The Kipsigis or Kipsigiis are a Nilotic group contingent of the Kalenjin ethnic group and speak a dialect of the Kalenjin language identified by their community eponym, Kipsigis. It is observed that the Kipsigis and another aboriginal group native to Kenya known as Ogiek have a merged identity. The Kipsigis are the biggest sub tribe within the Kalenjin community. The latest census population in Kenya put the Kipsigis at 1,972,000 speakers, accounting for 45% of all Kalenjin speaking people. They occupy the highlands of Kericho stretching from Timboroa to the Mara River in the south and the Mau Escarpment in the east to Kebeneti. They also occupy parts of Laikipia, Kitale, Nakuru, Narok, the Trans Mara District, Eldoret and the Nandi Hills.
Mbira are a family of musical instruments, traditional to the Shona people of Zimbabwe. They consist of a wooden board with attached staggered metal tines, played by holding the instrument in the hands and plucking the tines with the thumbs, the right forefinger, and sometimes the left forefinger. Musicologists classify it as a lamellaphone, part of the plucked idiophone family of musical instruments. In Eastern and Southern Africa, there are many kinds of mbira, often accompanied by the hosho, a percussion instrument. It is often an important instrument played at religious ceremonies, weddings, and other social gatherings. The "Art of crafting and playing Mbira/Sansi, the finger-plucking traditional musical instrument in Malawi and Zimbabwe" was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.
Ralph Sylvester Peer was an American talent scout, recording engineer, record producer and music publisher in the 1920s and 1930s. Peer pioneered field recording of music when in June 1923 he took remote recording equipment south to Atlanta, Georgia, to record regional music outside the recording studio in such places as hotel rooms, ballrooms, or empty warehouses.
Yodeling is a form of singing which involves repeated and rapid changes of pitch between the low-pitch chest register and the high-pitch head register or falsetto. The English word yodel is derived from the German word jodeln, meaning "to utter the syllable jo". This vocal technique is used in many cultures worldwide. Recent scientific research concerning yodeling and non-Western cultures has shown that music and speech evolved from a common prosodic precursor.
James Charles Rodgers was an American singer-songwriter and musician who rose to popularity in the late 1920s. Widely regarded as the "Father of Country Music", he is best known for his distinctive yodeling. Rodgers was known as "The Singing Brakeman" and "America's Blue Yodeler". He has been cited as an inspiration by many artists, and he has been inducted into multiple halls of fame.
The music of Zambia has a rich heritage which falls roughly into categories of traditional, popular and Christian music.
Western music is a form of music composed by and about the people who settled and worked throughout the Western United States and Western Canada. Western music celebrates the lifestyle of the cowboy on the open range, along the Rocky Mountains, and among the prairies of Western North America. The genre grew from the mix of cultural influences in the American frontier and what became the Southwestern United States at the time, it came from the folk music traditions of those living the region, those being the hillbilly music from those that arrived from the Eastern U.S., the corrido and ranchera from Northern Mexico, and the New Mexico and Tejano endemic to the Southwest. The music industry of the mid-20th century grouped the western genre with that of similar folk origins, instrumentation and rural themes, to create the banner of country and western music, which was simplified in time to country music.
Hugh Travers Tracey was an English ethnomusicologist. He and his wife collected and archived music from Southern and Central Africa. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Tracey made over 35,000 recordings of African folk music. He popularized the mbira internationally under the name kalimba.
The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is an organization dedicated to the preservation and study of African music. Seated in Grahamstown, South Africa, ILAM is attached to the Music Department at Rhodes University and coordinates its Ethnomusicology Programme which offers undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in Ethnomusicology that include training in performance of African music. ILAM, as the largest repository of indigenous African music, is particularly known for its study of the lamellophone mbira of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, as well as the Chopi people's Timbila, a variant of the marimba from southern Mozambique.
This is a list of notable events in country music that took place in the year 1928.
The blue yodel songs are a series of thirteen songs written and recorded by Jimmie Rodgers during the period from 1927 to his death in May 1933. The songs were based on the 12-bar blues format and featured Rodgers’ trademark yodel refrains. The lyrics often had a risqué quality with "a macho, slightly dangerous undertone." The original 78 issue of "Blue Yodel No. 1 " sold more than a half million copies, a phenomenal number at the time. The term "blue yodel" is also sometimes used to differentiate the earlier Austrian yodeling from the American form of yodeling introduced by Rodgers.
"Blue Yodel No. 1 " is a song by American singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers. The recording was produced by Ralph Peer, who had originally recorded with Rodgers during the Bristol Sessions. It was released by the Victor Talking Machine Company on February 3, 1928. Rodgers recorded it during his second session with Victor, on November 30, 1927.
Anna Lomax Wood is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and public folklorist. She is the president of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), established in 1985 by her father, musicologist Alan Lomax, at Hunter College, CUNY.
Elsie McWilliams was a songwriter who wrote for Jimmie Rodgers. McWilliams, even though she is only officially credited with writing twenty songs, actually wrote or co-wrote 39 songs for Rodgers. McWilliams was his most frequent collaborator. She was the first woman to make a career as a country music songwriter.
Clifford George Hayes was an African-American multi-instrumentalist and bandleader who recorded jug band music and jazz in the 1920s and 1930s, notably as the leader of the Dixieland Jug Blowers, Clifford's Louisville Jug Band, and Hayes's Louisville Stompers. His main instrument was the violin.
Cowboy pop is a term that American music journalist J. D. Considine first coined in his review of Rubber Rodeo's 1984 album Scenic Views. Although the term was coined in the 1980s, its usage since that time has been varied. In the late 2010s, the term began to be used to describe country-influenced indie rock and indie pop bands.
"Waiting for a Train" is a song written and recorded by Jimmie Rodgers and released by the Victor Talking Machine Company as the flipside of "Blue Yodel No. 4" in February 1929. The song originated in the nineteenth century in England. It later appeared in several song books, with variations on the lyrics throughout the years.
The discography of Jimmie Rodgers is composed of 111 songs that spanned the blues, jazz and country music genres. His first recording was made on August 4, 1927, during the Bristol sessions. The sessions were organized by Ralph Peer, who became Rodgers' main producer. Rodgers enjoyed success. At the height of his career, he made US$75,000 in royalties in 1929. After the Great Depression, his sales dropped to US$60,000. His last recording session took place in New York City on May 24, 1933. Rodgers died two nights later at the Taft Hotel after years of suffering from tuberculosis.
The Singing Brakeman is a 1929 short film, starring Jimmie Rodgers, and released by Columbia-Victor Gems. Rodgers sings three of his songs: "Waiting for a Train", "Daddy and Home" and "Blue Yodel".
The Tenneva Ramblers were an old-time string band which consisted of singer and guitar player Claude Grant, his mandolin-playing brother Jack Grant, and Jack Pierce.
