In the Southwestern United States mix of ethnic groups from Mexico, the British Isles, Germany, and the Czech Republic created the music that became the Western music of the term Country Western. [1] Guitars, fiddles, and the accordion are the most common instruments used in Western music.N. Howard Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys (1908) was the first book of Western Music published. Popular west of the Mississippi, it included many songs of unknown authorship, but it included the first popular cowboy song, "Little Joe, The Wrangler", which was written by Thorpe.[2] The book, however, included no musical notation.John Lomax, in his 1910 publication, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,
first gained national attention for Western Music.
His book contained many of the same songs as Thorp's book (he collected most of them before Thorp's was published). However, Lomax's compilation included many musical scores.With the advent of radio and recording devices the music found an audience previously ignored by
music schools and Tin Pan Alley. Many Westerners preferred familiar music about themselves and their environments. The first successful cowboy
band to tour the East was Otto Gray's Oklahoma Cowboys put together by William McGinty, an Oklahoma pioneer and former Rough Rider.
The band appeared on radio and toured the vaudeville circuit from 1924 through 1936. They recorded few songs however, so are overlooked by many scholars of Western Music.[3] With the romanticization of the cowboy in the following decades, the music attracted a much greater audience.
Film producers in Hollywood and New York City began incorporating fully orchestrated four-part harmonies into their motion pictures and recordings, something far from its folk roots but still Western. In its heyday, the 1930s and 1940s, the most popular recordings and musical radio shows such as the National Barn Dance of the era were of Western music. Western swing also developed during this era. By the 1960s, Western music was in decline. Relegated to the Country and Western genre by the marketing agencies, popular Western recording stars released albums to only moderate success. Rock and Roll dominated music sales and the Hollywood recording studios dropped most of their Western artists. Caught unaware by the boom in Country and Western sales from Nashville that followed, Hollywood rushed to cash in. In the process, Country and Western music lost its regionalism and most of its style. Except for the label, much of the music was indistinguishable from Rock and Roll or Popular. Some Western music traditionalists resent the blurring of "Western" in a Country and Western category that no longer represents them,
but the name is too well ingrained to be changed. Still, many Westerners prefer music about themselves, their culture, and the land around them.
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