Country Music, Episode 1

The first episode does an excellent job of showing that while country music may have eventually evolved into something like "blues for white people" it certainly didn't start that way. More than any other American musical form, country music began as the great melting pot where traditional folk ballads brought over from the British Isles got all tangled up with the African-American blues traditions, Mexican canciones from the border, German polkas, popular songs from Tin Pan Alley and who knows what else. If you listen to traditional music recorded before the Great Depression - and I've done a lot of that - you realize there's no way of knowing if the singer is black or white. The lines had yet to diverge. This would all change in time, and I trust the rest of the series will explain how. (It's going to involve politics, demographics, economics, and geography - and race will be involved every step of the way.)

It's also noteworthy that country music has no one to fill the role of founding genius, the way Louis Armstrong does in the history of jazz. Maybelle Carter comes closer than anyone, but it's not the same. Louis Armstrong was a born showman who wanted to perform for as many people as he could; Maybelle Carter was a wife and mother who never wanted to leave her Virginia mountain home. But she's as important as Chuck Berry. She developed a new way to play the freaking guitar. Anybody who picks up an acoustic and progresses past strumming a G chord will soon be doing stuff Maybelle Carter invented, whether they're aware of it or not. 

So the development of this music is a little more evolutionary, like the blues - as opposed to practically springing from the brow of a giant like Armstrong.