North-America

Bluegrass
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and it is a sub-genre of country music. It has its own roots in Irish, Scottish and English traditional music. Bluegrass was inspired by the music of immigrants from the United Kingdom and Ireland (particularly the Scots-Irish immigrants in Appalachia), as well as jazz and blues. In bluegrass, as in jazz, each instrument takes a turn playing the melody and improvising around it, while the others revert to backing; this is in contrast to old-time music, in which all instruments play the melody together or one instrument carries the lead throughout while the others provide accompaniment. Bluegrass is distinctively acoustic in instrumentation, not using electrical instruments of any kind.

Blogs

 * Bill's Blog
 * CMT Blog: Bluegrass on the fence
 * Doppelstopp (streaming)
 * Lonesome Lefty's Scratchy Attic
 * Second Cousin Curly (streaming video)

Cajun
Cajun music, an emblematic music of Louisiana, is rooted in the ballads of the French-speaking Acadians of Canada. Cajun music is often mentioned in tandem with the Creole-based, Cajun-influenced zydeco form, both of Acadiana origin. These French Louisiana sounds have influenced American popular music for many decades, especially country music, and have influenced pop culture through mass media, such as television commercials.

Blogs

 * Cajun Music mp3 Not a blog but contains a lot of music
 * Western Swing on 78 cajun, swing, hillbilly

Country
Country music is a broad term, covering a great many styles of music predominantly created in the United States of America - however there are growing traditions of country music elsewhere, particularly in Canada and Australia and Njgeria

Country music is generally characterized by its use of the guitar and its heavily-accented vocals describing life’s hardships. A common joke runs that if one plays a country song backwards, the singer’s child recovers from an illness, he gets his job back, his wife returns to him and his dog isn’t run over by a car.

Common lyrical themes deal with cowboys and other anti-heroes, often presented as common men and women just trying to make it through the day.

Country music was an influence on early rock music, along with blues, jazz, and gospel. Many different varieties of country music have arisen over the years, from the slick production of the Nashville sound to the rougher edges of outlaw country. There have been several cycles from periods of experimentation and fusion with other genres giving way to returns to traditionalism and back again. Recently, there has been a great deal of crossover between country and pop, beginning with Shania Twain in the mid-1990s and continuing through to Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift. On the other hand, there is also a loosely-defined group of alt-country artists operating outside the mainstream of country and incorporating influences from other genres ranging from folk to punk.

Blogs

 * Allen`s archive of early and old country music
 * Frances Favorite 45's streaming
 * LoneStarStomp (streaming only)
 * Mellow Log Cabin
 * Uncle Gil's Rocking Archive
 * Westex, Country & Western (streaming only)

Folk
In North-American culture, folk music refers to the American folk music revival, music exemplified by such musicians as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez, who popularized, encouraged and revolutionized in many ways the lyrical style in the 1950s and 1960s.

Blogs

 * Cornbread, molasses & sassafras tea
 * Common Folk Music (streaming/scrobbles)
 * The Old Weird America
 * Wired For Sound (streaming)

Old-time music
Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music, with roots in the folk music of various cultures of the British Isles, Africa, and Continental Europe. It developed along with various North American folk dances, such as square dancing, flatfoot dancing, buck dancing, and clogging. The genre also encompasses ballads and other types of folk songs. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle and plucked string instruments (most often the guitar and banjo).

Blogs

 * Bopping (hillbilly, cajun)
 * Hillbilly Researcher

Rockabilly
Rockabilly and Rock n Roll evolved side by side during the late 40’s and early 50’s, but it was rock n Roll that would become the commercial success of the day, resulting in Rockabilly becoming a cult fashion. Rockabilly has never gone away, it has always had a cult following enabling it to survive the 60 years it has, with periods of commercial success.

The genre came about when poor white kids in the southern states of the US grew up listening to hillbilly, gospel and blues, and mixed these musical influences and developed the sound that would later be known as Rockabilly.

The influence and popularity of the style waned in the 1960s, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s, rockabilly enjoyed a major revival of popularity that has endured to the present, often within a rockabilly subculture. It was the new generation of kids that became interested in the genre that spawned Neo and Psychobilly to the tree of Rock n Roll.

Blogs

 * The Ohio Valley Sound A celebration of the recordings made in the Ohio Valley area from 50's, 60's, and 70's