Southern
· Geographic. The American South as a musical region — not merely geographic but cultural: the
intersection of West African tradition, European folk music, Protestant church music, and the specific social
conditions of the post-Reconstruction South that produced blues, country, gospel, and the roots of nearly every
American popular form.
Strings
· Instrumental. String instruments — guitar, fiddle, banjo, dobro — as the primary carriers of Southern
musical tradition. The strings are the memory instruments of the South: portable, durable, capable of both melody
and rhythm, and historically the instruments of communities without access to pianos or brass.
The Southern Strings
adj. Of or pertaining to a melodic or textural quality in music derived from the
string-instrument traditions of the American South — characterized by blue notes, vocal vibrato applied to
instrumental lines, and the particular emotional directness of the country blues and its descendants.
n.(a The Southern Strings) (a Southern Strings) The specific melodic vocabulary of
the American South's string tradition — a set of inflections, bends, and timbral qualities that identify a
musical line as rooted in the blues-country continuum regardless of the genre in which it appears.