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Remembering the Birth of the American Music Story in ‘Twang’ [1]
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Date: 2025-05-01
Country radio wasn’t the only way I listened to music growing up.
My parents also raised us on the sounds and stories of blues, Motown, and rock and roll. How does this music resonate with a farm kid from Kansas?
To me Chuck Berry sounds like homemade ice cream, among other things. This might sound funny to you, but he holds a memory. It was early August, after fair season and before the first day of school. My family gathered around our back porch to do nothing but watch the sunset and whatever else was happening outside that night. My dad decided to play “School Days” to help get us in the mood for learning in the upcoming year.
We’d just made my great grandma’s homemade ice cream. The first bites were always the best, but in the summer heat it melted fast. I remember now how sweet life tasted then, on a sunset summer evening with my family around. And Chuck Berry was there, too, whispering from a speaker in the background. “Rock, rock, rock and roll. The feelin’ is there, body and soul.”
And then my dad played “Check Yes or No” by George Strait. “I think this is how love goes. Check yes or no.”
We are often told that artists like Chuck Berry and George Strait tell two separate stories. The radio and the charts today tell us music like country and hip-hop are two distinct genres, two unrelated musical traditions from two disparate worlds. But how different are they, really?
After all, to me they both sound like home. What if I told you that there’s only one big story to be told?
For more than three centuries, before the first recording device was invented, a musical tradition was being composed in the South. A musical revelation born out of a multiracial exchange of culture and emotion between struggling people facing enslavement, genocide and poverty.
The Blues were born out of this condition, to be sure. But there were also songs of joy, of hope, of peace, and of celebration.
“Such fiddling and dancing nobody ever before saw in this world,” Davy Crockett wrote in 1843. “Black and white, white and black, all together.”
How could struggling people celebrate in the face of such hardship?
They gathered around in a circle. They brought pieces of themselves, instruments, voices, gospels, memories — and they all played together. A new kind of music was born.
A music so moving that it became immensely popular – and immensely sellable – once the technology to record and sell music appeared.
Having no regard for the circle in which the music was born, the nascent recording industry split the vinyl in two. Hillbilly records for white folks and race records for Black folks. This helped streamline marketing. If they separated folks, they could sell more.
These are two different kinds of music, they said. It makes a person wonder if they ever actually heard the songs they were selling.
In a way, people bought what they sold. Race records became rhythm and blues and soul. And hillbilly records became country. And that’s history, so we’re told.
But the real story lies beyond the packaging and marketing campaigns. It’s hidden in studios, where a Black country musician kept time with piano. In writing rooms, where white and Black blues writers shared lyrics. It was in plain sight on the same porches and juke joints where the tradition began. It’s all around us today.
It’s in Beyoncé’s album, Cowboy Carter. It’s her and four Black women performing a cover of Blackbird, a Beatles’ tribute to the Little Rock Nine. This tradition in American music shows up again and again. A tradition of memory and love.
This week, Beyoncé began her 2025 Rodeo Chitlin Circuit Tour named for a network of entertainment venues where Black musicians and listeners gathered during the Jim Crow era. The tour is rooted in memory of the music played in these Chitlin Circuit venues, and before them, the music played on porches and in juke joints. A memory of the origins, of a free spirit, of Chuck Berry, of great grandma’s homemade ice cream, of love and connection.
To put it most plainly. If you are listening to any genre of popular American music, you are hearing echoes of these memories. We set out to explore them in the artists and songs featured in the latest episode of “Twang.”
Episode two is out now, along with a companion playlist featuring some of the stories we highlight (and more). I hope you’ll listen — not just to the music, but to the lives behind that trademark twang.
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