Western music originated as a form of American folk music.

Originally composed by and about the people who settled and worked throughout the Western United States and Western Canada. Directly related musically to old English, Scottish, and Irish folk ballads, Western music celebrates the life of the cowboy on the open ranges and prairies of Western North America. [1] The Mexican music of the American Southwest also influenced the development of this genre. Western music was associated with country music only because of Billboard chart classification. For the artists that wrote and performed Western music, this association as a sub -genre of country music is erroneous. W estern music shows no historical origination with the music that came from the southeastern parts of the United States (e.g. Appalachia). Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States : it was born from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music.[1] Its West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes , improvisation ,polyrhythms , syncopation , and the swung note .[2] The word "jazz" (in early years also spelled "jass") began as a West Coast slang term and was first used to refer to music in Chicago at about 1915. From its beginnings in the early 20th century jazz has spawned a variety of subgenres: New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s,big band -style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions , such as Afro-Cuban and free jazz , from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz fusion from the 1970s, acid jazz from the 1980s (which combines funk and hip-hop elements), and nu jazz in the 1990s. As the music has spread around the world it has drawn on local, national, and regional musical cultures, its aesthetics being adapted to its varied environments and giving rise to many distinctive styles.

Country music (or country and western) is a blend of traditional and popular US musical forms traditionally found in the Southern United States and the Canadian Maritimes that evolved rapidly beginning in the 1920s.[1] Distinctive variations of the genre have also emerged elsewhere including Australian country music . The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s when the earlier term hillbilly music came to be seen as denigrating. Country musicwas widely embraced in the 1970s, while Country and Western has declined in use since that time, except in the United Kingdom andIreland , where it is still commonly used.[1] However, in the Southwestern United States a different mix of ethnic groups created the music that became the Western music of the term Country and Western. The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres. Country music has produced the two top selling solo artists of all time in the United States. Elvis Presley , who was known early on as the Hillbilly Cat and was a regular on the radio program Louisiana Hayride ,[2] went on to become a defining figure in the emergence of rock and roll . With 129.5 million albums sold, Presley is the topdomestic-selling solo artist in U.S. history. Contemporary musician Garth Brooks, with 128 million albums sold, is the second best-selling solo artist in U.S. history.[3] While album sales of most musical genres have declined since about 2005, country music experienced one of its best years in 2006, when, during the first six months, U.S. sales of country albums increased by 17.7 percent to 36 million. Moreover, country music listening nationwide has remained steady for almost a decade, reaching 77.3 million adults every week, according to the radio-ratings agency Arbitron, Inc.[4][5] Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll or rock 'n' roll) is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s,[1][2] primarily from a combination of the blues , country music, jazz,[3] and gospel music .[4] Though elements of rock and roll can be heard in country records of the 1930s,[3] and in blues records from the 1920s,[5] rock and roll did not acquire its name until the 1950s.[6][7] An early form of rock and roll was rockabilly,[8] which combined country and jazz with influences from traditional Appalachian folk music and gospel.[9] The term "rock and roll" now has at least two different meanings, both in common usage. The American Heritage Dictionary[10] and theMerriam-Webster Dictionary [11] both define rock and roll as synonymous with rock music. Encyclopaedia Britannica , on the other hand, regards it as the music that originated in the mid-1950s and later evolved "into the more encompassing international style known as rock music."[12] For the purpose of differentiation, this article uses the latter definition, while the broader musical genre is discussed in the rock music article.