1-hits and 23 top-ten-hits. His songs were covered by a lot of stars of Pop and Country Music, for example Linda Ronstadt or Johnny Cash.

After his wife Audry couldn't stand Hank's drinking any more and the following divorce, he got completely disorientated and was also thrown out of the Opry. When he met Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar in 1952 he simply said to her: "If you ain't married, ole Hank's gonna marry you. You're about the purtiest thing I ever saw." And in October of 1952 he married Billie Jean. But this relationship didn't last long: On January 1, 1953, Hank Williams was found dead on the back seat of one of his Cadillacs. He had been on the way to a show.

If you want to take charts as a measure for success, Johnny Cash wasn't very successful in the last years. But charts are no measure any more for Cash's importance for North America's culture. But who is this "man in black", whose name is often said together with Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, if somebody wants to know the biggest stars of Country Music?

John R. Cash was born on February 26, 1932, in Kingsland/Arkansas, his father planted cotton and was the son of a Cherokee Indian woman and a white man. His mother played guitar and after his fifth birthday he sang with her Gospel and Country songs, and his sister Louise often sang lots of songs to him when he was working at his father's cotton fields. After school he went to the Air Force and was for three years in a military camp in Germany. In 1955, back in the USA, he recorded his first two songs at the studios of the small company Sun, which had just produced the first records of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins: "Cry, Baby, Cry" and "Hey, Porter" - and they got hits immediately. "Ballad Of A Teenage Queen", "Big River", and others were following. "I Walk The Line" even got to the top twenty in USA's Pop charts and got Johnny's first millionseller. But, on the other side, stress increased, and he took stimulants to stay fit and barbiturates to be able to sleep. He began to look older and older, and got divorced. Everything looked almost the same as with Hank Williams at this stage.

But then he met June Carter, the daughter of Maybelle Carter, who was divorced the second time. June, who was already a known singer that time, understood to get Johnny out of his vicious circle. Things were looking up for him again and June Carter became Mrs. Cash. With songs like "Jackson" or "Ring Of Fire" he brought Country Music also to new listeners. When 1970 a song called "A Boy Named Sue" came out, Johnny Cash was once and for all also loved by pop fans. Millions of people all over the world bought that record, which tells the story of a man, who leaves his wife leaving back only an empty bottle and a son with a girl's name. The reason for this strange fact: The son should be made ridiculous for the whole world, so that he should get a hard and tough man, who can survive in the battle of life.

Today Johnny Cash is without doubt the singer who made Country Music popular all over the world. He does a lot for minorities and outcasts, he plays concerts with Indians and Blacks, he plays in prisons ("Folsom Prison Blues") and sends money for children's homes and orphanages. He dresses in black saying he will only wear again "colored" clothes when poverty and injustice will be gone from this world.

But Johnny Cash also has to tell every listener something important. He sings about work on cotton fields, the wide countryside, the America of trains and trucks. In spite of his richness he has stayed a man of the people and a man of the country, a man with strengths and weakness, and his listeners feel that. Paul Gresco, a Canadian journalist said after one of Johnny's concerts: "The stories he sang sounded like they had been lived and not only composed."

With 7 albums and one greatest hits album Garth Brooks got the new American mega-star: In his first 4 years he had sold about 30 million albums, which got quadruple platin faster than other Country-albums before, and even though Garth has stayed "the nice boy from the next door", who cares more about contacts to his fans than about precious metal discs. Millions of fans, fame, awards, money, that all seems a little bit strange to "the magician" himself, and not even he himself can explain or analyze this success, he uses simply an old phrase: "Everything happens for a reason!"

But back to the beginnings: Garth Brooks was born on February 7, 1962 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Music was present every time in his family, and as he went to a concert of Queen in Oklahoma City, he knew he wants to stand one time on the stage and have this feeling... but it was Country, that he wanted to play. In "Yukon High School" and "Oklahoma State University" Garth played football, basketball, baseball, and track-and-field sports, but finally he saw he was too lazy for doing sports and he began to sing in honky tonks. In 1984 he graduated in "Advertising & Marketing" and in 1985 he drove to Nashville, convinced that all doors would stand open for him, "but there's nothing colder than reality", to say it in his own words. And so he drove back to Stillwater, to his family, and continued singing in honky tonks. In 1987 he drove to Nashville again, now convinced to stay until he would get a chance. And after working some time in a boot store, he also got his chance.

4 singles of his debut album "Garth Brooks" of 1989 got Country-charts-hits. His second album "No Fences" was a millionseller in 1990 within 6 weeks, and it looked like Garth had a "season ticket" for the Country-No.1 position. In 1990, he also won 8 Country awards, and the number of fanclub members raised from 459 to 11,000. His following albums, "Ropin' The Wind" (1991), "The Chase" (1992) and "In Pieces" (1993), broke again a lot of records, which were even held partly by himself before. "The Chase" was the first album which got in both Billboard-charts (Country and Pop) No.1 in the first week! In 1992, he won his first Grammy award "Best Country Vocal Performance for "Ropin' The Wind". And his 1994 greatest hits album "The Hits" had been in the Country-top-twenty for about two years!

Some controversial songs also caused big discussions, for example "The Thunder Rolls", which deals with abused women (comment from Garth: "This song came out fighting the day it was released"), or "We Shall Be Free", which was a reaction to a trial in Los Angeles, where 4 policemen who had beaten the colored man Rodney King, got free and which contains a line for the rights of homosexuals: "When we're free to love anyone we choose... then we shall be free". But Garth only says "that's real life", and I personally think, that's what Country Music is all about: real life. For Garth Brooks, it's not important if a song could get a hit, only strong emotional contents of his lyrics are important. So his comment to "We Shall Be Free" is easy said: "I never thought there would be any problems with this song. Sometimes the roads we take do not turn out to be the roads we envisioned them to be. All I can say about 'We Shall Be Free' is that I will stand by every line of this song as long as I live."

Garth's most famous song today is "Friends In Low Places", but also "The River", "Callin' Baton Rouge", "The Thunder Rolls", "We Shall Be Free", "If Tomorrow Never Comes", "The Dance" or "American Honky-Tonk Bar Association" will never be forgotten by his fans. And as he said that he wants to be here for a long time, and that he already has a lot of ideas left, a lot of good songs will follow.

"Country-and-Western Music", Microsoft Encarta 96 Encyclopedia, Microsoft Corporation, 1995
"History of Country Music", Internet site by John Walker (jhwalker@ilstu.edu), 1996
"The Hits", CD-booklet by Garth Brooks, 1994
"Country Music der '90er Jahre", Monica Mahlmann, Ber Verlag, Berlin, 1993
"Das Buch der Country Music", Walter Fuchs, Heel-Verlag, Schindeleggi (CH), 1990