Day 4

Today I did a little more research on Dr. Malone and his works and writing. Before today I did brief research on him and discovered that he wrote an entire book on country music titled Country Music, USA and it was published in 1968, but has since had more editions come out. While I couldn’t get my hands on a copy or an online copy, I read several reviews of the book from journals on JSTOR. One review that I found gave a very nice overview of the book and was unbiased. The journal article was titled on JSTOR as Review: Country Music U.S.A A Fifty-Year History by Bill C. Malone. And it was reviewed by Gilbert Chase. His review was very clear and concise but used several quotes from the book itself. It went over what the book was about. The book is not just about country music but the history behind it, how country music came to be a thing in the USA. It talked about how the attitudes of the rural southerners filtered into the music. The book admits that country music does stem from folk music but has evolved saying that is changed per the region it was in. For example Oklahoma and Texas became more Western swing rather than folky mountain music and so on. It also described how Dr. Bill C. Malone feels about country music and he feels that it is still primarily in the south and that he south contributed to the creation of a lasting regional music. The book not only analyzed specific careers of country stars, like the first one, Jimmy Rogers aka the father of modern country music, but also went over the different styles of country music, historically such as: Western swing, honky tonk, country-pop, the “Nashville sound,” saga song, bluegrass, urban folk song, etc. the review also stated that Dr. Malone feels that country music will never be fully appreciated by American culture to those who don’t listen to it because Americans are busy giving higher praise to other genres and tend not to pay attention to it. Overall the reviews were good but I thought this was the best one out of the ones I read. Dr. Malone still hasn’t called me back from yesterday, so I will most likely give him one more day to call back until I call again.

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