Country
Country music is a generalized name for a form of music that originated among white people in rural areas of the southern and western United States and is based on song and dance tunes brought to North America by early European settlers. In content, the songs and ballads performed by country musicians are close to the themes common to rural folklore. The spirit of the art of music-making was also determined by the selection of such stringed instruments as guitar and mandolin, banjo and harmonica; from the beginning, the characteristic flavor of the sound of music was given by the fiddle-fiddle, the main musical instrument of American farmers for several centuries. Country music tends to have open guitar chords and a 2/4 or 4/4 rhythm. The form of vocal numbers is usually verse-by-verse - a solo chorus and a choral refrain.
