“Hello Stranger”

This chapter discusses Carter Family, “Hello Stranger”, white blues, family bands, Leslie Riddles, and Decca Records

2. “Wildwood flowers”

“Wildwood flowers” focuses on some of the early country stars, including Fiddlin’ John Carson and Lily May Ledford, along with the two best-known acts of the era: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Realizing that a market existed for country music, the primarily New York-based recording industry scrambled to record “authentic” acts. This involved sending producers to the South, who relied on leads from local dealers, newspaper announcements, and word of mouth to produce a string of possible performers. Thanks to this commercial push, many artists were recorded who would have otherwise probably never have been heard on disc.

Thought I Had Your Heart Forever

This chapter shows how country music provided emotional bearing for an entire region gripped by processes of change. It presents country song as a dynamic phenomenon of space and time, one that provides an affective link between home and away as well as past and present. In the commercial ballads of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the chapter shows how the ground slips away and time moves forward, and the listener is propelled backward and forward on a current of uneasy but thrilling affect that comes to stand in for regional experience itself. The chapter develops this argument through four different moments in the early history of country music: the popularity of Fiddlin' John Carson; the underexplored influence of the Vagabonds and the Delmores; the Carter Family, the “First Family of Country Music;” and country radio.

Longevity Risk and Annuity Pricing with the Lee-Carter Model

ABSTRACTSeveral important classes of liability are sensitive to the direction of future mortality trends, and this paper presents some recent developments in fitting smooth models to historical mortality-experience data. We demonstrate the impact these models have on mortality projections, and the resulting impact which these projections have on financial products. We base our work round the Lee-Carter family of models. We find that each model fit, while using the same data and staying within the Lee-Carter family, can change the direction of the mortality projections. The main focus of the paper is to demonstrate the impact of these projections on various financial calculations, and we provide a number of ways of quantifying, both graphically and numerically, the model risk in such calculations. We conclude that the impact of our modelling assumptions is financially material. In short, there is a need for awareness of model risk when assessing longevity-related liabilities, especially for annuities and pensions.

Country music on location: ‘field recording’ before Bristol

From 1923 to 1931, record companies based in the northern USA stocked their catalogues of Southern vernacular music, particularly African-American blues and white ‘old-time’ music, largely with ‘location recordings’ made in Southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis and Dallas. These recording trips, which are sometimes characterised as speculative, were in fact partly planned, the uncertainty of discovering recordable new talent offset to some extent by the prior booking of artists with whom the companies had already had success. The evidence for this careful planning, however, has been somewhat obscured by the unscheduled discovery, in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, of Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, whose commercial success and stylistic innovations would have enormous influence on country music.