Near Country exists along the margins to the centre of country music, with all that defies and defines it. Mixes weave through rockabilly, blues, americana, experimental folk, bluegrass, gospel, classic country, pop country, radical country, country rap, and more. Listen to past mixes on Noods Radio, broadcasting online (and on occasion in-person) from Bristol, UK.
BRISTOL BRISTOL SESSION
Live from Noods Radio, Summer 2024
In 1927, a producer for Victor Records rolled into a small city in Tennessee with cutting edge technology: Western Electric microphones, a new tool in the nascent era of electrical recording. With these microphones and the hands of two skilled engineers, Ralph S. Peer recorded nineteen acts in a makeshift hotel room recording studio. The goal of this two-week recording project, known now as the Bristol Sessions, was to respond to a perceived market demand for the music of rural Appalachia, or a consumer-tailored version of it. The producer culled the repertoire brought by local musicians for what would sell best to a broad audience: modified renditions of singable old time, white gospel, novelty acts, and none of the vaudeville or northern pop many of them regularly performed. Packaged with tall tales of remote recording sessions with barefooted hillbillies, commercial country music was born.For the first live Near Country in studio, I focused on the star-stuff of this music for The Bristol Bristol Session.
With Near Country, I follow the threads of country music from its experimental melded origins through to its variegated branches today. Sometimes that means approaching country, getting near to, gesturing towards the thing itself without actually getting there. The nearer I get, the more porous its borders become. I could make a joke about holes in country’s border security but it writes itself. Industry, politics, culture posit a tight, rigid structure. And while to an extent that image maps to a reality in the genre, a historical perspective challenges the monolithic identity of contemporary country.
A survey of early country gives us old time, gospel, shape note, blues, work songs, Irish and British traditional tunes, and vaudeville and northern-tinged popular music. Not synthesized into one style, but as a multiplicity of synchronic approaches under a panentheonism then known as hillbilly. Not entirely as diverse as the above implies, the Bristol Sessions lacked any musicians of color but black and brown artists shaped the formation and continued development of this music from Jimmie Rodger’s yodeling blues to western swing to contemporary pop iterations bursting with hip hop influenced production.
The Bristol Bristol Session sorts through the complications of being simultaneously a Near Country in a far one.
