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America’s Music Of Choice

Writing in the mid-1990s, Peter Applebome, a former Atlanta bureau chief for The New York Times, affirmed that country music had become “white America’s music of choice,” and Nashville, the capital of country, “the Tin Pan Alley of the nineties.” What was once a marginal form of entertainment is today the staple of more radio stations—2,600, to be precise—than any other kind of music. Seventy million Americans tune into country and help drive what has become a two-billion-dollar industry. Country superstar Garth Brooks has sold more than 60 million records, making him second only to the Beatles in total U.S. sales.

Unlike stock car racing, country music was a highly lucrative industry as early as the 1920s, when advances in recording and radio helped capture and institutionalize the “hillbilly” sounds rural Southerners had invented, and reinvented, over the better part of two centuries. Bill C. Malone, the leading historian of country music, has written that the South prior to World War II was sufficiently conservative to encourage “the preservation of older values and institutions,” particularly a rich “folk culture.” Yet that folk culture, at least in its musical form, was always a “vigorous hybrid.” radio show in the United States.

The mix contained evangelical hymns and camp songs (first dubbed “gospel” music in 1875), African-American song styles —most notably the blues—outpourings of New York City’s Tin Pan Alley, whose professionals produced a variety of music wide enough to satisfy both Northern urbanites and Southern country folk. Most regional troubadours probably didn’t realize that such Southern favorites as “Old Dan Tucker,” “Listen to the Mockingbird,” and “Cotton-Eyed Joe” had been written by Northern minstrel troupes, or that sturdy American tunes like “Flop-Eared Mule,” “Fire on the Mountain,” and “Leather Breeches” had been born in Britain. Anthropologists in the 1920s were astounded to find “maverick” remnants of sixteenth-century English verse alive and fully integrated into regional music in the Southern Appalachians. In some cases whole songs, like the haunting ballad “Barbara Alien,” remained intact. Yet even these enthusiastic and knowledgeable students never appreciated the dynamic evolution of Southern country music. It was neither entirely authentic nor invented.

Thanks to technology—the phonograph and the radio - country music matured after World War I. At first record companies weren’t interested in rural sounds. But early radio producers were, and in the twenties radio fast outpaced the phonograph as a source of popular home entertainment. Between 1920—the first year of commercial broadcasting—and 1930, annual sales of radios jumped from $60 million to $842 million. At the close of the 1920s more than 12 million American households owned radio sets.

Because most stations then could reach only local audiences, their selection of music tended to be more democratic than the recording industry’s. Small stations carried local country talent from the beginning, and in 1922 the Atlanta Journal’s radio station, WSB, became the first high-power outlet to feature what Americans soon called “hillbilly music,” and for the first time millions of listeners heard authentic country talent like “Fiddlin’ John” Carson.

Following quickly on the heels of WSB’s coup, WBAP in Fort Worth invented the first-ever broadcast “barn dance,” a live country-music and talk program that proved immensely popular with Southern listeners. By the late 1920s WLS (Chicago) and WMS (Nashville) had perfected the form with “National Barn Dance” and “Grand Ole Opry,” two mainstays of American radio culture: “Barn Dance” ran for a quarter-century, and the “Opry” is with us still. By the 1940s “Grand Ole Opry” was perhaps the most admired radio show in the United States, with a cast of songsters and comedians that included Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Minnie Pearl, and “Uncle Dave” Macon. Like its Chicago counterpart, the “Opry” purveyed rural folk culture with an urban, commercial twist. After the 1920s that combination, more than anything else, would define the otherwise eclectic and diffuse art form that was country music.

The early success of hillbilly radio spurred the recording industry into action. While it’s not clear who the first country recording artist was, good money is on the duo of Alexander Campbell (“Eck”) Robertson, a fiddle player from Amarillo, Texas, and Henry Gilland, of Altus, Oklahoma, who on impulse traveled together to New York in June 1922 to cut a few tracks for Victor. The seminal moment in country recording came several years later, in August 1927, when a professional talent scout and producer, Ralph Peer, discovered and recorded modern country’s first two sensations, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.

Originally comprising Alvin Pleasant (“A.P.”) Carter, his wife, Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle, the Carters remained popular long after their joint singing career ended in the 1940s. Together they recorded over 300 songs for various labels. Their repertoire of new and traditional material, their trademark three-part harmony, and Maybelle’s unique thumb-brush method on lead guitar gained a wide following throughout the South. Long after hillbilly music had gone mainstream and invaded the North, so-called Carter Family songs, like “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “The Wabash Cannonball,” remained standard titles in the catalogues.

While the Carters gave the fledgling industry a down-home, family aura, Jimmie Rodgers, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, cultivated a somewhat different image as country music’s “singing brakeman.” He was the genre’s first self-styled rambling balladeer. In truth Rodgers’s railroad days were short-lived: He developed tuberculosis, which, coupled with his hard-living ways, drove him to an early grave in 1933. But in his few years of productive fame, his appealing blend of old and new music, his distinctive yodeling style, and his Western affectations brought him a level of renown unprecedented among country artists.

In the 1930s and early 1940s the evolving style that the Carters and Rodgers helped create became a national sensation, urged along by two unrelated phenomena: electrification and World War II.

Musicians and guitar makers had experimented with electrifying string instruments as early as the 1920s. The electric guitar made its country-music debut in Texas in 1934, and new models manufactured by Gibson, Rickenbacker, Bigsby, and Fender soon made it widely accessible to small-time musicians. In turn, electrification helped spur the decade’s “honky-tonk” sound, as small roadside bars throughout the Southwest featured a new form of country music that was both electrified and more rhythmic (so that customers could dance to it) than the usual hillbilly fare. These modern features helped make country more accessible to non-Southerners; World War II accelerated the process exponentially.

Since U.S. Army training camps were disproportionately located in Southern states, millions of Northern GIs heard their first licks of hillbilly music while sojourning in Dixie. Ferlin Husky, a popular country performer during the 1950s, recalled serving in the merchant marine with “lots of boys … who had never really heard country music before, and it was interesting to see how fast they acquired a taste for it.” So fast, it seems, that by 1945 GIs stationed in Munich, Germany, were debating the relative talents of Frank Sinatra and Roy Acuff. Well into the postwar period, the armed forces would continue to anchor the nation’s country-music obsession. In 1960 some 65 percent of all country record sales took place at base PX’s.

At the same time, war production catalyzed an exodus of Southern whites, and they took their music with them. In the 1950s the ABC Music Corporation, Chicago’s largest jukebox supplier, reported that of its 12 city routes, 2 were dominated by country music. The city’s largest record store, Hudson-Ross, found that in neighborhoods where Southern transplants were heavily concentrated, 30 percent of its sales volume was country and western. The trend had prompted Billboard to run headlines like HILLBILLY TUNES GAIN POPULARITY IN BALTIMORE, and HILLBILLY TUNES SCORE BIG HIT IN MOST DETROIT JUKES.

Country was also making considerable headway in California, thanks to the influx of Dust Bowl migrants during the 1930s and defense-industry workers in the 1940s. By 1945 a music writer in the state’s East Bay region could report, “It hasn’t been so many years since Hillbilly and Western programs were a real scarcity out here.... Boy, OH BOY, it’s a different story now! Turn the dial just any hour of the day and you’ll get a good old time program of OUR KIND of music.” Even in so unlikely a place as New York City, the country sound was coming into its own. In 1947 “Grand Ole Opry” staged a two-night performance at Carnegie Hall and grossed $9,000.

Already enjoying a national profile, country music continued to evolve in the 1950s and 1960s in much the same way it had originally ambled onto the airwaves and 78s in the 1920s: by melding tradition and commercialism. As home to the “Opry,” Nashville attracted considerable recording talent. In the 1950s the city gave birth to what was termed the “Nashville sound” or the Chet Atkins Compromise, a highly electrified pop-country blend, made wildly popular by rising talents like Atkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves, and Patsy Cline, the cowgirl sensation who always felt most comfortable with country music and never quite reconciled herself to performing pop hits like “Walking After Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces,” and “Crazy.”

The 1960s and 1970s saw this formula tempered but essentially left intact as country music—now electrified and rhythmic and spread to the North and West—set out to conquer television. Two of the first and most successful experiments in country television were “The Wilburn Brothers Show,” which helped propel Loretta Lynn to stardom, and “The Porter Wagoner Show,” which in 1967 provided a national stage for a young, blonde country-pop hopeful named Dolly Parton. As always, the music was in flux, but the country style remained so distinct and recognizable that many listeners confused new creations like “Tennessee Stud,” “The Long Black Veil,” and “The Battle of New Orleans” with traditional folk music.

Since the 1970s country stars from Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Kenny Rogers to Garth Brooks and Lyle Lovett have continued to merge old and new aesthetics in a way that appeals to an immense national audience. Like NASCAR, country music triumphed at the moment when the South itself began to modernize demographically and economically, so its ascendance is a mark of both Dixie’s triumph and its metamorphosis.

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