Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Creating an American Music: A Critical View of the Origins of Country / Kevin Yuill [Part 1]
Abstract: Country music, in its lyrics, its image and its themes, attempts to reflect the interests and experiences of the US white working class. Centred on the figure of the cowboy, this musical genre frequently draws upon influences from music originating in other communities, yet this process is "whitewashed" from the finished product. This encapsulates two broader trends: an attempt to construct a genuinely "American" form of popular music, shaped through often dubious ethnographic techniques, and forms of marketing which reflect official preoccupations expressed in the 1924 National Origins Act and its attempt to freeze immigration in proportion to the 1890 US census. Country music is shown emerging as the soundtrack to ethnic exclusion.
Part 1: The UnCountry Beginnings of Country Music
There is two kinds of music the good and the bad. I play the good kind.
Louis Armstrong
Introduction
<1> I must confess right from the start that, unlike most writers on country music, I did not grow up with affection for the genre; indeed, it was more like loathing. Raised on the windswept prairies of the Midwest, my peers and I were left with two rather stark choices when it came to music over the radio and the ever-important-for-teenagers question of musical identity – country or heavy metal. We chose the latter. Whereas heavy metal seemed to encapsulate some sort of rebellious spirit, country music expressed resignation. To our youthful ears and urban sensibilities, country seemed to us something listened to by losers in pickup trucks. Its subject matter – whether D.I.V.O.R.C.E., "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights," "Six Days on the Road" or "Your Cheatin' Heart" – was utterly irrelevant to our lives. Those songs caterwauling "Take Me Home" did so just as we were trying to escape from home. We often mocked country music as ridiculously maudlin and sentimental, designed to make people cry into their beers in abject self-pity.
<2> And, in general, we were right. I defy anyone to listen to the whole of Ferlin Husky's "The Drunken Driver" with a straight face or to resist thoughts of violence when confronted by that "Achy-Breaky" song or John Denver's permanently beaming face. Of course, we qualified our dislike with respect – debated seriously for many hours, of course – for some artists like Willy Nelson, Kenny Rogers and a few others. After living in the UK for some years, I appreciated a little more the sentimental odes to kith and kin, bought CDs by the Judds and the O'Kanes. After I started work and embarked on meaningful relationships lasting more than a month, the heartbreak songs could evoke a sigh and I appreciated the wry humour of Marty Stuart's "There's Too Much Month (at the End of the Money)." At its best, country music tells a good story. Nonetheless, this essay is rare among those discussing the origins of country music in that it has been written by a critic rather than a fan. Having said that, this essay is critical of the genre rather than of the individual artists, some of whom have produced some of the finest popular music of the last century.
<3> This essay concerns the historical development of a genre. In particular, it considers the process whereby what began simply as regional and amateur music, the music people sang in their homes, on streetcorners, in community halls or as they worked, became segmented and codified, its black origins censored, suggestive lyrics or rebellious themes removed, and celebrated as authentic Americana. What follows is a re-interpretation of the beginnings of country music, placing it in the context of the complex interwar period of American history, especially within the racial identity stamped on the country by the 1924 Immigration Act. Rather than looking at the roots of the music, like much of the excellent scholarship already available, this essay examines the development of the genre, which, for our current purposes, may be said to have arrived in January of 1944, when Billboard began charting the juke-box success of this distinct type of music. What this essay reveals is how the genre was invented and re-invented, shaped as much by the elite obsession with discovering the true nature of "the folk" as by the folk themselves, presented as the musical expression of the American working class yet no more real a representation than the WPA posters showing brawny, smiling and "Nordic" (in the contemporary sense of originating from northern Europe) workers. [1] Country music is in some ways the package with which the "people's music" was sold back to them, with any hint of rebelliousness removed, any urban, black or commercial origins disguised with spurious "authenticity" complete with ragged clothes and a cowboy hat. Thus, the genre was a product of the need for a musical composite to the 1924 Immigration Act's definition of "American" in racial terms, identifying the mix of ethnic backgrounds of Americans in 1890 – as well as their predominantly rural existence – as that which is authentically American. Country music, an amalgamation of black blues and jazz, Tin Pan Alley songs, traditional British ballads, and show-tunes, is no more authentically American than Tin Pan Alley, but is often promoted as the true "roots music" of the country.
<4> My first question: what IS country music? There are clearly many answers to this question but we can identify several characteristics of what is actually a very diverse and constantly changing musical style. First, it is the music of the "common man" and conveys ordinary people and experiences. It emphasizes fallibility over heroism, bad luck more than good, and misfortune rather than fortune. Second, country is rural as opposed to urban, despite a large urban and suburban fan base. Rural areas figure in its imagery, rural themes in its lyrics, and it often seems directed at those who have reluctantly left the rural areas of their youth behind. Though country is national, its listeners and stars identify with the South and West (the "Heartland," as George Strait once put it) more than the East and North of the country. More than other genres of music, country tends to be nostalgic; common themes are lost love, memories of places and people, and values imperiled by modernity. Constantly looking backwards, it trades heavily upon its purported connections to its roots, on its "authenticity" as opposed to the "inauthenticity" of pop music. Like forms of pop music, country music is often divided – particularly by ardent fans – into a "soft" commercially-oriented and, the implication often is, inferior tendency, and a "hard" version, characterized by artistic integrity, authenticity, and being closer to its "roots." Thus, pronouncements about the death of country music, when the latter style is perceived to be waning, are just as common as they are wrong, reflecting the feeling that country music is an embattled legacy of the past. Finally, we might observe that country music is quintessentially American. More than any other genre of commercial music in the United States, country is comfortable when it is draped in the American flag. Country music is presented as the authentic American folk music. [2]
<5> Another, less commented upon but just as real, characteristic of country music is its whiteness. As George Lipsitz observed, "Whiteness is everywhere in American culture, but it is very hard to see." [3] Though the music frequently takes draws upon influences from music originating in other communities, the genre, in its lyrics, its image and its themes, tends to reflect the interests and experiences of the American white working class. As Richard Schusterman observed:
Though defiant of the white corporate establishment and intellectual elite, country music (partly through its traditional ties to working class white culture) favors whiteness per se. It thus can recruit American whites from all different ethnic backgrounds, rallying them around a distinctive white image, whose cultural roots they may not have inherited but which they can adopt without the contradiction of color. [4]
Even as recent country hits emphasize racial equality, they are usually careful to do so by emphasizing their own white origins. [5] According to Tammy Genovese, head of the Country Music Association (CMA), "The black community's lifestyle is different from what we communicate with country music." [6] But almost every history of the music stresses the diverse influences in the beginnings of country music. So how did it come to be white? When did it become segregated from its varied roots? Moreover, the scholarship emphasizes the falseness of any developmental role of the cowboy in country music. As Bill Malone plainly states, there was no musical culture amongst cowboys. Yet if there is any iconic representation of the spirit of country music, it is the cowboy. The 1992 film Pure Country, for instance, starring George Strait – the leader of a new, traditionalist school of country in the 1980s – devotes two minutes to a rodeo ceremony involving a cowboy holding the stars and stripes parading to the tune of America the Beautiful. The only black character in the movie is – perhaps tellingly – a chauffeur. As Schusterman observes, through the film, "[c]ountry's image of proudly authentic Americanism is linked to racial purity, since all the film's musicians, fans, reporters, bartenders, waitresses, etc., are clearly white." [7] When did country music don a Stetson and become the authentic American music?
<6> In this context, country music's elevation to an American music resembles the famous pageant at the Ford English School, a language and civics program for the company's immigrant workers. Into a pot (fifteen feet in diameter and seven feet tall), "52 nationalities with their foreign clothes and baggage go and out of the pot after vigorous stirring by the teachers (with ten foot ladles representing nine months teaching at the school) comes one nationality, viz, American. ...Presently the pot began to boil over and out came the men dressed in their best American clothes and waving an American flag." [8] The creation of the genre of country music in the 1930s (and its predecessor of hillbilly or "Old-time Music") took place with no less breathtaking artifice.
<7> There are three essential developments in the development of country music noted here. First, a nostalgic interest in the music of the Southern uplands was begun by elite Americans venturing into the region and identifying it as a repository of all things Anglo-Saxon, pre-industrial, and, thus, an authentic "folk" culture. Listening to the songs of these Southern uplanders, the "song-catchers" discarded that which did not fit in with their romantic ideal of what they considered the real expression of an Anglo-Saxon folk, and pruned and censored that which did. The conceptions of these elite "song-catchers" were racial and reflected a similar European trend.
<8> Second, in the quest for "normalcy" and old-fashioned values in the 1920s, but also with important new technological developments, the music of the Southern uplands was effectively sold back, initially to those that made it themselves and later to all Americans. Amateur music and musicians became popularized as musical nostalgia, marketed as "Old-time music" and "Home and Hearth" music, alongside many other categories of music. The music itself actually a mixture of nineteenth and sometimes twentieth century commercial Tin Pan Alley tunes, some old fiddle tunes passed down through the generations, and more modern influences. Moreover, it changed; as the real old music was recorded, some commercial interests sought artists who wrote music (which was thus able to be copyrighted) that sounded like old-time music. Jimmie Rodgers, perhaps the most influential early country star, sang a white man's blues and popularized yodeling. The only identification of his music with the ballads sought by the song-catchers was his nasal Southern accent.
<9> Finally, in the 1930s, with the perverse reassignment of country music as cowboy music, the creation was complete. The mythical cowboy combined the latter day virtues of hard work, sacrifice, and individualism with sentimentality for a vanishing rural world. The cowboy, just as many Americans imagined themselves, maintained an ambiguous relationship with civilization, upholding its values upon a lawless wilderness but constantly threatened by the spread of civilization from the East. With no real music of his own, the cowboy took the sentimental-if-newly-developed strains of Jimmie Rodgers and the close harmonies of the Carter family as his own. Both the cowboy and country music became national symbols of an imagined past, one that contrasted with an urban, jazz present.
Inauthenticity and Country Music
<10> Authenticity has become the straw man of the history of country music, at least amongst the academics writing about it. The titles of recent books, such as Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor's, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music and Richard Peterson's Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, indicate that, at least at some level, there is an appreciation of the difficulty of tracing the exact origins of country. Though it is generally traced back to folk music in the early part of the last century, the origins of folk music are no clearer. D. K. Wilgus admitted in 1959 that "study is revealing that a simple concept of origin is not only misleading, but nonsensical." As Robert Chistgau commented in a review of Benjamin Filene's Romancing the Folk, calling into question rigid definitions of "pure" folk music and noting that memory can create American culture anew "is by now so widely accepted that even purists have to live with it." [9]
<11> Questions of authenticity and origin, it seems, are rejected anew by each generation. And yet they are repeated, it seems, by each new generation. "Country music is America's truest music," states the pre-eminent scholar of country music, Bill Malone, even while simultaneously recognizing the falseness of "assertions of romantic nonsense concerning their music's alleged Celtic or Appalachian ancestry." [10] But the music is still romanticized, surrounded by myth and legend, and, ultimately, traced back to Britain, as if the layers can be peeled back to reveal the true Anglo-Saxon heart of the music. Country music, according to a brochure published by the Country Music Foundation of Nashville, Tennessee, "is the commercial extension of Anglo-American folksong." More often, studies simply divert our attention back to the misty origins of country, drawing images of grandmother a settin' on the back porch, perhaps with a dulcimer, singing out her heartaches in a nasal but appealing and bittersweet style.
<12> More often, a mystique surrounds the Appalachian region, where the dimly lit beginnings of country music are said to lie. Thus Bob Coltman states that "[h]ome made music had developed among southern rural people to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the country, owing to a fortunate combination of community isolation from outside resources and just the right backwoods and small-town population density to promote singing and dancing socials." Folklorist Norm Cohen believed that it was the admixture of African that has set apart Southern rural music from rural music elsewhere in the United States. But the Appalachian region – the font of country, according to most sources – has historically had a low percentage of African-Americans compared to other regions of the South. So, why the Southern uplands? [11]
<13> In fact, the best starting point for the genesis of the genre of country music is amongst the European and American elite. It was they who developed the first interest in "folk" music and from their number came the first song-catchers to visit the Appalachian region of the United States. It was also the elite that identified the need for an "American music," whether vernacular in style or not, around the same time that the song-catchers visited the Appalachian.
<14> The idealized but useable past constructed by the early patrons of folklore and the folk reflected a golden age where the ills of the present had yet to be discovered and where, if restored, the key to a less problematic future might lie. The most influential early figure in the movement to preserve folk music was Professor Francis J. Child of Harvard University. At its inaugural meeting in 1890, the American Folk-Lore Society noted that "it was in no small degree owing to the labours of Professor Child that folk-lore has obtained some measure of recognition in America." [12] Child's monumental work published in ten books between 1882 and 1898, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, inspired a generation of scholars to attempt to preserve ballads on both sides of the Atlantic. Child's outlook belonged to the romantic school and he harked back to a golden age:
The condition of society in which a truly national or popular poetry appears explains the character of such poetry. It is the condition in which the people are not divided by political organization and book culture into markedly distinct classes, in which, consequently there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form one individual. [13]
Whereas, in the Old Country, the object of Child's studies, this period of the development of the national character appeared to have been lost forever, it seemed to some to be in mid-process in America. First, no national music and only a nascent poetry and literary tradition characterized this new country. Second, vast areas of the country contained pockets where the spirit of the "whole" people might be glimpsed. The task in America for the reformers lent itself to an optimistic if anxious drive towards both preserving existing peasant cultures and directing them away from destructive modernism, at the same time as holding the values they "found" within these communities up as examples to the rest of the country.
<15> As D. K. Wilgus, author of an authoritative book on American folk music comments, very little effort was put into collecting folk songs before 1898. The number that began scouring the hills and valleys in order to find ballads in the first years of the twentieth century were inspired by Child's efforts: "The distinguishing traits of American academic collection derive clearly from Child..." [14]
The Search for an American National Music
<16> Antonin Dvorak, the Czech composer who headed the New York Conservatory of Music, effectively challenged many Americans regarding a national music. Influenced by peasant music in his native land, Dvorak noted, just before the debut of his New World Symphony in Boston in 1893 that "I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. ... These are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them." The nervous and ambivalent response to Dvorak's proclamation suggested that a search for alternative sources of American folk music would soon get under way. Most correspondents agreed that folk music was to be the inspiration for an American music but disagreed about whether or not Negro music was genuinely American. [15]
<17> As class and other cleavages rent the country, identification of the United States with rural areas began to grow, encouraged by Teddy Roosevelt's linking the countryside with health and vitality. The search for a national music, particularly in Britain and the United States where an absence of an obvious musical heritage compared to continental countries was felt the keenest, meant that folk music – once frowned upon as primitive and low in character – began to be reassessed. In 1905 the British Board of Education recommended to teachers the use of "National or Folk-Songs" for their "unaffected patriotism, their zest for sport and the simple pleasures of country life." By 1914, the Bureau of Education in Washington had reproduced Child's 305 ballads and urged teachers to form ballad societies in each state in order to preserve these ballads. [16]
Why the Appalachians?
<18> If country appears as the "authentic music of America," then the Appalachian region in the border South, the south-western parts of Virginia, the eastern parts of the Carolinas, northern Georgia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee seem the inner-core of America, the fountainhead of what is truly American. The Southern uplands are often imbued with magical qualities that enabled music to spring forth, as we have seen.
<19> In truth, however, the identification of the Southern uplands as a place of musical importance came only after the region was written only once its primitive nature created interest. The original interest of the Vassar and Harvard-educated writers and social workers who first "discovered" the region lay in the fact that it was cut-off from and, thus, uncorrupted by society. For these early writers, the music was a footnote at best. In 1892 James Allen Lane wrote that the denizens of this region were "...utterly lacking the spirit of development from within; utterly devoid of any sympathy with that boundless and ungovernable activity which is carrying the Saxon race in America from one state to another..."
<20> At the end of the decade, influenced by the racial thinking in Europe, Ellen Churchill Semple, who had studied under Friedrich Ratzel in Germany, identified the unique character of the Southern uplands. "In these isolated communities, therefore, we find the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States." She admits that the odd foreign name appears. "But the stock has been kept free from the tide of foreign immigrants which has been pouring in recent years into the States." Later, she added: "If the mountains have kept out foreign elements, still more effectually have they excluded the negroes." [17]
<21> In a celebrated article published in 1899 William Frost, the President of Berea College in Kentucky, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Highlands." Frost wrote that the music was played in a "weird minor key," a phrase that was repeated by Semple and many others writing after Frost. [18] While many of these writers on the Appalachian region noted the music, many more made no mention of it at all and it may well be that those that followed Frost's article looked carefully for any music they could claim was sung in a weird minor key. Nor did these writers give the impression that the area was more musical than anywhere else; one traveler who spent three months in the region had heard of the balladry but had never encountered any. [19]
<22> It was the identification of the South as a preserve of Anglo-Saxon people, manners, culture and racial characteristics that directed attention to the Southern uplands and its music. The song-catchers doggedly searched for the Child ballads to the exclusion of all other music. They had, of course, located them in other areas of the country. The North East of the United States also claimed many ballads, as C. Alphonso Smith, who collected ballads in the South, and Louise Pound, were forced to admit. Pound reported in 1922: "As regards regional distribution, traditional songs of the character of those included in this volume are found most abundantly in New England and in the Southern Appalachian region, in the Southwest, and in the Middle West ... Canada also has yielded material." [20]
Cecil Sharp
<23> Prior to the commercial explosion of hillbilly music in the 1920s, the most influential man in the history of country was undoubtedly Cecil Sharp. An unlikely paternal figure for country, Sharp, a foppish English ballad collector with a talent for publicity, did more to draw attention to folk music in the South than any other single figure. Sharp also provides a useful illustration of the concerns that motivated ballad collectors and thus of the forces that shaped the beginnings of country music.
<24> Sharp, son of a prosperous slate-merchant, attended Clare College, Cambridge, taking a third-class degree in 1883. Sharp held a number of positions, including teacher of music at the Adelaide College of Music in Australia. Returning to England, he was appointed music-master at Ludgrove, a preparatory school for Eton. Sharp, in common with many of the early figures in country music, is best described as a folk entrepreneur. Once the mythology and iconography is swept away, it is difficult to resist the observation that Sharp went very far on little actual knowledge of his chosen subjects. Like Saul, Sharp's conversion to the joys of folk-music was sudden and rather late on in life. Sharp had his ballad-collecting epiphany in 1903 when he heard a vicar's gardener in Dorset singing The Seeds of Love. This was not Sharp's first epiphany, however. In 1899 he came across Morris dancers in Oxford and became a keen advocate of Morris dancing. Whereas, in 1908, Sharp's knowledge of Morris dancing was "limited," by 1910 he was acknowledged as a "great expert" on the subject by the Musical Times. [21]
<25> Ballads had come to Sharp's attention when writing a book of songs for children designed to make the musical heritage of England part of children's birthright, Book of British Songs for Home and School, published in 1902. Compiled entirely from printed sources, it contained mostly patriotic tunes but also a number of folk songs. Sharp's contacts from his time in Australia ensured publicity. Within a few months of collecting ballads "with a missionary fervor," Sharp had forced his way into the English Folksong Society and lamented, in a characteristically dramatic tone, the impending death of the ballad:
The clapperings of the steam-binder have killed it in from the harvest-field; the board school master, a perfect Herod among the Innocents, slays it in the children by his crusade against all dialect but his own... [The] [f]olk –song ...[is] unknown in the drawing room, hunted out of the school, chased by the chapel deacons, derided by the middle=classes. [22]
His efforts did not go unappreciated. More than one source has credited Sharp with single-handedly restoring to the English people the songs and dances of their country. Indeed, one observer noted that Sharp averted what would have been a "national disaster" by doing so. [23] Whatever else Sharp did or did not accomplish, he did bring the place of folksongs in society to prominence.
<26> Sharp's significance for the beginnings of country music came in late 1914 when he accepted an invitation to New York to help with a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In June 1915 he met Olive Dame Campbell, who had accompanied her husband on a social survey of the mountain region and had been collecting ballads since 1908. On the strength of Campbell's collection, Sharp undertook to collect ballads in the Appalachian region.
<27> With his assistant Maud Karpeles, Sharp arrived back in New York in February of 1916. In common with nearly all ballad collectors at the time, Sharp sought the Child ballads and ignored religious music, popular music, instrumental music, and recently-written ballads and songs. Supporting himself by teaching, Sharp managed to reach western North Carolina near the end of July, 1916. Writing to Mrs. Campbell on August 1, after having taken on some 25 tunes, he said of his singers: "[They] are just English peasant folk [who] do not seem to me to have taken on any distinctive American traits." Spending 46 weeks in the Appalachian regions between 1916 and 1918, Sharp collected some 1600 tunes to about 500 songs from 281 singers. [24]
<28> Sharp undoubtedly owes some of his prominence amongst other song-catchers to the seriousness with which he undertook song-collection. But the overwhelming reason for his fame lay in the fact that he was the most well-known collector of English ballads at a time when many Americans sought to emphasize their Anglo-Saxon roots. At a time characterized by uncertainty about the future, the comforting picture painted of the South, with its "Elizabethan" speech patterns and its olde Englishe ballads coincided with a growing national nostalgia that, more and more, expressed itself in racial terms. Sharp noted that "the illiterate may ... reach a high level of culture ... due partly to the leisure they have to give to cultural developments but chiefly to the fact that they have one and all entered at birth into the full enjoyment of their racial heritage. Their language, wisdom, manners, and the many graces of life that are theirs, are merely racial attributes..." [25] Elsewhere, Sharp noted: "Folk music, on the other hand, is the product of a race, and reflects feeling and tastes that are communal rather than personal; it is always in solution; its creation is never completed; while, at every moment of its history, it exists not in one form but in many." [26]
<29> Sharp's initial publication with Olive Campbell, English Folksongs of the Southern Appalachians, appeared around the same time as Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race. The messages were, in many ways, similar. Grant's pseudo-scientific and elaborate tract concerned the extinction of the "Nordic" race through infiltration by "lesser" races. Sharp identified the "race" of people in the Appalachians as the purest expression of an Englishness now consigned to history in the Old World. Both were backward-looking but sought to stop what they saw as the rot with prescriptions for the preservation of these relics of bygone ages. Both sought a refuge from the questionable gains of "progress." Many Americans were beginning to take on these perspectives. Thus, the Nation reported on Sharp's collection in "America's Arcady" that those he collected the songs from were "Americans whom time has forgotten, and Progress never hustled." [27]
<30> The manipulative nature of the entrepreneurial forays of song-catchers into the Appalachians must be highlighted. As John Francmanis noted of Sharp's efforts in England, "[e]ffectively, he had determined who the 'folk' were, what constituted their art, which were their songs and dances, and what they represented." In the United States, nearly all song-collectors consciously ignored anything but the pristine ballads they sought. Dulcimers were good. Banjos and guitars pickers, according to Howard Brockway, a New Yorker who published Lonesome Tunes: Folksongs of the Kentucky Mountains a few months before Sharp and Campbell's effort, "were never conversant with the object of our quest. They played a type of song which had for us no interest whatever." [28]
<31> In the ensuing years, the theme of the Appalachians being the true ancestral homeland, with its implicit and occasionally explicit racial message, strengthened. Travel writer Laura Thornborough wrote an article entitled "Americans the Twentieth Century Forgot" in 1928. "'It's a mystery how they make a living,' you murmur to yourself. But is it a mystery? These descendants of pioneer ancestors, proud of their Anglo-Saxon stock, cling to pioneer ways because of the conditions under which they live." Similarly, Charles Morrow Wilson, writing in The Atlantic magazine, claimed at the start of his article: "We know a land of Elizabethan ways – a country of Spenserian speech, Shakespearian people, and of cavaliers and curtsies." [29]
<32> The place of the Southern Appalachians in the story of country music was, in truth, fixed by Cecil Sharp's prominent excursions there and his success in recording some of the Child ballads sung by the denizens of that region. The region and the people of the region as well as a selected section of the music were romanticized by these elite collectors. However, in terms of a national music, the Appalachian region had only its claim – in competition, at the time, with several other regions [30] - to the area where ancient English ballads survived in the biggest number. Many other genres had greater claim to a national music at that stage.
The Musical Mix in the 1920s
<33> The most popular music at the time, that sung by more Americans than any other type, was undoubtedly religious music. Hymns, especially those of Isaac Watts, created a profound impact on Americans and are still sung – unlike Barbara Allen or Twa Sisters or any of the other Child ballads, except in self-conscious revivals – today. Why were they ignored by Sharp and others who searched for an American music? Certainly, the hymns and spirituals sung by African-Americans were what Dvorak had hinted at. The answer is that religion was undermined by the same doubts and uncertainties that created the fin-de-siécle mentality amongst the elite. This current in European and American thought created doubts in all the old certainties, with its paeans to rationalism and science, was often hostile to religion. Moreover, to these reformers and ardent nationalists who sought a truly American music, religion was increasingly divisive. [31]
<34> There were, however, other contenders for the title of American folk music. The American working class was beginning to develop a nascent culture though it has been effectively written out of the history of country. As Archie Green has written, "[s]trangely, no folklorist has ever come to grips with either the labor or radical tradition in the United States." Whereas, as Arlene E. Kaplan has noted, those singing what was later called folk music were "deviant," this particular deviant tradition was growing at the turn of the last century. [32] Many of the early ballads, such as Coal Creek Troubles, retold strike-related events. The IWW, a revolutionary syndicalist organization formed in 1905, adapted the tactics of the Salvation Army after being drowned out by a Salvation Army brass band on the streets of Seattle. The preamble to the resultant Little Red Song Book promised music to "fan the flames of discontent." Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill was one of those who added seditious lyrics to popular songs. In a cynical age such lyrics were effective. Hill's "The Preacher and the Slave" [33] (also known as "Pie in the Sky") contains the memorable line "There'll be pie in the sky when you die"; its familiarity at least matches, if not surpasses, that of any of the Child ballads. The lasting popularity of the song arguably outweighed that of the hymn it lampooned – "The Sweet Bye and Bye." As Joyce Kornbluh noted, "IWW songs were sung on picket lines, in hobo jungles, during free speech demonstrations." [34]
<35> Carl Sandburg, whose 1931 publication, American Songbag, emerged after years of song-catching, might be seen as an accurate reflection of the sort of music people sang in their homes, workplaces, on street-corners and other places appropriate for amateur music. Not only were there at least three songs from the IWW's Little Red Songbook there, other song titles included give a good indication of the sort of pruning that later country music was subject to:
The Poor Working Girl
Cocaine Lil
The Preacher and the Slave (Hill)
Bird in a Cage
Jay Gould's Daughter
Casey Jones
There's Many a Man Killed on the Railroad
My Sister Works in a Laundry
A Filipino Hombre
Hinky Dinky Parlez-Vous
All Night Long
C.C. Rider [35]
Though some of these songs have resurfaced as country music, the absence of risqué, drugs-related, or rebellious lyrics, let alone songs that mocked religion, in today's country music shows that censors – whether the self-censorship of artists or censorship by their sponsors or by radio stations or official censors – cut out that which did not appear wholesome or contradicted the political message of the authorities as the genre developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Country was hardly just amateur music commercialized. Despite the limited range of scholarship on labor and union folksongs, it is clear that many of the early country singers sang labor and union songs not knowing that they were pioneers of a genre that – while it celebrated working-class culture – preferred it to express resignation rather than rebellion. Not only did Jimmie Rodgers include labor-related titles, the first singing cowboy, Gene Autry, sang a tribute to the famous miners' leader, Mother Jones, when she died in 1930. Whereas protest music survived as an expression of resignation and wry humor, a pale shadow of its former self, that music which praised insubordination or rebellion disappeared from the genre and from American life after World War II. [36]
<36> The genre of hobo songs – significant enough to attract the attentions of song-collectors in the 1920s and 1930s – indicates the influence of an icon that served as a vehicle for economic criticism but also represented virile adventure and a super-regionalism that was American. Hobos were in reality the transient working-class dependent on railroads, short-term or "ten day" mining jobs, lumberjacking, seasonal agricultural work and other hardscrabble work. With a culture of their own, and often closely associated with the Wobblies who successfully recruited within this group, they both inspired song and spread songs around their makeshift camps. The music might be regarded as real folk music in that it was sung by ordinary people, expressed themes touching their lives, and was passed on through singers rather than writers. As some of the literature demonstrates, the Wobbly and hobo songs might well be regarded as the true heirs of the ballad, despite being studiously ignored by Sharp and others. [37] The depressions of 1873, 1893 and 1929 cast thousands adrift to move from no particular place to nowhere at all, especially if they were asked by the police.
<37> Certainly, the hobo was the hero of many songs of the time and the image of restlessness and rambling so popular at the time finds an echo in today's country music, a testament to the latter's incorporation of many of the hobo themes. The first true country star, Jimmie Rodgers, helped this process by commercializing these themes. In Rodgers' "blue yodels" "there is scarcely a word that cannot be traced to song and sung phrases of hoboes and Negro railroad workers," as John Greenway has noted. [38] As a railwayman, Rodgers was well-placed to hear the hymns of the road. However, the themes redolent in hobo celebrations have been carefully pruned in order that the cowboy – the hobo's natural iconic heir – carried with him the hobo's individualism and wanderlust but not the avoidance of work and hostility to authorities ("Halleleujah I'm a Bum" and "Big Rock Candy Mountain" spring to mind). The hillbilly, though heavily promoted, could scarcely compete with the romantic and rebellious iconic status of the hobo.
<38> In commercial terms, there was a virtual explosion of music and genres in the 1920s as record companies and, later, radio stations competed in existing markets and searched for new ones. So straight is the line drawn in existing country music literature between Child ballads, the South, and Country music that contemporary competitors to what would later become country have been forgotten. Another influence – one that was also eventually subsumed within the music known after the war as "country" – was "ethnic" music. One of many niche markets at the time, ethnic records made at the time also featured string bands and lively two-step beats, "not unlike Southern United States 'old-time' or 'hillbilly' music of the same period." [39] Columbia's 18000F series (F for foreign) continued to produce ethnic recordings until after World War II but the 1920s and 1930s proved to be a high water mark for ethnic recordings. As ethnic categories within the population decreased, as fewer and fewer Americans thought of themselves in cultural terms as Polish, Ukranian, Armenian, Hungarian, or Scandinavian, the markets for ethnic music dried up. Instead, these ethnic groups and their music became more generic and simply "white." As Pekka Gronow noted, major labels actively sought ethnic buyers until the Depression's early years, then gradually retreated until, by the 1950s, only a few performers commanding pan-ethnic audiences and national saleability remained in their catalogues. [40]
<39> Why did the ethnic categories dry up in the early 1930s? Certainly, the Democratic Party was moving to incorporate these ethnic groups politically; Al Smith's 1928 campaign showed the potential of these voters and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an aide claimed, was never photographed with a Protestant clergyman without a Priest and a Rabbi by his side. But the most important development – of which the Democratic Party's strategy was only a part – was the expansion of whiteness to include ethnics in the 1930s. During WWI "race" denoted not just African- or Native Americans but was often used when discussing the different peoples of the Balkans. "Race" and "nation" were often used interchangeably. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, the term race became defined more in relation to skin colour and less as a property of national difference. The 1924 Immigration Act, though perceived as prejudicial to Southern and Eastern European nationals, established that they – albeit in smaller numbers – could become Americans. Those outside the European area could never become Americans. Though Africans were, by virtue of the Naturalization Act of 1870, able to become Americans, the restrictions placed on immigration from the West Indies and the absence of any real immigration from Africa as well as the pervasive attack on African-American cultural expressions, discussed in Part 2, meant that those of African descent were, de facto, un-American. The color lines had been drawn, in 1924, around Europe and the cultural manifestations of this process shaped the music market.
The 1920s, "Race and Folk Music"
<40> Country music as a category assimilated much of the music played in diverse communities as musical influences, but it remains to be seen how what was originally a niche and regional market spread nationwide. One answer was that it was promoted by some searching for an American music as an alternative to jazz and all that came with jazz.
<41> Several trends in the mid 1920s encouraged more amateur musicians to become professional. The music ignored by Sharp and others – instrumental music – became part of a short-lived craze, between 1923 and 1927, that contributed to the pervasive use of the fiddle in country music. Fiddling contests had taken place since the 18th century. In the mid-1920s, fiddling contests attracted sponsorship from Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, part of a conscious promotion of "old-time" dancing, music, and values. Second, the event song – describing an event, usually a disaster, stalked the charts as Vernon Dalhart's recording of "The Wreck of the Old '97" sold three million records between 1924 and 1927. [41]
<42> Of course, folk music had not yet to be given its precise definition in the 1920s, reflecting the fact that the "folk" were only just being defined. As Norman Cohen observed, "[i]f a record salesclerk of 1927 were asked if he had any folk music, he probably would have referred the customer to some of the educational selections recorded for school use, or to folk dance records, or to the few concert artists who recorded folk songs as a sideline." [42]
<43> However, what was being defined was hostility to jazz. Besides the legacy of hostility to Dvorak's pronouncement, there was a vague association of jazz with urban values; country music is, in some ways, the product of the conscious promotion of "rural values" against the evils of American cities. Henry Ford promoted square dances and fiddling contests specifically to combat the "pestiferous" and, he felt, immoral urban influences. Robert Winslow Gordon, a song-collector and founder of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, also highlighted the "American" nature of folk music in contradistinction to jazz. "I'm not a fanatic at all, but I do think that a lot our fathers and grandfathers sung helped toward making good Americans. Much more than this modern jazz – which I detest." [43] In fact, the whole folk music ideal defined itself against everything urban, of which, musically, jazz was representative. Jane Becker observed that "[a]s a crucible for the values, both real and imagined, inherent in preindustrial communities, rural America needed protection from pollution by the 'commercial values' that had infected urban and modern culture and nurtured such urban cultural forms as jazz." [44]
<44> Even Jimmie Rogers, the first real country star, noted that the popularity of hillbilly music, as it was then called, was a reflection of disaffection with jazz music. He wrote his wife in 1925 that "[f]olks everywhere are gettin' kind of tired of all this Black Bottom-Charleston – jazz music junk." [45] Underlying the antipathy towards jazz expressed by many at this time, of course, was hostility towards African-Americans, though Jimmie Rodgers, in contradiction to his earlier statement, later recorded music with Louis Armstrong. Louise Pound, an argumentative folk music aficionado, similarly complained that black music was unlikely to last: "Nor are the succeeding rag-time songs, or jazz songs likely to leave much of a legacy. There is little in their texts which is distinctive enough to lodge in the memory. No clear-cut story holds them together, and the taste to which they appeal is transitory." [46]
<45> In fact, hostility to jazz grew alongside a widespread attack on all things urban, modern, Catholic, or related to immigrants. A wave of nostalgia brought Harding to power; his appeal to "normalcy" reflected the wish by many Americans that the situation existing prior to World War I could be replicated. Not only was this the period where the old time religion took off, so did what was termed by enterprising talent scout Ralph Peer "old-time music." Other labels called it "hearth and home" or "old familiar" music. The possibilities of commercial exploitation of the sentimental longing for the urban past set up the next chapter in the development of country music.
Go to Part 2, "Constructing Country: Fakery and 'Strictly American' Music"»
Notes
[1] See, for instance, Albert Bender's A young man's opportunity for work, play, study & health, a poster promoting the Civilian Conservation Corps, at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b53090. [^]
[2] The literature on folk music carries forward a debate which is by no means finished. On the historical background of the discovery of folklore and, later, folk music, see D. K. Wilgus, Anglo American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959) and Bruno Nettl, Helen Myers, Folk Music in the United States: An Introduction (MI: Wayne State University Press, 1976), Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Kip Cornell, Introducing American Folk Music: Ethnic and Grassroots Traditions in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 2002), and Norman Cohen, Folk Music: A Regional Exploration (New York: Greenwood Press, 2005). [^]
[3] George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White' Problem in American Studies," American Quarterly 47 (Sept. 1995): 369. Cf. Derek W. Vaillant, "Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921–1935," American Quarterly 54.1 (2002) pp. 25-66. [^]
[4] Richard Shusterman, "Moving Truth: Affect and Authenticity in Country Musicals," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 2, Aesthetics and Popular Culture, (Spring, 1999), pp. 221-233, 222. [^]
[5] See, for instance, Bobby Braddock's "I Believe The South Is Gonna Rise Again":
"The Jacksons down the road were black like we were
But our skins were white and theirs was black "
©1973 Tree Publishing, BMI.[^]
[6] When asked why country music was not marketed to black people, Ms. Genovese noted that "every culture has its own kind of music, and that is something we can't change. Black people have their own types of music that they like to listen to, be that jazz, hip hop or whatever." Cited in Martin Hodges, "The hidden faces of Country," Observer Music Monthly, July 16, 2006. [^]
[7] Schusterman, "Moving Truth," 224. [^]
[8] Cited in Steven Meyer, "Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914-1921," Journal of Social History, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Autumn, 1980), pp. 67-82. See also James R. Barrett, "Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930," Journal of American History Vol. 79, No. 3: Discovering America: A Special Issue (December 1992), pp. 996-1020. [^]
[9] Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W. W. Norton and co., 2007), Wilgus, Anglo American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 363, Robert Chistgau, "Defining/Inventing/Exploiting the Folk," a review of Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music in New York Times Book Review, December 10, 2000. [^]
[10] Bill C. Malone, Country Music USA (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002©1968), xiv. [^]
[11] Cited in Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 16. [^][12] First Annual Meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 3, No. 8. (Jan. - Mar., 1890), pp. 1-16, 1. [^]
[13] Cited in Louise Pound, "Ballads and the Illiterate," in Dianne Dugaw, ed. The Anglo-American Ballad: A Folklore Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), pp. 80-94, pp. 85-86. [^]
[14] Wilgus, Anglo American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 145. [^]
[15] "American Music. Dr. Antonin Dvorak Expresses Some Radical Opinions," Boston Herald (May 28, 1893). The replies solicited by the Boston Herald give a flavour of the sort of welcome given to Dvorak's pronouncement. Professor John K. Paine, Head of the Musical Department at Harvard, noted: "In my estimation, it is a preposterous idea to say that in future American music will rest upon such an alien foundation as the melodies of a yet largely undeveloped race. " Another noted: "Mr. Dvorak must be excused for the mistake he makes, because he must naturally think the 'Negro' is the original American instead of the imported slave, and if they sung any other melodies than those composed by white men, it must have been music from Africa." (op. cit.). [^]
[16] Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 58. [^][17] Ellen Churchill Semple, "The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Athropogeography," from the Geographical Journal 17 (June 1901), pp. 588-623, reproduced in William K. McNeil, ed., Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), pp.145-174. [^]
[18] William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," Atlantic Monthly (March 1899), pp. 311. See Semple, "The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains," 174. See also Ælwin Tindal-Atkinson O.P., "Poor Whites," New Blackfriars, Vol. 20 Issue 234, (September 1939), 667. [^]
[19] Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of American Folk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) pp. 44-45. [^]
[20] C. Alphonso Smith, "Ballads Surviving in the United States," The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1. (January 1916), pp. 109-129, 110. [^]
[21] John Francmanis, "National music to national redeemer: the consolidation of a 'folk-song' construct in Edwardian England," Popular Music (2002) Volume 21/1, pp. 1-25, 9. See Cecil J. Sharp and Herbert C. Macilwaine, The Morris Book: A History of Morris Dancing, with a description of eleven dances as performed by the Morris-men (London: Novello and Company, 1907). [^][22] Cited in Dave Harker, Fakesong: The manufacture of British 'folksong' 1700 to the present day (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1985). [^]
[23] A. H. Fox Strangways, Cecil Sharp (New York: DaCapo Press, 1980 ©1933), W. Shuldham Shaw, "Cecil Sharp and Folkdancing," Music and Letters 2/1, January, 1921, pp4-9, p4. [^]
[24] Cited in David E. Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p121. [^]
[25] Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine, 120. [^]
[26] Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine, 121. Cited in Richard Aldrich, "English and Scottish Folk-Songs in America – Cecil Sharp Publishes His Finds in the South," New York Times, December 2nd, 1917, pXX3, cf. Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine, 120. [^][27] Cecil J. Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell, English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1917), Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921, ©1916). Cited in Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine, 118. [^]
[28] Cited in Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine, 56. [^]
[29] Charles Morrow Wilson, "Elizabethan America," Atlantic Monthly 144 (August 1929), 238-44, cited in McNeil, ed., Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture, pp. 206-214. [^]
[30] As D. K. Wilgus noted: "The Journal of American Folklore had published materials from such unlikely areas as the Pacific Coast, Wisconsin, and Illinois." Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 74. Louise Pound noted in 1922: "Nearly any kind of piece may be found in any region; but, on the whole, English and Scottish pieces of the romantic and legendary type have been best preserved in New England and in the South." It is worth noting, in relation to the later elevation of the cowboy producer of authentic American music, Pound's next sentence: "As they have roamed westward they have lost their archaic flavor and many of their distinguishing touches." Louise Pound, American Ballads and Songs (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), xvii-xviii. [^]
[31] For a useful exposition of this subject, see T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981). [^][32] The hobo (distinguished from the tramp by willingness to work and from the bum by willingness to work and transience) passed on many songs. These lines express sentiments that would later be transformed into Americanism by Woody Guthrie:
I've best my way from Frisco bay to the rockbound coast of Maine,
To Canada and Mexico and wandered back again
I've topped the spruce and worked the sluice and taken a turn at the plough
I've searched for gold in the rain and cold and I've worked on a river scow
I've dug the clam and built the dam and packed the elusive prune...
Cited in Clarke C. Spence, "Knights of the Tie and Rail – Tramps and Hoboes in the West," The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Jan., 1971), pp. 4-19, 15. [^]
"Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die..."
Cited in Jerome L Rodnitzky "The Evolution of the American Protest Song", The Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 3, No. 1 (1969), pp. 35–45, 38. [^]
[34] Cited in David Horn, The Literature of American Music in Books and Folkmusic Collections (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977), 215. [^]
[35] Cited in "A Platform," California Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1942, pp. 3-6. [^]
[36] Peterson, Creating Country Music, 85. [^][37] See "Notes and Queries: Wobbly and Other Songs," California Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Jan., 1943), pp. 42-44. [^]
[38] John Greenway, "Jimmie Rodgers. A Folksong Catalyst," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 70, No. 277. (Jul. - Sep., 1957), pp. 231-234, 232. [^]
[39] Cliff Warnken, review of Pekka Gronow, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage, Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Vol. 10, No. 1, Ethnic Literature and Music. (Spring, 1983), pp. 95-98, 95. [^]
[40] See Pekka Gronow, Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage (Washington, D.C.American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982). [^]
[41] Peterson, Creating Country Music, 49. See Charles K. Wolfe, "Event Songs" in Cecelia Tichi, ed., Readin' Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars: The South Atlantic Quarterly, Special Edition. Vol. 94, No 1 (Winter, 1995), pp. 217-230. [^][42] Cited in Paul F. Wells, "Review: Roots and Revival: Two Recorded Perspectives of American Folk Music, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 2. (Summer, 1994), pp. 246-254, 252. [^]
[43] Deborah Kodish, Good Friends and Bad Enemies: Robert Winslow Gordon and the Study of American Folksong (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 95. [^]
[44] Becker, Selling Tradition, op cit. [^]
[45] Cited in Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeller (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992 ©1979), 72. [^]
[46] Pound, American Ballads and Songs (1922), XXXII. [^]
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