Everything that’s gone into constituting American music has in some way relied on the blues for backing. Louis Armstrong was able to demonstrate how blues with a feeling could lead to not just some of the most artful playing in music’s recorded history, but also how it was able to unite a country in some ways that nearly no other art act could muster. Jimmie Rodgers and his blue yodels used the same basic frame work as every jazz bandleader, but because of his different life experiences rendered it all in bucolic fashion.

Tuning into any radio show, armed with an adept deejay, the two players, Armstrong and Rodgers, could easily be played back to back and please the same audience. But that’d most likely be on college radio as neither performer today garners any attention from popular culture. Jazz may have been popular music at one point in our nation’s history just not any longer. Country music and bluegrass never attained that status even as its source material was often similar to its better loved, seemingly more cultivated brother.

Rock and Roll may have unseated both musical vernaculars, but jazz at least saw a moment of widespread acceptance. White folks emulated the form’s players, their style in manner of dress and performance even as most Americans never sought to cop a cowboy stance and sing about rambling. Considering the stifling racism and decades of disapproval, it’s startling that a country comprising a majority of European decedents would basically embrace the cultural other, the minority, in some ways, but continue to relegate the entirety of a race to second class citizenry.

In part what contributes to the relatively confusing situation is the fact that both jazz and any strain of hillbilly styled music can be traced back to the south. Again, being birthed from the blues has a great deal to do with that. But New Orleans seems to have provided a better confluence of cultures as to imbue jazz with a more enticing sound. Coming from some combination of Carribean, African, French and Native American understanding of music, jazz should have immediately become a hugely popular form. It’s sounds encompassed a tremendous amount of the citizenry’s history. Jazz was also, somehow, able to become an art music, while retaining the folk traditions that assisted in founding the genre. The same can’t be said for early country music, though.

Much in the same way that pinpointing the birth of jazz becomes an insurmountable task, figuring the starting point of country, or a bit later bluegrass, is all but a futile endeavor. One of the best tools for investigating this, regardless of there being a proper answer or not, is The Anthology of American Folk Music. Cobbled together from Harry Partch’s personal record collection, the tracks represent some of the earliest recorded moments in folk, blues, country, string bands and minstrelsy. Partch, though, was a film maker as opposed to an historian, although he would eventually embrace his scholarly tendencies while compiling the collection for Smithsonian-Folkways.