Hillbilly Music
Source & Symbol
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Biographies

Sounds

Images

Archie Green: "Hillbilly Music"

Guthrie Meade: Country Music Sources

About The Site

Image of Uncle Dave Macon
Uncle Dave Macon. John Edwards Memorial Collection (#20001), Southern Folklife Collection.

Hillbilly Music brings together stories, sounds and images of country folk music as it developed from oral tradition to recorded style in the 1920s.

Choose your tour:

- Enter exhibit for a guided visit.
- Read biographies.
- Listen to the sounds of the era.
- View images of early country music performers.
- Read "Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol," folklorist Archie Green's landmark 1965 article on hillbilly music, which includes links to many of the images and sounds in the exhibit.
- Discover Guthrie Meade's Country Music Sources.
Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol is a virtual exhibit space of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It draws on images, songs, and texts presented during the April 2003 conference entitled Hillbilly Music Sources and Symbols: Country Music, Cultural Brokerage and O Brother, Where Art Thou? The original exhibit celebrated the publication of Country Music Sources (SFC/JEMF, 2002) by Guthrie T. Meade Jr., Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade. Image of the Hill Billies
The Hill Billies. John Edwards Memorial Collection (#20001), Southern Folklife Collection.