Appalachian music comes from Anglo-Celtic roots, but it has its own sound. In a book with the marvelous title of "Roadkill on the Three-chord Highway," Colin Escott, a Canadian journalist who has written about Hank Williams Sr., Sun Records and the origins of country music, traces the sound back from early rock and the music heard on 500-watt Southern radio stations in the 1930s and 40s:
The Everley Brothers borrowed the sound of the Louvin Brothers. The Louvins sang an old murder ballad called 'The Knoxville Girl,' and if you dig around you'lll find that the Blue Sky Boys recorded an even spooker version twenty years earlier, in 1937, and that the first recorded version dated all the way back to the dawn of the country music record business in 1924. Dig around some more and you'll find that the song came over from England as 'The Wexford Girl,' but what's really interesting is that 'The Wexford Girl' isn't really 'The Knoxville Girl.' Something happened in the darkness and isolation of Appalachia, something indefinable. It happened before the recording machine, and it happened in the little hollers [sic] and valleys. The American experience warped and transformed the immigrants, changing their music as it changed them. 'The Knoxville Girl' is eerier and darker than 'The Wexford Girl,' despite the fact that 'The Wexford Girl' is more explicit. (vii)The song clearly has Anglo-Celtic roots. Wexford is in Ireland, and "Wexford Girl" is variously described as Irish or English. But "Knoxville Girl" just sounds Appalachian. Especially if you first heard it, as the writer did, on the jukebox at the former Yardarm tavern just off the Western Avenue viaduct in Knoxville during the 1960s.
Reference(s)
Escott, Colin. Roadkill on the Three-chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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