Does anyone like country

This week's top ten country hits:
10 "I hate every bone in her body but mine"
9 "I ain't never gone to bed with an ugly women but I woke up with a few"
8 "If the phone don't ring you'll know it's me"
7 "I've missed you but my aims improvin"
6 "You broke my heart so I broke your arm"
5 "I'm so miserable without you It's like you're still here"
4 "My wife ran off with my best friend and I miss him"
3 "She took my fing and gave me the finger"
2 "She's lookin' better with every beer"
1 "It's hard to miss the lips at night that chewed me out all day"

Tostado correctly points out that the pentatonic MAJOR scale is often associated with country music while pentatonic minor (sometimes the hexatonic minor with the added flattened fifth) is a blues scale. I also agree that a lot of the well known Southern rock leads visit the pentatonic major scale at some point.

To be fair, rock n roll music was originally characterized by many as "the bastard child of country and blues" because the highest profile players (see Chuck Berry) moved fluidly from the pentatonic minor scale to the pentatonic major and back. So, what some may hear as country influences, others may hear as '50s rock n roll.

TO MY EAR (tho I'm not about to argue with anyone who disagrees) one of the characteristics that makes Southern rock a distinctive genre is that it seemed to re-introduce the pentatonic major BACK into hard rock, which - over the course of the '60's had seemed to generally migrate further and further towards blues style leads at the expense of country influences.

So, I personally hear a lot of country in the Southern rock genre as a whole. YMMV.

Martykl,

I think you nailed that.

In a bluesier realm, a list of guys who use a good dose of major pent/major blues along with a lot of minor pent/minor blues would include T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn. It sets them apart from the guys who seem to use the minor counterpart almost exclusively.

No question that there was a community of Blues players in the 1950s who popularized the idea, BB King probably being the most influential. Interestingly, you can hear even earlier examples here and there.

One of the really great, relatively obscure players who pioneered that style was Carl Hogan of the Louis Jordan Big Band. Check out the intro lick to "Ain't That Just Like a Woman" from IIRC the late 1940's. If it sounds familiar, it's probably because Chuck Berry "borrowed" it for (arguably) the most famous bit of rock n roll guitar ever, the intro to "Johnny B Good"

Didn't Ray Charles do a lot back then to help popularize and cast a different light on country music? His "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" album specifically? That is a quite excellent recording, one of my favorites.