Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Constructing Country: Fakery and "Strictly American" Music / Kevin Yuill [Part 2]
Go to Part 1, "Creating an American Music: A Critical View of the Origins of Country"»
<1> Having identified the strands that would later make up country music, we now consider the further development of the search for a national music. It coincided with the growing romantic attachment of certain members of the elite to a racialized Anglo-Saxon American "folk" whose culture they re-imagined, shorn of any uncouth or labor-related themes, in contrast to more urban, black or immigrant cultures. The English proselytiser for Morris dancing, Cecil Sharp, exceeded the efforts of others in highlighting the music of the Appalachians as particularly Anglo-Saxon and thus worthy of attention. After World War I in particular, an increasingly racialized sense of self made many Americans identify with a largely-imagined Anglo-Saxon rural past free from immigrants, large cities and labor troubles. But the "folk music" of the South had yet to be commercialized or shaped into the category we now understand as country music, a process explored below.
<2> The first ever country record – an event felt by some to be the birth of country music – was cut in 1923. Fiddlin' John Carson recorded "Little Log Cabin in the Lane" in Atlanta. Carson, a political campaigner for the inveterate Negro-baiter Tom Watson as well as governors Eugene and Herman Talmadge, also recorded "Flat-footed Nigger" and a ballad that he had written after the murder of Mary Phagan in 1913; the ballad was sung at protest rallies calling for the death penalty for Leo Frank, Phagan's Jewish employer who was later lynched.
<3> The first country record was not all that it seemed. As Bill Malone has noted, "'Little Log Cabin [in the Lane]' began life in 1871 as the nostalgic complaint of a faithful darkie; by 1923 it had metamorphosed into a more general expression of regret about the disappearance of rural society – an impulse that remained central to country music in the decades that followed." Along with many other "folk songs" of the time, Little Log Cabin in the Lane had been copyrighted by William S. Hays in 1871. Hays, who had the dubious distinction of being imprisoned by the Union in the Civil War for writing "seditious" songs, also wrote Black, Irish, German, and hayseed "dialect" songs that were designed to be sung in an accent. [1]
<4> Ralph Peer, who supervised Macon's recording of the ditty, pronounced it "pluperfectly awful." His agent, however, ordered a few hundred copies. When the agent sold out and ordered some more, Peer knew he was on to something. Even before this, however, radio shows giving local amateurs airtime had proved popular. On November 29 1922 there was what was billed as an "Old-fashioned Concert" was probably what would later be recognised as the first all-country radio program. Thus, Atlanta's WSB's program on February 6 1923 at 10:45 played a String band led by Roy Thompson, playing "Waldemar," "The Messenger," and "Pert and Pretty"; a steel guitar solo by Russell Thompson and a square dance called by Jack Manning. The public showed a nostalgic taste for amateur music based in rural areas. Even then, however, this was nostalgia for a comparatively recent past. String bands, with a combination of fiddle, guitar, banjo, and sometimes mandolin represented an innovation in the early years of the twentieth century. As Malone notes, by the turn of the century, banjo, mandolin, and guitar clubs became all the rage amongst middle-class youth on college campuses and in towns and cities throughout the South. This instrumental music became popular before songs took over. The steel guitar – now a standard of country music – reflected the Hawaiian music craze that swept the United States after the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Amateur music was made up of these comparatively recent – and fairly easy to play – musical trends. [2]
<5> Early country performances were simply laypeople, singing and playing any music that came to hand, from Tin Pan Alley to old fiddle tunes to jazz-and blues-inspired music. [3] But early commercializers sold musical nostalgia alongside anything else that would sell. The genre was anything but developed. Vernon Dalhart, a popular, classically-trained interpreter of folk music, struck gold with The Wreck of the Old '97. Dalhart then recorded The Death of Floyd Collins under the pseudonym, Al Craver; on the flip side was Dalhart's version of "Little Mary Phagan." Dalhart, besides singing light opera, sang "dialect songs," also popular at the time. Besides imitating Irish, "darkie" and Swedish accents, Dalhart sang in a "hayseed" dialect. Hayseed, of course, was often signified with a Southern accent. Indeed, only the high-pitched nasal voice with a "hayseed" dialect connected the commercial form of country with Sharp's ballads. [4]
<6> There was little attempt at authenticity and those marketing the early "hillbilly" music seemed to have been recruited directly from the travelling medicine shows where many of the musicians cut their teeth. It is notable that the image of the musicians was carefully created as soon as audiences were able to see the musicians. George Hay, father of the Grand Ole Opry radio and later television program, actually changed the names of the bands coming up with names like "The Fruit Jar Drinkers" and "The Gully Jumpers." Vanderbilt-trained physician Dr. Humphrey Bate and his Augmented String Orchestra became "The Possum Hunters." The "Binkley Brothers Barn Dance Orchestra" was renamed "The Dixie Clod Hoppers." [5] Perhaps most egregious of the fakery at this time is the story of Jilson Setters, the singing fiddler who had been blind from birth. Jean Thomas had made up the story for an article in American Magazine in February 1930 entitled "Blind Jilson: The Singing Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow," which was a complete fabrication. Jean Thomas was not, as she claimed, a circuit court stenographer but a Hollywood scenario writer and amateur folklorist. Blind Jilson Setters, whose real name was J.W. Day, had been marshalled into the role by Thomas herself. So anxious were various forces in American society to find something that represented their vision of what was really American that Day was heralded as the genuine article. Thus, William Wolff, in a 1939 article entitled "Songs that express the soul of a people" in the left-wing The People's World, noted of Jilson Setters: "He has probably never heard of Marx or Lenin, but there can be no doubts about where his roots lay, as he sings." [6] But Setters, though he was a blind musician from the Appalachian region, had his roots as much in Hollywood as anywhere else.
<7> Other voices called for hillbilly music to be promoted for exactly the same reason – it seemed to express what was genuinely American. Several musical figures promoted Appalachian music specifically because it was white. John Powell, born in 1882 in Richmond, Virginia, was a descendant, through his mother's, of Charles I's court musician, Nicholas Lanier. Powell rose to musical prominence with his Rhapsodie Négre in 1917, using Negro folk-tunes as inspiration. [7] From the early 1920s onwards, Powell moved away from Negro themes and concentrated on American folk music derived from Anglo-Saxon sources. "He came to believe that a truly national music must be based on the 'national musical idiom' of the people; and in America, he maintained, the idiom was typically Anglo-Saxon." Powell busied himself outside of his musical career by forming the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, preaching against the "annihilation of white civilization," the "Jewish infection" in American music and calling for "fundamental and final solutions of our racial problems in general." Part of his contribution was to successfully lobby for Virginia's infamous 1924 Racial Integrity Law. [8]
<8> Powell thus promoted folk-music of purportedly Anglo-Saxon derivation in order to stem the tide threatening to wash over white civilization. Promoting the "pure" music of the Appalachians, Powell organized the White Top Folk festival with Annabel Morris Buchanan, a former settlement worker who had met Cecil Sharp during his forays into the Appalachians. Two years after the first concert, Eleanor Roosevelt requested a role at the festival and handed out prizes to the winners. Roosevelt's two cooks were the only African-Americans at the festival. [9] Paralleling the quest of some contemporary country fans to delineate between "hard" and "soft" country, the festival was careful to divide pure folk music from the "tawdry" commercial folk music played on the radio. [10] This "pure" folk music had other sponsors, though not all listed such outwardly racist reasons for supporting it. Robert Winslow Gordon, who set up the Archive of Folk Song (later the American Folklife Center) in 1928, also sponsored folk-song in opposition to "newcomers, immigrants, foreigners, or those associated with modern styles, with jazz-playing, or Broadway productions." [11] Lamar Stringfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who founded the North Carolina Symphony, wrote America and Her Music in 1931. He stated that he searched for "native and fine" music and asserted that a strong and united nation must have a national music but that a distinctively American music had yet to be developed. Just as the 1924 Immigration Act attempted to define the American people as Nordic, so did Stringfield try to define what was and what was not American music. He dismissed Native American music as music of a dying race and declared that "Negro lack of originality in music prevents his songs from being carried on from generation to generation." Jazz was "mathematical and commercially concocted" and furthermore, "since the emotions of the Negro race are foreign to the white man, an essentially Anglo-Saxon nation derives its nationalism in music only from its own people." [12]
<9> The delineation of folk music and country music came about only with the commercial success of the latter, beginning a pattern replicated with each new generation. The familiar story of the development of country music begins with what Johnny Cash, whose wife's mother was one of the original Carter Family members, described as "the single most important event in the history of country music." Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers' biographer, called the session the "Big Bang" of country music. [13] In the late summer of 1927 the Victor Talking Machine Company, later known as RCA Victor, sent Ralph Peer to Bristol, Tennessee, to record some local acts. Using what was then the cutting edge technology available to them – a mobile recording studio and new Western Electric microphones – Peer and his two engineers recorded seventy-six performances by nineteen different artists, including pioneers like Ernest "Pop" Stoneman, topical-protest singer Blind Alfred Reed and two hitherto unknown acts, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.<10> As Charles Wolfe has pointed out, the sessions are the stuff of legend. Only a year after the sessions, Peer remembered that Rodgers had been "running around in the mountains" before the session and that he was laughed at when he tried out. Peer later recalled that the Carter Family arrived at the temporary studio looking like they had "come through a lot of mud" either in a "horse and buggy or an old car." A. P. Carter was "dressed in overalls" and the women had "calico clothes on …They looked like hillbillies." The image that Peer and later observers wished to create was of a chance encounter between Peer and genuine mountain folk in a little backwoods town high up in the Appalachians. [14] However, as Wolfe notes, none of these images is accurate and many were simply wrong. Rodgers had been working on the radio and his band, the Teneva Ramblers, had been working in a local hotel under the name "Jimmie Rodgers and his Entertainers," playing dance tunes. The Carters came into Bristol regularly and had been recommended to and, indeed, contacted by Peer before he arrived. The image, as Peer appreciated, helped to sell the music. Record sleeves featured mountain scenes, fiddlers at square dances, and singers sitting on cabin porches. The legend contributed to sales of the music. The nostalgic image of country music, in its earlier hillbilly guise, was already important. [15]
<11> Though purists might be horrified, technology shaped country music dramatically. Not only did the development of recording technology allow mobile recording studios to venture beyond city limits, radios popularised local singers and allowed local audiences a taste of exotic music. Those who would not dream of going to a venue popular with African-Americans could hear black music on the radio or buy blues records. The expansion of radio negatively affected record sales, especially during the Depression, but also helped to professionalize the musicians who flocked to the new craze for nostalgic music. Ethnic sounds drifted into the homes of those with diverse ethnic and "American" backgrounds.
<12> Technological developments directly affected the music. Developments in microphones let singers, who previously had to shout to be heard above the other musicians, concentrate on their style. Close harmonies could come to the fore. Songs outstripped instrumental music as the way people listened to music changed. The singer was becoming the star. Instruments that suited the singer, such as the guitar, replaced the string bands that became popular with amateur musicians at the turn of the century. But perhaps the most important determinant of country music was the development of copyrighting. A rush to copyright old music led Ralph Peer's Southern Music Corporation to register over 3,500 old tunes and arrangements. For many artists, who did not read music and were unfamiliar with copyright laws, Peer's copyright at least allowed them to claim authorship for songs and thus to become professional musicians. [16]
<13> The Carter Family performed to Ralph Peer at the Bristol sessions on July 31, 1927. Alvin Pleasant (A.P.) Carter, the tall, gangly bass, joined his wife Sara, who sang lead alto and auto-harp, and her first cousin Maybelle, who played guitar and sang harmony. Peer later recalled that "as soon as I heard Sara's voice, that was it." Despite this Hollywood-scripted story of a New York talent scout mining country gold, Victor released recordings of eleven different groups Peer had found on his Southern expedition in October 1927; the Carter Family was not among them. However, in November, a recording of "Poor Orphan Child" and "Wandering Boy" appeared, and in early 1928 the song that launched the Carters, "Single Girl, Married Girl," appeared with "The Storms are on the Ocean." [17]
<14> The Carter Family's appeal was in their ability to sing pathos, to evoke an empathetic response to the tales of heartache and tragedy in their music. Much of their material, though copyrighted by A. P., consisted of songs they had heard in their youth or were collected from friends, neighbors and even strangers. Their signature theme song, "Keep on the Sunny Side," came from an 1899 Sunday School song adapted from The Young People's Hymnal No. 2. "John Hardy" was a famous bad man song already recorded and in existence at least since the 1890s. "Wildwood Flower," one of their biggest hits that inspired a young Italian-American city resident named Perry Como to play guitar, was actually an 1859 sheet music song that had been a vaudeville favourite since the Civil War. During the Depression, tales of disappointment and heartache appealed to a great audience. Yet, as attested to by the success of some of the Carter Family's hits prior to A. P. copyrighting them, prior generations enjoyed weeping along to tragic songs. The Carter Family's popularity owed much to the new electric microphones that brought home the feeling in Sara Carter's voice and to the harmonies in such classics as "In the Valley of the Shenandoah." [18]
<15> Whereas the Carter Family copyrighted old musical standards and re-popularized musical weepies, Jimmie Rodgers led the way with what might be known as "white man's blues." Rodgers took on the persona of the wandering hobo, the hard-living, tough but tender-hearted young man, singing convincingly of heartache and lost love along the way. Born in 1897, in Geiger [19], Alabama, Rodgers is celebrated in the Country Music Hall of Fame as "the man who started it all." Rodgers began his career at age 12, winning a singing contest. In the two years after that, Rodgers ran away, joining two travelling medicine shows. Caught by his father after the second sojourn, young James Charles was offered the choice between school and following his father in working on the railroads. Choosing the latter, he worked, as his frail health would permit, on railroads but always dreamed of being an entertainer. In 1924, he contracted tuberculosis – at that time a death sentence – and only lived another nine years. There were few auspicious signs that hinted at the success to come. Despite working as a musician, Rodgers could not read a note, keep time or even write lyrics that fit. As his biographer Nolan Porterfield commented, "For the first thirty years of his all-too-short life, he was more or less a failure at everything he tried…" [20]
<16> Nor was Rodgers considered a sure bet by Peer in 1927. Rodgers was one of the nine acts for whom Peer had not allocated time in Bristol in 1927. When Rodgers turned up with his band, who later became the Teneva Ramblers, they played the dance tunes they had been playing at the hotel in Asheville. Peer remembered of the session: "we ran into a snag almost immediately because, in order to earn a living in Asheville, he was singing mostly songs originated by the New York publishers." [21] Rodgers, hungry for success, assured Peer that he could play old-time tunes. That night, arguments between the Teneva Ramblers and Rodgers, whom they considered a second-rate musician, ensued. Rodgers appeared by himself the next day and asked Peer if he could record alone. Peer assented and Rodgers recorded "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" after what would become his signature tune, "T for Texas," was rejected.
<17> Like the Carter family, Rodgers' success was not instant. His first royalty cheque amount earned for sales of "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" was for the princely sum of 27 dollars "and some odd cents." [22] Whereas Peer had clearly wished to get the Carter Family back in the studio after the release of the Bristol material, Rodgers simply turned up uninvited at Peers' office in New York in November of 1927. One of the four songs that resulted from this session, "T for Texas" (coupled with "Away Out on the Mountain"; the other two were "Ben Dewbury's Final Run" and "Mother Was a Lady"), sold nearly half a million copies over the next two years, catapulting Rodgers to a stardom comparable with that of Elvis Presley. He performed his first big theatre show in 1927 to rave reviews and by the end of 1928 Rodgers' recording royalties alone reached $2000 per month. [23]
<18> Rodgers' appeal and his originality were in the way he played music, rather than the music he played. As Porterfield notes, though Rodgers' name appears on 83 percent of the tracks he recorded, he actually wrote very little of his own music. Rodgers' ability to make the listener believe the song, conveyed by bending the melody, speeding up or slowing down the time, adding his plaintive yodel, was his true talent. Country legend Ernest Tubb recalled that Rodgers had such "sincerity in his voice that he made you believe what he was singing. When I first heard Jimmie Rodgers' song 'T for Texas,' I felt so bad for the jilted singer who sang 'I'm going to shoot poor Thelma' that I immediately started to dislike Thelma, whoever it was, hurting him like that. He made it true." [24]
<19> In fact, as many observed, Rodgers' style was closer to the blues than to the string bands with which he had played for so many years. Often accompanied only by a guitar, his clear, nasal voice belied his Southern rural origins but little else related either to what might had been called hillbilly music before him or what is now called country music. Ralph Peer, remembering the split between Rodgers and the Teneva Ramblers at the time of the Bristol sessions, suspected that "the records would have been no good if Jimmie had sung with this group because he was singing nigger blues and they were doing old-time fiddle music. Oil and water … they don't mix." Edward Abbe Niles, a reviewer and Wall Street lawyer sympathetic to jazz, blues and other fledgling forms of entertainment, categorized Jimmie Rodgers as "White Man Gone Black" after Blue Yodel No. 3. [25] In other words, the father of country music in fact played what would now be called black music.
<20> Rodgers, of course, did not see himself as exclusively of any genre, let alone the father of one. He was above all an entertainer; if people liked it he played it. Thus, this most authentic voice of the rural South played "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze," "Jeannie (with the light-brown hair)," "My Blue Heaven," "Everybody Does It in Hawaii," and "Frankie and Johnny" as well as his "Blue Yodel" standards. Moreover, Rodgers recorded with a wide range of backing groups and musicians, including the Carter Family, the Blue and Grey Troubadours, a jug band, a musical saw, a jazz combo and Louis Armstrong.
<21> In terms of image, while the Carter family dressed perpetually, it seems, in their Sunday best, Rodgers was always a smart dresser and no images of Rodgers as a rural yokel can be found. He marketed himself as the Singing Brakeman, making a film of that name in 1929. Rodgers created the image of the rambling, rakish but sentimental working man who did a highly-skilled and dangerous job but was little rewarded, from some little town but living everywhere and belonging nowhere – certain to speak to the self-image of much of his audience. However, for much of his career Rodgers appeared as a dapper college boy – a popular image in the 1920s – with his round spectacles, slicked back hair and dinner jacket. In 1931, after moving to Texas, Rodgers became fascinated with the Western image and was photographed in Western getup. However, as Porterfield notes, there is no evidence that he ever performed in Western gear. [26]
<22> The importance of Rodgers to country music was in nationalizing a style of music or, more accurately, marketing his own style of music as America's national music. He soon dropped the brakeman persona, calling himself Mississippi's Blue Yodeller for a very brief period of time and then America's Blue Yodeller. The nationalization of the image reflected a change in Rodgers' identity and the identity of his music. Whereas Peer's original marketing strategy for sales outside of the South – certainly what he had in mind for the acts he auditioned in Bristol – highlighted the quirky regionalism of the Appalachian region of the South that had so fascinated Cecil Sharp, Rodgers became a truly national performer. In such a way regional music (the blues) and a personal style (yodelling, present in nearly every Rodgers track after the initial success of "T for Texas") became the model for all those that wished for national success.
The Ascent of the Cowboy
<23> The musical culture of the cowboy, as Bill Malone succinctly put it, "did not exist." [27] Yet what is now called country music became forever linked with the cowboy's favourite article of clothing, the ten-gallon hat. How did the genre previously marketed as mountain music take on such a new and, at least in musical terms, unlikely persona?
<24> Douglas B. Green noted that the singing cowboy was born of three parents: the romantic West of novels like Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), the cinematic West of The Great Train Robbery (1902) and a thousand followers and the musical West, beginning with Carl T. Sprague's "When the Work's All done this Fall" (1925). He might have added the rugged portrayals of the West by Charles Frederick Remington and other artists, the popularity of Oklahoma-born ropes trickster turned comedian Will Rogers, and the sponsorship of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, the most important parent was the search for an inclusive American image that captured what were deemed to be American values and to which all Americans (as defined by the 1924 Immigration Act) might relate. The cowboy, forever stuck in the latter half of the nineteenth century, mirrored the 1924 Immigration Act's reliance on the census of 1890 as an identifier of what was "really" American.
<25> The cowboy, despite having no musical heritage, possessed iconic advantages over the mountaineer who, though possessed of many of the attributes of the cowboy, fell out of favour. The cowboy maintained the attractive independence of the hobo but presented, from many points of view, a much better self image for the American working class. Free from any kind of authority, the cowboy, like the hobo, lived on the edge of civilization – an image that must have been attractive to those working in a mine, chained to a desk, trapped in a company town or struggling to pay the rent. Unlike the hobo, however, the cowboy worked hard; moreover, his work always had purpose. Safely located in the past, the cowboy image could be moulded. The growing importance of radio and film – as opposed to records, the sales of which plummeted in the Depression years - to musicians was to marry country artists to their radio and film sponsors, forcing musicians to clean up their acts. Whereas Jimmie Rodgers sang coarse songs, the newer acts became cleaner and more wholesome, as befitting their film personas. [28]
<26> Like the hobo, mountain folk were knocked off of their iconic pedestal by the cowboy. Formerly presented as a rustic twentieth-century version of the early settlers, the 1920s and 1930s saw the mountain man image lose its sheen. Accounts of snake-handling and other forms of eccentric behaviour - coupled with the notorious Scopes trial, testing a Virginia law preventing the teaching of evolution - proved unhelpful. But the events that probably curtailed any possibility of iconic status for the mountaineers were the troubling and violent strikes in the coalfields and textile mills in the Appalachian regions. These newly militant workers destroyed the image of individualism, fatalism and docility that had so bewitched early admirers of denizens of the Southern mountains. Moreover, each struggle seemed to have its balladeers – Aunt Molly Jackson, Sarah Ogan, Jim Garland, and Florence Reese, in the Kentucky coal fields; Ella May Wiggins, the union organizer who was shot to death near Gastonia at the age of 29 by the Committee of One Hundred, a strike-breaking organization. The cowboy, set in history, maintained the Anglo-Saxon character of the mountaineer without the political class-based connotations. Whereas the cowboy was a rebel, the focus of his rebellion was blurred and individualised.
<27> Gene Autry was the first big cowboy singing star. Autry, though born in Texas, did not immediately affect the cowboy image. He began by singing a variety of pieces from the fairly obscene "Do Right Daddy Blues," [29] "Hillbilly Wedding in June," "A Gangster's Warning," and the aforementioned homage to Mother Jones. He was slavish in his admiration for Rodgers, a fact reflected in his music. He achieved his first big hit with a nostalgic number called "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine" in 1932. However, the massive success he enjoyed only came when he donned a ten-gallon hat and sidled into the movies as a replacement for a reluctant John Wayne, who did not warm to the idea of singing "over top my horse crappin' on stage." Autry's record company, associated with Mascot Pictures, recruited Autry for a scene in Old Santa Fe, released in 1934. The scene proved popular and Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Autry's third film, released in September 1935, was a smash hit. [30]
<28> As Peter Stansfield notes, the model for Autry's cowboy was vaudeville cowboy Will Rogers. Rogers, in the words of his biographer Peter Rollins, "was important to Americans in the 1920s and 1930s because he addressed his humour to their basic sense of rootlessness and loss. As cowboy version of Rip Van Winkle, Rogers passed through the era of change, judging new developments by the standards of the 1890s." [31] His persona was impeccably Anglo-Saxon, rural but successful and implacable in the uncertainly of the interwar years. In ways uncomfortably close to the 1924 Immigration Act – attempting to ossify America in line with the census of 1890 – Autry symbolized the imposition of rural, Anglo-Saxon imagery upon the new industrial, urban United States.
<29> Autry took on the Rogers persona in his films – the likeable country bumpkin, ostensibly simple and innocent but always ending up on top. Not particularly adept at acting or imposing, Autry starred in movies with ludicrous plots that were universally derided by critics. Filled with comic breaks with his faithful partner, Smiley Burnett, many times the action would stop for Autry to sing a song. The films shamelessly promoted his records. Set in modern times rather than in days of yore, Autry dealt with contemporary themes in his films, unlike later Westerns that located the cowboys in a mythical history. Autry noted about his movies: "While my solutions were a little less complex than those offered by FDR, and my methods a bit more direct, I played a kind of New Deal Cowboy who never hesitated to tackle many of the same problems: the dust-bowl, unemployment, or the harnessing of power." [32]
<30> Autry became one of the most popular singers ever. Certainly, the riches amassed during his lifetime would have amazed even Jimmie Rodgers. With a retinue of famous collaborators, from Merle Haggard to Mary Ford, his talent lay less in singing or acting than in penning popular songs and picking up songs that he knew would be popular. He recorded many famous pieces, such as "Ghost Riders in the Sky," and his biggest seller ever that everyone certainly knows, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."<31> With the passing of the torch from Jimmie Rodgers to Gene Autry, the yodel – seamlessly – became the hallmark of the cowboy, as many who had been inspired by Rodgers' success sought it for themselves by yodelling. After newly elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared David Guion's arrangement of "Home on the Range" to be his favourite song, many musicians traded in their city and hillbilly outfits for some cowboy duds. The authenticity of these new cowboy acts was, if anything, more questionable than the country credentials of the hillbilly acts. For instance, The Girls of the Golden West, Dolly and Milly Good, farm girls from Southern Illinois, were named by their manager, after which he looked at a map of Texas and discovered a small town with the name of "Muleshoe." To the end of their career, they were described as ranch girls whose expert yodelling style had been influenced by the coyotes they heard howling on the windswept Texas plains, rather than learning it from Jimmie Rodgers songs on the radio. Patsy Montana (real name Ruby Blevins from Arkansas, daughter of a school-teacher), who attended UCLA to study the violin, also yodelled her way to fame, recording "I want to be a cowboy's sweetheart" in 1935, which sold over a million records. Montana also recorded spoofs of the urban cowboys that cropped up, one of them containing the appropriate lines "all you ever shot … is lots and lots of bull." Even the unmistakably Southern hillbilly Roy Acuff donned a Stetson and changed the name of his band from the Crazy Tennesseans to the Smoky Mountain Boys. [33] Likewise, The Sons of the Pioneers, a talented but hardly authentically Western band consisting of Bob Nolan from New Brunswick in Canada, Tim Weston from Missouri and Leonard Slye from Cincinnati, achieved fame as a cowboy outfit after unsuccessfully touring as the tellingly-named "Rocky Mountaineers." Slye went on to replace Gene Autry when he failed to turn up during a contractual dispute with Republic Pictures. Under the name Roy Rogers, often accompanied by a sidekick, his favourite steed Trigger and, after 1947, his wife Dale Evans, Slye made over one hundred films. Tex Ritter, having moved to New York from his native Texas, appeared as a cowboy on Broadway before signing with what would later be Columbia Records in 1933. Ritter followed Gene Autry and made many "B" Westerns.
<32> In terms of sound, what was later called Western Swing perhaps had the greatest effect on country music. In Texas, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies welded together jazz, blues and country music to get a new sound. Bob Wills with his stylized "hot fiddling" added to the sound and became Western Swing's new pretender. Western Swing added drums and popularized steel guitar. Proving enormously popular – particularly within the "honky-tonks" springing up along the highways near the rapidly-expanding oil industry in the South-west – Western Swing retains a recognizable sound long after the yodel has been consigned to history.
<33> Taken together, these trends meant that the cowboy - ironically, given that cowboys had little claim, at very best, to a musical heritage - became the new image for country music. By 1935 As Douglas P. Green noted, the Autry phenomenon, amongst other things, was "the first nationwide demonstration of the absolutely national appeal of country music, an overwhelming referendum proving country music was a major musical form and force, the ballots being 78rpm records and theatre ticket stubs." [34] Country music arrived on the national stage.
<34> By this time country music had been thoroughly tamed and generally purged of lyrics that might have caused offence to elements of the American public. Aiding this cleaning up process was the switch from record sales, which dropped precipitously in the Depression, towards promotion through radio. Radio programs were invariably sponsored by companies to whom a clean image was important. This self-censorship was augmented by the new importance of film, more and more the property of a few large studios. Especially after 1934, when the Hays code began to be enforced, the accompanying music came to be cleaner than clean and to express only the approved sentiments. The cowboy, the new hero of the time, was becoming white but, at least until World War II, black cinematic cowboys enjoyed success – not surprisingly, as many African-Americans had worked as cowhands. Herb Jeffries sang and rode the range in four cowboy films including "Harlem on the Prairie" (1937), "The Two-Gun Man From Harlem" (1938), "The Bronze Buckaroo" (1939) and "Harlem Rides the Range " (1939). A fifth picture was planned but never completed. [35] Not until the 1960s did another significant black cowboy appear in popular cinema.
<35> The forces that finally established the "Americanness" of hillbilly and cowboy music were largely political. Beginning with the New Deal but reaching consolidation during the Second World War, country music became a real American genre. No longer could it be derided as hillbilly music: the emphasis on unifying the American people around symbols of what was truly American ensured that the fakery and commericalized nonsense of cowboy music was sold back to Americans as a truly American cultural product. Cecil Sharp's artificial category of "the people" – that declassed, preindustrial peasantry – was replaced by the equally mythical "the American people" – a unified, industrious and patriotic working-class. Whatever "the people" listened to, whether it was a yodelling sort of blues sung badly by fake cowboys sitting atop their horses or jazz-influenced western swing music, suddenly emerged as the essence of the American people. Country music was thus given a nobility and cohesiveness as a genre along with falsified roots dating back to the beginning of the Republic.<36> As observed earlier, the genre coalesced when Billboard began charting its juke-box successes in January of 1944 under the moniker "folk" music. By 1949 the term "country and western" replaced the two separate categories of hillbilly and folk, the former being considered derogatory and the latter having faint associations with socialism. Modern music categories were emerging at this time; just two years earlier Billboard created its "Harlem Hit Parade" which was renamed "Race Records" in 1945 and then "Rhythm and Blues" in 1949. Country music's new legitimacy occurred as part of a wider recognition of the value of American vernacular music. Even Variety, which had condemned hillbilly music as fit only for those with "the intelligence of morons" in 1926, grudgingly now admitted the newcomer to the feast. Reviewing a Barn Dance in Indianapolis in 1942, it commented: "This hay-flavored bill has little appeal to smartened showgoers, but it is getting a nice play from defense workers and the rural element that don't get to the theatre often." Billboard was far more enthusiastic and noted, tellingly: "It is interesting to note that the war is tending to aid the folk music field. Placing greater and greater importance upon all things that are indigenously American, it is attracting more and more attention to the great field of folk records," listing Gene Autrey, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Montana Slim and other mostly white artists. Billboard endorsed these country artists for producing "distinctive and down to earth music – strictly American music." [36]
<37> Why was there a sudden and broad acceptance? As late as 1941, Clay Deemer, a schools music supervisor from Ohio, hoped to blast that "guitar pickin', nasal singin'" kind of music "into oblivion." [37] But Deemer spoke against the tenor of his times. From the New Deal onwards, folk music – music of "the people" – had been discovered. As folk music chronicler and collector Alan Lomax noted: "The Roosevelts, the Tugwells and the Hopkinses were interested in folk music because they wanted to be identified with it as a democratic, American art." [38] Amongst a growing section of the music elite, especially after 1935, a desperate scramble for American unity ensured that "folk music" was actively promoted as a truly American music.
<38> The New Deal and left-influenced musicians had altered the landscape. Harry Hopkins, chief administrator to the Works Progress Administration, felt that the arts might help to establish "in some ways a new base of American life." On August 2, 1935, Hopkins established the Federal Arts Projects, putting Nikolai Sokoloff in charge of the Federal Music Project, one of four arts projects. Some $27 million dollars was allocated for "the risky ask of employing the nation's artists and inherently discovering and defining American culture." Though Sokoloff's emphasis was clearly on classical music, several folk units were established; one of the most active was headed by the aforementioned Jean Thomas. The folk units would send folk musicians to schools to promote American music. Cowboy bands such as the Arbuckle Buckaroos, the Red River Hill Billies, and Devil Dan's Trio were sent around local schools, where they proved a big hit. Needless to say, these bands did not play "Tom Cat and Pussy Blues" or "Which Side Are You On?" [39]
<39> This newly integrationist approach underlined a key change from the emphasis of Cecil Sharp. All – from the twangiest hillbilly tunes to the badly-sung cowboy songs written in Manhattan to the sweetest tunes handed down and accompanied by a dulcimer – was now classified as folk. In the 1930s the hierarchical notions of the past over the present, of the "pure" over the commercial, and of older genres over emerging forms of music gave way. Benjamin Botkin, national folkore editor of the Federal Writers Project and later Head of the Archive of American Folksong, pushed the New Deal agencies towards and appreciation of the folk as well as the folk song and for recognition of the heterogeneous production of the music.
<40> In reality, though, this debate between purists and modernists over what was the "authentic" American music simply located the "authentic" elsewhere; it did not challenge the whole notion of authenticity. It simply replaced one myth with another. Moreover, despite its alleged heterogeneity, folk was in reality cast in only a few expressly racial categories. A 1936 international concert, broadcast to twenty-one European and all South and Central American countries, had as its purpose to "promote an understanding of the cultural backgrounds of the separate countries to the rest of the world." The American contingent broadcast in four styles of American folk music, all appropriately backed up with a full orchestra: "Indian Music" (two Iroquois war tunes), "cowboy songs," "Negro Music," and "Anglo-American folk-music." The ethnic folk music categories had been subsumed or had disappeared. Now there were only three kinds of legitimate American "folk," expressed in the primary racial categories of white, black and red. [40] The fact that African-American music represented in many ways a continuation of the British ballad or that both the white categories of music expressed African-American musical traditions was lost.
<41> Between the years 1918 and 1940, a new definition of what was American and what was not led to a total change in the iconography, the mythmaking. Throughout this period, there was a concerted effort by the elite to promote music that it saw fit, to contain and regulate as well as mould the cultural expressions of the working class. This was a period of time when the phrase "The American Dream" came into use and it was also the first time the phrase "The American Way of Life" was used. It is easy to think of the icons of the 1930s as natural and extending back into history. The importance of myth pointed to by Kenneth Burke in his American Writers Congress address of 1935 pointed to myth as "the social tool for welding a sense of interrelationship by which the carpenter and the mechanic, though differently employed, can work together for a common social end." [41]
<42> The dovetailing of the two white musical categories of "country" and "Western" came in the 1940s, completing the creation of country music. By that stage the instability of what was meant by "American" was at an end; it could now be assumed "authentic" American implied white and European. Accordingly, the stipulations of the 1924 Act, which remained in force until 1966 (though the racial categories were removed in 1952) were expressed in cultural terms. Cultural blackness emerged with the Harlem Renaissance, much to the chagrin of one of its celebrated writers, Jean Toomer, who preferred to be seen as mulatto. [42] The deep division between different sorts of folk music expressed a growing segregation of Americans. Cultural whiteness developed with country music.
<43> Country's whiteness constituted a strict – and false, as we have seen – separation between the genre itself and black music. Though the celebration of folk music emerged from a romantic attachment to the past, it had to go through a long process to be reframed in racial terms – even further to pose itself against black influences. Dvorak and many others deemed black American folk music – not unreasonably – as the most important influence for the development of a truly American music. Later, the 1924 Immigration Act privileged Anglo-Saxons as the most American, deemed that other Europeans, by adopting Anglo-Saxon ways, might become American, but set barriers against extra-Europeans. Whereas anyone else can convincingly don the symbols of country music, African-Americans or Americans of Asian background cannot. By the time John Travolta, whose Italian background is clearly identifiable, donned honky-tonk cowboy gear to play the white Texan hero Bud Davis of Urban Cowboy (1980), Italian Americans were considered white enough.
<44> Despite the fact that blacks, whites and others shared the early forms of country music, country music was commercially developed in the 1920s as cultural nostalgia in opposition to a rapidly industrializing and increasingly urban present. From this point, though, it emerged in opposition to forms of music identified with blacks, especially jazz. The many different styles and influences united only by their amateur appeal became repackaged again as a national music sung by that most Anglo-Saxon of symbols, the cowboy. The end-product, shorn of nearly all its interesting edges, of suggestive or rebellious lyrics, and of any trace of its partially African-American heritage, was finally given a name in the 1940s.
<45> Despite the fairly harsh interpretation of the genre, it is worth repeating that this is no indictment of the music (except, of course, the achy-breaky heart song). True artists, as always, can work within whatever restraints they are faced with and produce something that touches our innermost selves; those grouped within the genre of country music can and have made excellent music. Not only that, but many of the artists have reached out for influences far beyond the constraints of Country, revitalising the product despite itself. But the process of segmentation and marketing surely reflects a top-down attempt to impose both a racial identity upon something that ought not to have it and elite values upon those below.
<46> The last word belongs to Louis Armstrong, albeit within what may be an apocryphal story. Armstrong was approached by a pretentious music critic, who proclaimed that Satchmo played the only truly indigenous American music. Armstrong replied, "No, man, I play the horn."
Notes
[1] Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 64. [^]
[2] Malone, Singing cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 54. For the explosion of Hawaiian music across the nation, see Paul Vernon, "Worldawaii!," Folk Roots, vol. 19, no.10:178 (Apr 1998). pp. 33-36. [^]
[3] For an interesting indication of how much Tin Pan Alley had influenced folk music, see Norman Cohen, "Tin Pan Alley's Contribution to Folk Music," Western Folklore, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 9-20. [^]
[4] Wolfe, "Event Songs", 221. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 64-65. [^]
[5] See Charles K. Wolfe, "A Good Natured Riot": The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999). [^]
[6] Cited in R. Serge Denisoff, "Folk Music and the American Left: A Generational-Ideological Comparison," The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 4. (Dec., 1969), pp. 427-442, 431. The folk-music historian D. K. Wilgus also regarded Setters as real as did nearly every folk-music historian until the publication of Stephen F. Davis's "Jilson Setters: The man of many names" (The Devil's Box [Journal of the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Association] 12, no. 1 [March 1978]: 42-45.) Jean Thomas incorporated the American Folk Song Society in 1931. Nostalgic for the 19th century, Thomas costumed festival performers in homespun garments evoking that era: girls wore bonnets and calico dresses; women dressed in "linsey-woolsey" and wrapped shawls around their shoulders; and men and boys often wore overalls, indicating that, if country music is guilty of fakery and hokiness, "folk" music is doubly so. See http://digital.library.louisville.edu/collections/jthom/bio.php and Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). [^][7] As a music critic of the time indicated, however, the "profound respect" that Powell showed the Negro through music was not the same as "facile sentimentality that refuses to recognize the dangers that threatens two races of widely different stages of evolution that try to live together." Cited in L. Moody Simms, Jr., "Folk Music in America: John Powell and the 'National Musical Idiom,'" Journal of Popular Culture VII (Winter, 1973), pp. 510-15, 511-512. [^]
[8] See Simms, "Folk Music in America," 513, Richard B. Sherman, "The Last Stand: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s," Journal of Southern History, vol. 54, no. 1 (February 1988), pp. 69-91, David Z. Kushner, "John Powell: His Racial and Cultural Ideologies," Min-Ad Volume 2, 2004 (www.biu.ac.il/HU/mu/min-ad/06/John_Powell.pdf). For more on the Racial Integrity Act, see Sherman, "The Last Stand," and J. Douglas Smith, "The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: 'Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro,'" Journal of Southern History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (February, 2002), pp. 65-106. [^]
[9] See Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine, 192. [^]
[10] Martha W. Beckwith, "The White Top Folk Festival," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 46, No. 182 (October-December, 1933), 416. [^]
[11] Kodish, Good Friends and Bad Enemies, 11. [^]
[12] Cited in Peterson, Creating Country Music, 64. [^]
[13] Cited in Charles K. Wolfe, "The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions" in Paul Kingsbury, ed. The Country Reader: Twenty-Five Years of the Journal of Country Music (London: The Country Music Foundation Press, 1996), pp. 3-19, 4. Charles K., Wolfe and Ted Olsen, eds. The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005). [^]
[14] Wolfe, "The Legend That Peer Built," 10. [^]
[15] Ibid. [^]
[16] Guthrie T. Meade, Jr., "Copyright: A Tool for Commercial Rural Music Research," Western Folklore, Vol. 30, No. 3, Commercialized Folk Music (July, 1971), pp. 206-214, 210. [^]
[17] Cited in Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 100. See also Charles K. Wolfe, Classic Country: Legends of Country Music (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 3-4. [^]
[18] Wolfe, Classic Country, 5. The Carter Family's "Hello Central, Give Me Heaven," for instance, was published by Charles K. Harris in 1901. Moreover, the black Tin Pan Alley songwriter, Gussie Davis, had published "In the Baggage Coach Ahead" about a father and a crying child on a train at night. Reprimanded by angry fellow passengers, the father's response to the question, "where is the child's mother?" gives the song its title. [^]
[19] Although in many accounts, Rodgers was born just outside Meridian, Alabama, in evidence found recently – an application to join Blue Bonnet Masonic Lodge in San Antonio, Texas – Rodgers listed his place of birth as Geiger. [^]
[20] Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 5. [^]
[21] Wolfe, "The Legend that Peer Built," 11. [^]
[22] Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 128. [^]
[23] Peterson, Creating Country Music, 45. [^]
[24] Cited in Peterson, Creating Country Music, 48. For an interesting discussion of Rodgers' personal style of playing, see Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007) [^]
[25] Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 108, 124. [^]
[26] Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers, 294. [^]
[27] Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 75. [^]
[28] Blue Yodel No. 10, for instance, contains the lines:
I ain't no sheik man
Don't try to vamp no girl
It's my regular grinding get me by in this world
Compare the above to cinematic cowboy Tex Ritter's 1935 recording of "Do Right Cowboy," whose greatest ambition is to be daddy to a great big family. See Peter Stansfield, Hollywood Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 71, 72. [^]
[29] In the latter Autry sang:
You can feel of my legs
You can feel of my thigh
But if you feel my legs you got to ride me high [^]
[30] Cited in Peterson, Creating Country Music, 84. [^]
[31] Cited in Stansfield, Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s, 75. [^][32] Cited in Peter Stanfield, "Dixie Cowboys and Blue Yodels: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy," in Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson, eds., Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London: British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 96-118, 110. [^]
[33] See Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, 94. Lyrics from "I'm a Wild and Reckless Cowboy," (1937), cited in Robert K. Oerman and Mary A. Bufwack, "Patsy Montana and the Development of the Cowgirl Image" in Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Country Reader: Twenty-Five Years of the Journal of Country Music (London: The Country Music Foundation Press, 1996), pp. 75-89, 83. By 1939 Acuff finally rebelled when he was asked by Republic Studio to don cowboy outfits for the film, The Grand Ole Opry, released in 1940. Acuff insisted that hillbilly gear would be more realistic. See Peterson, Creating Country Music, chapter 9. [^]
[34] Douglas B. Green, "The Singing Cowboy: An American Dream," in Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Country Reader: Twenty-five Years of the Journal of Country Music (London: The Country Music Foundation Press & Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), pp. 21-73, 37. [^]
[35] Pamela Grundy describes this process in relation to radio in "'We Always Tried to be Good People': Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933-1935," The Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 4. (March, 1995), pp. 1591-1620. [^]
[36] For 1926 Variety quote, see Peterson, Creating Country Music; Malone, Country Music USA, XXXX. Peter Townsend, Pearl Harbor Jazz: Change in Popular Music in the Early 1940s (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 211, 212. [^]
[37] Clay Deemer, "So You Like Hillbilly Music!" Music Educators Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1. (Sep. - Oct., 1941), p. 62. [^]
[38] Cited in Robbie Lieberman, "My Song is My Weapon": People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 38. [^]
[39] Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to The Nation, x, 37. [^]
[40] "Microphone Presents – American Networks Join Today in Broadcasting Folk Music to Twenty-one Countries," New York Times, September 20 1936, pX11. [^]
[41] Cited in Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003 ed., o.p. 1973), 160. [^]
[42] Toomer railed against what he called "the hypnotic division of America into black and white." See Chapter 4 of Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America 1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 154-183. [^]
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