Country music is one of those phenomena that remind us how much we’ve packed into the twentieth century, for it is younger than many of our parents. This is its story.

The term country music does not denote “rural people playing instruments and singing”; probably the last place it had this meaning was turn-of-the-century Britain. Country music is not folk music —the orally transmitted songs of a community—but something more complex, more dynamic. It is the product of a collision, some seventy years ago, between Northern businessmen and rural Southern white musicians—folk musicians, but changed by this encounter into a very different species: professionals. Country music, in this usage, means “commercial country music,” America’s immensely profitable country-music business. Country music, says Robert Cantwell in his good book Bluegrass Breakdown, “has never been anything but entrepreneurial and commercial, prospering in the one commodity which in America is ever in short supply—the past.”

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