Upstairs, Flemons, Farrow, and I talked like long-lost friends. I told them about my own fascination with country music and roots, how the ballads of George Jones and Ralph Stanley called to me early on, even as I posed as a hip-hop kid in ’90s Los Angeles.
Flemons told me his own story. Growing up in Arizona, he became interested in guitar in high school. He began hanging out at a folk festival near his home, and fell in love with the jagged and delicate literature of cowboy poets. This led him to seek out as many black musicians playing old-timey and roots music as he could find; before long, he had stumbled upon Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, the guitarist/singer/songwriter considered by most historians to be the original nexus point of blues, bluegrass, Dixieland, and country-and-western. Creating a seminal jumping-off point in a litany of American musical traditions, Lead Belly recorded “When I Was a Cowboy” for archivist Alan Lomax in 1933, when Lomax visited the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana to find and archive African-American folk songs. Lead Belly was serving time on an attempted murder charge for stabbing a white man during a brawl.
As Flemons dove deeper into the history, he began to play banjo (itself an African instrument) and harmonica. Tracing the roots of cowboy music is like unfolding a string puzzle. You find that African music led to bluegrass when it married with Scotch-Irish folk songs. Jazz is rooted in the same spot, but followed the sunlight in a different direction, merging with — and in some cases lampooning — the stately American brass marches of John Philip Sousa and the Confederate army bands that wandered the South after the Civil War.
Meanwhile, blues as we know it comprised only a minority of the music played by African-Americans, in the ’20s and ’30s, but because the Lomax recordings focused almost entirely on blues, that’s what became synonymous with the black South. Musicians traveled from town to town, for work or family, happening upon the work of other players and influencing or being influenced by them. Arnold Shultz was a black Kentucky guitar picker who traveled to New Orleans every summer in the 1910s, learning new chords and constructions from Dixieland ensembles there. He then went on to teach what he knew to Bill Monroe, Chet Atkins, and Ike Everly, father of The Everly Brothers.
http://www.mtv.com/news/2990869/the-roots-of-cowboy-music/