COUNTRY
The prehistory of country music, going back a few centuries to folk traditions of the rural southern United States, provides one of the most vivid examples of the symbiotic cultural relationship between Anglo-Americans (those coming from the British Isles) and African Americans. The banjo was an invention of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, with early forms used on plantations in North America by the eighteenth century (Conway 1995). In the early nineteenth century, whites began to play it, adding technical innovations to its construction. In the 1830s it was used in small minstrel troupes in a genre in which whites blackened their faces with burned cork and caricatured blacks by singing in exaggerated dialect. African Americans eventually dropped the banjo in favor of the guitar in the latter half of the nineteenth century, although a few have maintained banjo traditions to this day.
The fiddle, the other characteristic instrument in country music, was brought over from Europe, with an especially strong tradition from Scots-Irish immigrants (Ritchie and Orr 2016). While whites had picked up the banjo from blacks, the complementary process occurred with the fiddle, with some African Americans achieving a degree of local fame for their ability on the instrument. The fiddle, banjo, and guitar form the nucleus of string-band traditions (called old-time music) that were central in the rise of country music in the 1920s.
The first commercial recordings featured virtuoso fiddle-contest champions. Eck Robertson (1887–1975), born in Arkansas and raised in Texas, recorded four fiddle duets with Henry C. Gilliland (1845–1924), who was born in Missouri and grew up in Texas, for Victor in New York in June 1922.11 Robertson recorded solo (and with piano) the following day. Victor released two records from those sessions: “Sally Gooden” (Robertson solo) and “Arkansas Traveler” (duet with Gilliland) in 1922, and “Ragtime Annie” (Robertson solo) and “Turkey in the Straw” (duet with Gilliland) in 1923. They were the first country music recordings.
“Sally Gooden” is replete with a short-long rhythmic pair called a Scotch snap (at the end of every two bars), historically associated with Scottish language and fiddle music, which has filtered into a variety of American musics. Fiddlin’ John Carson (1868–1949), from Georgia, recorded “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” on portable recording equipment in Atlanta brought by Ralph Peer of Okeh Records, who was scouting talent in 1923. Carson played solo fiddle and sang along. He had played the previous year on Atlanta’s WSB radio, probably the first station to broadcast country music, but his success in this untapped market was extraordinary. The initial run of five hundred copies quickly sold out, and he would record over 120 sides for Okeh between 1923 and 1931 (and 24 more for Victor in 1934), opening up a new market that was initially called hillbilly in 1925. Billboard charts later used the term folk until it was replaced by country and western in 1949.
An important landmark in country music came when Ralph Peer visited Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927 to record local talent for Victor. The discovery there of singer-guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933), born in Mississippi, and the Carter Family (husband, A. P.; wife, Sara, and A. P.’s sister-in-law, Maybelle), from Virginia, yielded the first two major stars of country music, representing opposite poles of the spectrum (the road-wise traveler and the domestic family). The Carters recorded over 300 sides for several record labels from 1927 to 1941, and Maybelle’s daughter June would marry Johnny Cash, a major star who started out on Sun Records in 1955. Rodgers’s career was meteoric, recording over a hundred songs for Victor and selling more than most of Victor’s pop artists, but brief due to his early death just six years after his recording debut.
In the 1930s country expanded to include the westernmost southern states (Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas) and California, which drew in part on cowboy imagery and songs. The most successful artist was Gene Autry (1907–98) from northern Texas, who went to Hollywood in 1934 and made over ninety movies. Autry popularized the image of a cowboy who wielded both a gun and guitar. Honky-tonks, drinking establishments that featured music, dancing, and jukeboxes, became an important part of the landscape in the 1930s, especially in Texas, where oil attracted workers with cash to spend. Southwestern bands electrified in this environment and developed a style that after World War II became known as western swing.
In 1939 Nashville’s radio show Grand Ole Opry on WSM was picked up for national broadcast by NBC, making it the most visible face of country music. When Decca began recording country musicians there starting in 1946, Nashville would soon become the center of the country music world. Just after the war a virtuosic uptempo instrumental ensemble style called bluegrass surfaced in the hands of Kentucky mandolinist Bill Monroe and his band, including future stars Earl Scruggs (1924–2014) from North Carolina on banjo and Lester Flatt 1914–79) from Tennessee on guitar, and a fiddle and bass player. Their recordings from 1946 to 1947 for Columbia defined the style. Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was covered by Elvis Presley on his very first recording for Sun Records in 1954.
In the late 1940s Hank Williams (1923–53), from Alabama, emerged in a style known as honky tonk (named after the bars where the music was played). Williams’s recording career was short (similar to Rodgers), due to his early death at age twenty-nine in January 1953, but he had an enormous impact on the generations after him. Williams began recording professionally (on the Sterling label) in December 1946, and after recording eight songs (including “Honky Tonkin’”), he moved to MGM in April 1947, when he recorded “Move It on Over,” his first recording to register on a Billboard chart (country #4). The same session also yielded “I Saw the Light.” He recorded another version of “Honky Tonkin’” for MGM in November 1947 and remained with the label for the rest of his life, placing a total of thirty-eight records on the country charts through the year he died, all recorded in Nashville. He had seven #1 country hits during his lifetime, including “Hey Good Lookin’” (1951) and “Jambalaya” (1952), and another four the year he died, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” (1953). He crossed over into the pop charts only twice in his lifetime (“Lovesick Blues” and “Jambalaya”). After joining the Shreveport radio show Louisiana Hayride in 1948 and Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1949, Williams had become, by virtue of his singing and songwriting abilities, the most famous and most emulated country singer, even though he rarely broke into the pop charts. He averaged earnings of $200,000 per year from recordings and appearances the last few years of his life.
Williams’s clever songwriting was similar in some ways to that of Chuck Berry, the master craftsman of early rock and roll a decade later. “Move It on Over” (1947) and Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” (1955) both insert a verse-chorus structure into a single twelve-bar blues form: “Move it” has a four-bar verse and eight-bar chorus, and “Roll Over” has an eight-bar verse and four-bar chorus. Each time Williams sings the chorus, he slightly alters it: move, get, scoot, ease, drag, pack, tote, scratch, shake, slide, sneak, shove, and sweep, keeping listeners on their toes. The all-string ensemble, including a fiddle, and solos on the electric guitar and steel guitar exude a signature Nashville sound.
Kitty Wells (1919–2012), from Nashville, was country music’s first woman star, initially registering on the charts with the answer song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (country #1) in 1952. Between 1952 and 1965 she placed fifty-nine singles on the country charts, thirty-four of which hit the Top 10. After that she was still placing on the country charts, but only occasionally breaking