History of Country Music

Series Summary

Songwriting has a long and rich history dating back hundreds of years. From the bards and troubadours of the middle ages to more modern songwriters like Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, songwriters change, shape, and in most cases improve the quality of life for those around them. Songwriting is made easier when the writer has a knowledge of music theory, but this kind of expertise is not a always a prerequisite, as many songwriters describe themselves as a mediums rather than creators.

In this free video series, our expert Cody Kimmel will give you a bit of the history of country music before going over songwriting tools, tips, and methods. He will give you tips for starting a country song, and teach you about chord and lyric structures for verses, pre-choruses, choruses, and bridges. Cody will then show you how to put all these disparate parts together and blend them into a completed whole with examples from his own music.

Video Transcript

"CODY KIMMEL: Hi. My name is Cody Kimmel. I'm the lead singer of the band Eliot Fitzgerald, and I'm here with Expert Village to teach you how to write a country song. When writing a country song, it is important to note the history of country music. In any songwriting style, no matter if it's pop, folk, country, rock, R and B, anything like that, it's important to take note of where that genre's come from and how you fit within that genre. With country music--what's fun about country music is that it truly is an American art form, that country music started here in America and has perpetuated through American songwriters. It is--it kinda--it was a musical art form that grew out of gospel and bluegrass. It was kind of a fusion of those two genres. It kinda happened in the mid to early 20th century. It kinda grew from there. You got Hank Williams and then it grows into Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash and other people like that began to perpetuate country music and bringing it to what it is today which is a very large and broad category with many different sub-genres. And as a songwriter, when you're writing country music, it is important to understand that you are a part of that history. And so, when you're thinking of your themes, you gotta think of the history of themes in which country music is a part of. Country music rose from the church. Part of--a conventional theme within country music and when you're writing country music is whether it directly relates to the church or conservative values, it should at least make a reference to those or use those as metaphors or things like that. It's a very common thing to do. It's also based and rooted in American culture. So, the use of cities, the use of places that you've gone within America, incorporated into the storytelling of the song is a very important part of country music and storytelling in general. Country music is great at telling stories."