Rural Sociology Commons^™

99 Years Is Almost For Life: Punishment For Violent Crime In Bluegrass Music, Kenneth Tunnell

Kenneth Tunnell

The roots of Southern American music are located in the music of the eighteenth-century English, Irish and lowland Scots who migrated to North America. As they settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Cumberland Gap of Appalachia, they brought their songs that had been a part of their oral histories and cultures for at least two centuries. The commonly shared ways of life and social class among Appalachian mountain-dwellers not only inform about the early formative stages of bluegrass music but its growing popularity. As bluegrass music was removed from its insular setting and exposed to a wide variety …