Hillbilly Music: The Modern Origins of an Old-Time Southern Sound, 1922-1931

FAIN: FT-52451-04

Patrick Joseph Huber
Missouri University of Science and Technology (Rolla, MO 65409-0001)

My book project explores the origins and early development of hillbilly music in the modern American South. In its broadest strokes, the study argues that, contrary to popular and academic conceptions, hillbilly music was chiefly the product of the urban-industrial South, and that this popular music can only be understood within the historical context of the large-scale industrial development, urban growth, and emergence of regional mass media that transformed the South in the half century following Reconstruction. When my book is published, it will fill an important void in the fields of country music scholarship, working-class history, occupational folklore, and American and southern studies.