Music Row In Nashville
Jimmie Rodgers blended musical styles. The Carter Family stayed true to tradition. Vernon Dalhart popularized. Between them, they sketched the outline for what would become the distinctly American invention, country music. Their talent was aided by timing: Country music would not have been possible before the 1920s, when the mass production of radios and records broke down the walls that had kept American musical styles hemmed into regional pockets. Dalhart, largely forgotten today, was country music's first major star. Born Marion Try Slaughter in an East Texas cattle-herding family, he moved to New York City in 1910 and found work singing at funerals, then in light operas. His recording career took off with his 1924 release, The Prisoner's Song, and its flip side, The Wreck of the Old 97. His ability to sing hillbilly songs in a way that appealed to the general population made him country music's first million-seller. Looking for more such successes, record companies began sending talent scouts South. One, Victor Records' Ralph Peer, discovered Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family and recorded them a few days apart in 1927 in Bristol, Va. "These recordings are the single most important event in country music," Johnny Cash has said. Rodgers and the Carters — patriarch A.P., his pure-voiced wife, Sara, and guitarist Maybelle, Sara's cousin — were immensely important in forging two performance traditions. Rodgers blended blues, yodels and folk tunes to sing about rounders, ramblers and roustabouts. The Carters stood for home, God, mother, family and faith, and sang about them in a still-copied close-harmony style. Maybelle's Carter lick became the most influential in country music history. Rodgers was the more popular in his day. When tuberculosis sapped his health, he refused to slow a hectic recording pace. "I want to die with my boots on," he told his wife. For much of the Carters' careers, singing was a part-time affair. Between recording sessions, Sara said, "Why, we went home and planted the corn." To save money, A.P. printed handbills with their names, a promise (The Program is Morally Good) and blank lines, where he could fill in the date and place. Dalhart's fame waned. By the '40s, he clerked nights at a hotel in Bridgeport, Conn., where he died in 1948. Expanding on the foundation laid down in the '20s, country music added a western wing during the '30s. Singing cowboys such as Gene Autry became the rage; in Texas, the innovative Bob Wills helped create a hot new dance sound called western swing; and Patsy Montana became the first female country star with her song I Want To Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart. In the Southeast, the Depression sent record sales plummeting, but country music held its own via dozens of radio barn dances. The emphasis, however, began to shift from string bands playing hillbilly tunes to solo performers such as Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb. In 1934, Decca Records was formed as a budget label. Until Decca, hillbilly music was best exploited on radio and the concert stage. Decca became the first great and important country label. But the big news of the '30s came from the new sounds out west. In 1933, Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan formed Bob Wills and His Playboys (later renamed the Texas Playboys). Its collection of danceable fiddle tunes, reworked with big-band orchestration, jazz-style solos, drums and amplified guitars, made Wills the undisputed King of Western Swing. His encouragement to steel guitar player Leon McAuliffe — Take it away, Leon — became a familiar catch-phrase. "Hell, I know what I'm doin', all right," he told Time magazine. "I'm just playin' the kind of music my kind of folks like to hear."
Gene Autry started out as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator, but found his calling once he strapped on a pair of six-shooters and climbed aboard his trusty steed, Champion. Through movies and his popular Melody Ranch radio show, he became America's No. 1 singing cowboy. He rode a new style of music to popularity, too — western songs, with their soaring harmonies and words that spoke of freedom and wide-open spaces. Arkansas-born Patsy Montana was the first million-selling country female, with 1935's I Want To Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart. It was the biggest of her series of western-themed hits, which she sang through the '30s on the nationally syndicated radio show WLS Barn Dance, creating the yodeling cowgirl image and making her the most successful woman country vocalist of her era. Good times, drinking and dancing went with the honky-tonk, both as a place and a musical style in country. The slang word for barrooms became intertwined with country music in the '40s, when Ernest Tubb ruled as the king of honky-tonk jukeboxes. Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, started his career in the '30s as a Jimmie Rodgers imitator. So great was Tubb's devotion that he borrowed Rodgers' coat for early publicity photos. Tubb found his own style by 1941 with the million-selling Walking the Floor Over You. In 1943, when he moved to Nashville, he introduced the electric and steel guitars to Grand Ole Opry audiences. By this time, country music — then called country & western — was catching on outside its Southeastern stronghold: A 1943 survey of Detroit jukebox operators found it to be the most popular music. The premier radio showcase of country — the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast on Nashville's clear-channel AM station, WSM — also found its greatest host during the '40s: Roy Acuff. Baseball great Dizzy Dean dubbed Acuff King of the Hillbillies, which was soon modified to the more dignified King of Country Music. The title was justified — in the 1940s he began to regularly perform for crowds exceeding 15,000 and was as popular during World War II as Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra. Legend has it that Marines in the Pacific heard Japanese soldiers taunting them by shouting, "To hell with Roosevelt! To hell with Babe Ruth! To hell with Roy Acuff!" His partnership with Fred Rose in Acuff-Rose in the early '40s established country-song publishing in Nashville for the first time. The move eventually helped Nashville cement its place as country music's home city. Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, rose to fame during the '40s. When he and his band, the Blue Grass Boys, joined the Opry in 1939, most of the elements of the style were already in place — a driving tempo, high harmonies, and intricate fiddle and mandolin licks. Vocalist Lester Flatt and banjo wizard Earl Scruggs joined the band as World War II wound down, completing the sound that eventually took its name from Monroe's band. Post-war prosperity made possible country music's first real boom. The Grand Ole Opry, on network radio every Saturday night, reached 10 million listeners. Barn dances all over the country prospered, and in the early '50s country music made its first forays onto national television. With its emergence, country music had its first grand-scale tragedy — the flameout of its brightest star, Hank Williams. He wrote simple, yet compelling songs such as Cold, Cold Heart and I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. They propelled him to stardom in the late '40s and early '50s, and endure today. "You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly," he said. His heavy-drinking lifestyle took the ultimate toll: Hank was found dead in the back seat of a chauffeured Cadillac while en route to a Jan. 1, 1953, performance in Canton, Ohio. He was 29. At Hank's funeral, Red Foley sang Peace in the Valley and a choir of Foley, Roy Acuff, Little Jimmy Dickens, Carl Smith, Webb Pierce, Johnny Wright and Jack Anglin sang Hank's own I Saw the Light. Lefty Frizzell's impact was greater than his six No. 1 records. His laconic soulfulness inspired George Jones, Merle Haggard, John Anderson, Keith Whitley and many other male artists. He once explained his deliberate, note-bending style: "When I sing," he said, "to me, every word has a feeling about it. I had to linger, had to hold it . . . I didn't want to let go of that no more than I wanted to let go of the woman I loved." In 1967, a Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum was built on Music Row in Nashville. The first three inductees, Jimmie Rodgers, Fred Rose and Hank Williams, were announced. Bronze plaques, with the facial likeness and a thumbnail biography of each new member, were cast in bas relief. They were unveiled on the Grand Ole Opry by Ernest Tubb. The Music Row location of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum was closed December 31, 2000. The building was later razed and a private parking lot for employees of music licensing firm BMI now occupies the site. Before they went on to become major stars in the country music recording industry, Kathy Mattea and Trisha Yearwood worked as tour guides at the Music Row museum. On May 17, 2001, the new $37,000,000 facility in downtown Nashville was built. | ||||||||||
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