American country music is also known as country western music. It has a very long history. It comes from the folk songs of immigrants (移民) from Britain.

Country music uses simple music and words to express everyday feelings such as loneliness, love, and sadness. That is to say, country music describes life. It talks about friends and enemies, trucks and roads, farm and crops. People in many parts of the world like country music, because everyone can understand what the music is about.

Country western music became popular first among cowboys (牛仔) in the American west countryside. Cowboys had to take care of cows day and night. When they were alone with the cows, they often sang beautiful and peaceful songs to calm the animals and to overcome their own fear. They were not well-educated and so they sang about their daily life in very simple words. They played guitars, violins and other instruments. In the south of America, many people added instruments from their homes, like bottles and spoons. When cowboys visited their friends and families on holidays like Thanksgiving, they usually sang and played country western music. 

In recent years, many musicians have made country western music a little different from the one in the past. These changes make the songs sound even better. Today singers such as Carth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Rabbitt, LeAnn Rimes, Randy Travis and a group called Alabama are singing and playing in different styles. They have brought country western music more and more fans from all over the world.

This is a song millions of Americans will hear this New Year’s Eve. It is called Auld Lang Syne (《友谊地久天长》). It is the traditional music played during the New Year’s celebration. Auld Lang Syne is an old Scottish poem. It tells about the need to remember old friends.

The words “auld lang syne” mean “old long since”. No one knows who wrote the poem first. However, a version by Scottish poet Robert Bums was published (出版) in 1796. The words and music we know today first appeared in a songbook three years later.

The song is played in the United States mainly on New Year’s Eve. The version (译文) you are hearing today is by the Washington Saxophone Quartet. As we end our program with Auld Lang Syne. I would like to wish all of our radio friends a very Happy New Year! This is Buddy Thomas. (from www.zkenglish.com)

Nadine McKenzie, a 35-year-old wheelchair dancer in South Africa, has experienced great difficulty since he took up dancing as a hobby. He said that access is the biggest barrier for entering the performing arts. “There are not many companies or training programs for persons with disabilities, especially in the dance field,” McKenzie said. “I’ve had quite a few experiences where you’d be in a class with different people and some trainers would not know what to do with us, and so for those reasons, they don’t open these spaces to different artists.”

Beyond lack of access, McKenzie, who’s been dancing for 15 years, said inclusion(认同) is another barrier for people with disabilities. “There are very few people especially in South Africa that actually have projects where they involve dancers with disabilities,” he added. “It's something that’s still very difficult, but it’s slowly starting to change.”

Seeing a gap in the industry, McKenzie founded Unmute with his friends in 2013, a dance company in Cape Town that enlists young South Africans with disabilities to get involved in the arts. “It's been extremely rewarding in the sense that we’ve been able to create more platforms for artists to train and perform, and also expose more young people,” he said. McKenzie believes Unmute is helping break down some of these barriers through awareness campaigns not just for people with disabilities to sign up, but also for able-bodied people to learn how to work with them.

Gerard Samuel, a professor at the University of Cape Town told CNN that though there has been some progress in both access and inclusion within dance, there is still much work to be done. “Barriers include mindsets of limitation and inability of disabled persons,” he said. All this still need to change. He believes that education, investment and more representation in the media would help encourage more accessibility and inclusion.