Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Having identified the strands that would later make up country music, we now consider the further development of the search for a national music. It coincided with the growing romantic attachment of certain members of the elite to a racialized Anglo-Saxon American "folk" whose culture they re-imagined, shorn of any uncouth or labor-related themes, in contrast to more urban, black or immigrant cultures. The English proselytiser for Morris dancing, Cecil Sharp, exceeded the efforts of others in highlighting the music of the Appalachians as particularly Anglo-Saxon and thus worthy of attention. After World War I in particular, an increasingly racialized sense of self made many Americans identify with a largely-imagined Anglo-Saxon rural past free from immigrants, large cities and labor troubles. But the "folk music" of the South had yet to be commercialized or shaped into the category we now understand as country music, a process explored below.
Repository Citation
Yuill, Kevin. "Constructing Country: Fakery and 'Strictly American' Music [Part 2]." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss4/11