Western

Western music is the song tradition of the American West: ballads and popular songs about cowboys, cattle drives, outlaws, railroads and the frontier landscape, forming the 'western' half of the historical pairing 'country and western'. Developed from nineteenth-century trail songs and popularized in the 1930s and 1940s by Hollywood's singing cowboys, it favors smooth close-harmony singing, yodeling and romantic, scenery-rich writing quite distinct from the hillbilly realism of country music proper. Marty Robbins carried the form into the LP era with his gunfighter ballads, and a specialist revival scene sustains it today.