What makes country music country music?

[Mota Boy]

This has been bothering me for a while. I've asked my friends, who happen to go to one of the more prestigious music schools in the country (for classical music) and they can't tell me - what makes country music country music? The best I can describe it is having some sort of intangible thing called "twang" which I could pick out of a crowd but not vocalize, like Calvin unable to distinguish between a certain type of smell*. Anyway, there are a handfull of y'all that I'd trust to be able to tell me exactly why country music is country music, and I'd be ever so delighted if you could take the time to respond.









*If you can recall anything about the strip of which I speak, you fucking rock. That or you're a geek, but you most likely rock.

[Endymion]

if the lyrics involve fucking your sister or pick up trucks, it's country.

[Little_Miss_1565]

But Johnny Cash has no twang, and he IS country.

Shania Twain is all twang, and she is a poseur from Canadia.

[Mota Boy]

Blah, the stereotype is trains, rain, jail... fuck it, the venerable David Allen Coe has already written a stanza illustrating this point better than I could:

"Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison,
And I went to pick her up in the rain,
But before I could get to the station in my pick-up truck,
She got run over by a damned old train."



Seriously though, what the fuck makes twang twang?

[Little_Miss_1565]

Study the pedal steel guitar. What makes it tick, or rather twang? The tuning? How it's played with the slide? What does that pedal do, anyway?