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Western Swing
Western swing, country jazz or smooth country is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma, and California during the 1930s and 1940s until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline.''Stomping the Blues''. Albert Murray. Da Capo Press. 2000. page 109, 110. , The movement was an outgrowth of jazz. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, old-time, Dixieland jazz, and blues blended with swing; and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar. The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound.Wolff, ''Country Music'', "Big Balls in Cowtown: Western Swing From Fort Worth to Fresno", p. 71. La ...
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Musical Genre
A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. Genre is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style, although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Music can be divided into genres in numerous ways, sometimes broadly and with polarity, e.g., popular music as opposed to art music or folk music, or, as another example, religious music and secular music. Often, however, classification draws on the proliferation of derivative subgenres, fusion genres, and microgenres that has started to accrue, e.g., screamo, country pop, and mumble rap, respectively. The artistic nature of music means that these classifications are often subjective and controversial, and some may overlap. As genres evolve, novel music is sometimes lumped into existing categories. Definitions Douglass M. Green distinguishes between genre and Musical form, form in his book ''Form in Tonal Music''. ...
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, ...
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Shreveport
Shreveport ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Louisiana. It is the List of municipalities in Louisiana, third-most populous city in Louisiana after New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Baton Rouge. The bulk of Shreveport is in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, Caddo Parish, of which it is the parish seat. It extends along the west bank of the Red River of the South, Red River into neighboring Bossier Parish, Louisiana, Bossier Parish. The 2020 United States census, 2020 census tabulation for the city's population was 201,573, while the Shreveport–Bossier City metropolitan area had a population of 393,406. Shreveport was founded in 1836 by the Shreve Town Company, a corporation established to develop a town at the juncture of the newly navigable Red River and the Texas Trail, an overland route into the newly independent Republic of Texas. It grew throughout the 20th century and, after the discovery of oil in Louisiana, became a national center for the oil industry. Standard Oil of Loui ...
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San Antonio
San Antonio ( ; Spanish for " Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the third-largest metropolitan area in Texas and the 24th-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 2.6 million people in the 2020 United States census. It is the most populous city in and the county seat of Bexar County. San Antonio is the seventh-most populous city in the United States, and the second-most populous in the Southern United States and Texas, after Houston. Founded as a Spanish mission and colonial outpost in 1718, the city in 1731 became the first chartered civil settlement in what is now present-day Texas. The area was then part of the Spanish Empire. From 1821 to 1836, it was part of the Mexican Republic. It is the oldest municipality in Texas, having celebrated its 300th anniversary on May 1, 2018. Straddling the regional divide between South and Central Texas, San Antonio anchors the southwe ...
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Great Plains
The Great Plains is a broad expanse of plain, flatland in North America. The region stretches east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. They are the western part of the Interior Plains, which include the mixed grass prairie, the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains Ecozone, Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains Ecozone, Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. "Great Plains", or Western Plains, is also the ecoregion of the Great Plains or the western portion of the Great Plains, some of which in the farthest west is known as the High Plains. The Great Plains lie across both the Central United States and Western Canada, encompassing: *Most or all of the U.S. states of Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota, North and South Dakota; *Eastern parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming; *Parts of the U.S. states of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas; *Sometimes western parts of Iowa, Minnesot ...
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The Light Crust Doughboys In Oh, Susanna!
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee' ...
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Merle Travis
Merle Robert Travis (November 29, 1917 – October 20, 1983) was an American country and western singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Born in Rosewood, Kentucky, his songs' lyrics were often about the lives and the economic exploitation of American coal miners. Among his many well-known songs and recordings are " Sixteen Tons", "Re-Enlistment Blues", " I Am a Pilgrim", and " Dark as a Dungeon". He is best known today, though, for his unique guitar style, still called Travis picking by guitarists, as well as his interpretations of the rich musical traditions of his native Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Travis picking is a syncopated style of guitar fingerpicking rooted in ragtime music in which alternating chords and bass notes are plucked by the thumb, while melodies are plucked by the index finger. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977. He is considered by some to be one of the most influent ...
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Big Band
A big band or jazz orchestra is a type of musical ensemble of jazz music that usually consists of ten or more musicians with four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section. Big bands originated during the early 1910s and dominated jazz in the early 1940s when swing music, swing was most popular. The term "big band" is also used to describe a genre of music, although this was not the only style of music played by big bands. Big bands started as accompaniment for dancing the Lindy Hop. In contrast to the typical jazz emphasis on improvisation, big bands relied on written compositions and arrangements. They gave a greater role to bandleaders, arrangers, and sections of instruments rather than soloists. Instruments Big bands generally have four sections: trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and a rhythm section of guitar, piano, double bass, drums and sometimes vibraphone or other percussion. The division in early big bands, from the 1920s to 1930s, was typicall ...
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Bebop
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early to mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo (usually exceeding 200 bpm), complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous Modulation (music), changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and Jazz improvisation, improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales, and occasional references to the melody. Bebop developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians expanded the creative possibilities of jazz beyond the popular, dance-oriented swing music-style to a new "musician's music" that was not as danceable and demanded close listening.Lott, Eric. Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style. Callaloo, No. 36 (Summer, 1988), pp. 597–605 As bebop was not intended for dancing, it enabled the musicians to play at faster tempos. Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, cho ...
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Steel Guitar
A steel guitar () is any guitar played while moving a steel bar or similar hard object against plucked strings. The bar itself is called a "steel" and is the source of the name "steel guitar". The instrument differs from a conventional guitar in that it is played without using frets; conceptually, it is somewhat akin to playing a guitar with one finger (the bar). Known for its portamento capabilities, gliding smoothly over every pitch between notes, the instrument can produce a sinuous crying sound and deep vibrato emulating the human singing voice. Typically, the strings are plucked (not strummed) by the fingers of the dominant hand, while the steel tone bar is pressed lightly against the strings and moved by the opposite hand. The idea of creating music with a slide of some type has been traced back to early African instruments, but the modern steel guitar was conceived and popularized in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiians began playing a conventional guitar in a horizontal p ...
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Musical Improvisation
Musical improvisation (also known as musical extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of Emotion, emotions and Musical technique, instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians. Sometimes musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on Chord (music), chord changes in classical music and many other kinds of music. One definition is a "performance given extempore without planning or preparation". Another definition is to "play or sing (music) extemporaneously, by inventing Variation (music), variations on a melody or creating new melodies, rhythms and harmonies". ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' defines it as "the extemporaneous composition or free performance of a musical passage, usually in a manner conforming to certain stylistic norms but unfettered by the prescriptive features of a specific musical text." Improvisation is often done within ...
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Swing Music
Swing music is a style of jazz that developed in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It became nationally popular from the mid-1930s. Swing bands usually featured soloists who would improvise on the melody over the arrangement. The danceable swing style of big bands and bandleaders such as Benny Goodman was the dominant form of American popular music from 1935 to 1946, known as the swing era, when people were dancing the Lindy Hop. The verb "to swing (jazz performance style), swing" is also used as a term of praise for playing that has a strong groove (music), groove or drive. Musicians, who were also big-band leader of the swing, era include Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Earl Hines, Bunny Berigan, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw. Overview Swing has its roots in 1920s dance music Musical ensemble, ensembles, which began using new styles of written ar ...
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