Last night (May 26), Megan Moroney had one of the most viral moments of the 2025 American Music Awards. She and fellow rising country star Shaboozey took the stage to present the Favorite Country Duo or Group to Dan + Shay. During their shared speech leading up to announcing the winner, Moroney said the Carter Family “basically invented country music.” Her co-presenter didn’t say anything to refute her claim, but his facial expression spoke volumes.
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Shaboozey was taken aback by Moroney’s insistence that the Carter Family created country music. This is likely because he’s studied the history of the genre. While the Carter Family was one of the biggest acts to come out of the Bristol Sessions–largely considered the “big bang” of country music–they were far from the originators of the genre.
To be fair, stars likely don’t write the things they say while presenting awards. Instead, it is more likely that they read a teleprompter, announce the winner, and go on about their evening. If this is true, it means Shaboozey knows more about country music history than whoever wrote for the American Music Awards.
Megan Moroney Is Not Alone—Behind the Origins of Country Music
Megan Moroney, or the writer behind her brief AMAs speech, can be forgiven for being wrong about the origins of country music. After all, they only repeated a widely believed myth.
The common belief is that country music began when Ralph Peer set up his recording rig in the attic of a hat store in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927. He recorded several Appalachian artists who performed what, at that time, was called “hillbilly music.” The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers were two of the most successful acts to record during the Bristol Sessions. They later received the nicknames The First Family of Country Music and The Father of Country Music, respectively.
The Bristol Sessions took “hillbilly music” from the Appalachian region and made it commercially available to people across the United States. At the same time, early records from the Carter Family and Rodgers helped popularize the genre and generated much revenue for the Victor Talking Machine Company. As a result, a surface-level understanding of the genre’s history would lead one to believe that the Carter Family “basically invented country music.”
Moreover, early marketing created the illusion that country music was the product of white culture alone. This led to generations of fans, critics, and some artists who believed the myth making and legend building of early publicists. There’s much more to the history of country music, though.
A Brief Look at the Origins of Country Music
Researchers and scholars have penned shelves full of books about the origins of country music. As a result, it would be impossible to detail the genre’s early history in this article. Instead, we’ll use the falsehood in Megan Moroney’s AMAs speech as a jumping-off point.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Ted Olson, an award-winning educator, folklorist, and record producer. At the time, he was the head of Middle Tennessee State University’s Appalachian Studies Department. In short, Dr. Olson is an authority on the subject at hand.
“That music derives from many different sources, many different places, and many different people. The notion that it automatically or spontaneously emerged in Bristol is fanciful,” Dr. Olson said of early country music. “It really preceded that by many, many years and from different places,” he added.
“It came from highland areas and lowland areas. It came from white musicians and Black musicians, from people of different ethnicities,” he explained. Over the years, cultural and musical practices blended in the hills and hollers of the Appalachian Mountains. “[Those practices] blended so long ago that we have to be careful about making too many assessments or judgements about where they came from,” Dr. Olson said. “What we certainly need to do is give full credit to all the participants in culture-making,” he added.
“Music is the great unifier. Music is colorblind. People could appreciate the humanity in other people, regardless of where they came from, through their shared language, which was music,” Dr. Olson said of how musicians of diverse backgrounds came together in the early 20th and late 19th centuries.
Lesley Riddle, the Uncredited Black Musician Behind The Carter Family
Lesley Riddle suffered a debilitating injury while working at a cement plant in Kingsport, Tennessee in the later 1920s. He was no longer able to do manual labor, but was a talented musician. As a result, he joined a group of Black musicians in town and they played together on the streets of Kingsport. That’s where Riddle met A.P. Carter.
The pair met after Carter heard Riddle playing. By all accounts, they formed a quick friendship and began working together. “I like to put it that Lesley Riddle contributed to the Carter Family repertoire and provided some alternate finger styles on guitar to Maybelle Carter,” Dr. Olson said. “He was an under-attributed but enormous influence on the Carter Family,” he added.
Riddle and Carter would go on song-collecting trips in rural Southwest Virginia. They would learn songs from musicians who played time-worn folk songs with their neighbors on their porches or during barn dances. “A.P. and Lesley got along very well and had complementary talents. A.P. was extremely good at memorizing lyrics, and Riddle was excellent at memorizing melodies. So, they worked together to adapt songs from tradition,” Dr. Olson explained.
“Alas, based on the segregation of the era, Carter was credited with the composition of those, which are essentially arrangements, not full compositions, and Lesley Riddle was left out of the attribution angle by the record companies,” Dr. Olson said.
Why Does the Myth Persist?
Lesley Riddle was far from the only Black musician who helped shape early country music. Unfortunately, segregation and institutional racism have all but removed them from the conversations around the origins of country music.
Dr. Olson summed this up neatly in our conversation. “The contributing forces to early country music also contributed to the myth that somehow this music was from a white cultural source as opposed to coming from different cultural groups with equal contributions.”
Featured Image by Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock
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