Mocked by some because her appearance typifies the gaudier aspects of country music, Dolly Parton has nonetheless endured as a country icon—and commercial success.
Country music covers a broad set of musical styles that have a recognisable history and identity. As a genre, it has enabled many artists to find an expressive voice that has affected (and continues to affect) millions. Singers and lyrics are very important in the country tradition: the great country songs tell a story, the great country singers seem to reveal to us their personal lives. Since its birth as a recorded form of music, country has been the “soul” music for the white American rural working class, giving its fans a shared vocabulary and a tradition on which they can depend. Unlike jazz, country music has not undergone any profound musical development in terms of harmony, melody, or rhythm. It is musically conservative partly because it is dominated by the requirements of popular singers, and partly because of the commercial requirements of the music industry. Commercial requirements, however, are never able to destroy the basic nature of country. Each time the industry seems to be losing touch with its constituency and drifting away from its roots, there are enough musicians waiting in the wings with an understanding of the power and importance of tradition to pull country music back onto its established course again.
Country music’s geographic cradle was the southern Appalachian region of Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. As the poor white families, or “hillbillies,” came from the mountains to the cities in search of work, they brought their music with them. Hillbilly music was a blend of such 19th-century forms as gospel, minstrel, and the old-time music of British-influenced string bands. Laments on love and loss were accompanied by the fiddle, and sometimes by the banjo and the dulcimer (a small stringed instrument played with light hammers). Early recordings by such artists as vaudeville banjoist Uncle Dave Macon and minstrel singer Emmett Miller—a “blackface” jazz singer whose style subsequently had a profound influence upon Jimmie RODGERS, Bob WILLS, and Hank WILLIAMS—demonstrate how deeply these sources run through country music.
However, it was not until the 1920s that country music consolidated its various strands into the genre we know today. It was at this time that the explosion in both record production and the establishment of local radio stations enabled the music to reach a much wider audience. In 1925, the radio station WSM began broadcasting the weekly country showcase, The Grand Ole Opry, out of the Tennessee state capital, Nashville. It proved to be a popular show, and thereby established that city as the heart, head, and soul of the country music industry.
The burgeoning radio exposure also alerted the U.S. record industry as a whole to country’s commercial potential. This led to what has become known as country’s “big bang” in 1927. Ralph Peer, a talent scout for the New Jersey-based Victor Records, discovered country music’s first prominent acts, Jimmie Rodgers and the CARTER FAMILY. Rodgers, an itinerant railroad worker, mixed the African-American blues of his native Mississippi with hillbilly yodelling, while the Carters blended the highland string band tradition with gospel and storytelling songs. Both acts were immediate sensations throughout the South, selling millions of records.
The hardship and unemployment caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s severely curtailed record sales of the styles newly popular among the American working classes—country for the whites and blues for African-Americans. However, despite the economic difficulties, country music’s stylistic development continued apace. As Americans escaped reality at the movies, the singing cowboy emerged as a film icon. Actors Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and many others sold records as well as movie tickets, changing country music to country and western in the process.
In Texas, an innovative fiddler named Bob Wills blended country with jazz and founded an exuberant new form which acquired the name “western swing.” Brother duets such as the Louvin Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, and the Blue Sky Boys also became popular, laying the foundation for harmony singing in country and bluegrass. And Tennessee’s Roy ACUFF became a country music star in 1937 with “The Great Speckled Bird,” a song that, true to country’s roots, combined mystical biblical allegory with a traditional English melody.
America’s entry into World War II in December 1941 profoundly altered U.S. popular culture as servicemen from far-flung corners of the country migrated to military bases, many of which were located in the South. The once regional phenomenon of country music found many new listeners as radio began a phase of rapid growth. And, by this time, Americans once again had money to spend on records. Roy Acuff and Texas singer Ernest TUBB were the prime beneficiaries of this surge in country’s popularity. Both became nationally known figures thanks to Nashville’s high-powered WSM radio station—Tubb as host of the Midnight Jamboree, and Acuff as a regular on country music’s premier performance showcase, The Grand Ole Opry.
Country continued to flourish during the period of postwar prosperity. In 1947, a young Alabama singer named Hank Williams vaulted to stardom with “Lovesick Blues” (a tune straight out of Emmett Miller’s repertoire). Williams would not only write a string of classic country songs during his career—including “You’re Cheatin’ Heart,” “Hey Good Lookin’,” “Jambalaya,” “Honky Tonk Blues”—but would permanently alter the vocabulary of the country lyric with pain-filled war reports from the battlefield of his troubled marriage.
The void left by Hank Williams’s death in 1953 was s quickly filled by a new generation of country singers | who followed his stylistic lead. This hard-livin’, hard-1 drinkin’, amplified style known as honky-tonk § (named after the sleazy dance halls where the music ^ was played) would serve as one of country music’s deepest and most enduring currents. New stars emerged, such as the plaintive Webb Pierce, the innovative Lefty Frizell, and George Jones, who would become country’s greatest male vocal stylist.
Old-time Appalachian string band music also enjoyed a popular revival from the late 1940s, thanks mainly to singer and mandolin player Bill MONROE. Monroe had been playing the Opry since the late 1930s, but it was not until Earl SCRUGGS and Lester Flatt joined Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in the mid-19405 that they perfected the sound of “bluegrass,” as the music came to be known. Monroe even created a permanent site for bluegrass shows on land he bought in Brown County, Indiana. The group’s acoustic instrumentation, tight harmony vocals, breakneck tempos, and stunning instrumentals spawned similar groups—for example, The Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs’s own Foggy Mountain Boys—and established bluegrass as a permanent feature of country music.
Mocked by some because her appearance typifies the gaudier aspects of country music, Dolly Parton has nonetheless endured as a country icon—and commercial success.
Today, bluegrass still acts as the quieter, older brother of mainstream country, providing an invaluable inspiration and cornerstone for country music as a whole, and continuing to evolve while keeping one foot squarely in the realm of tradition. In the late 1960s, progressive, or “newgrass,” bands such as the Country Gentlemen, and Old And In The Way (which included banjoist Andy Garcia, later of the renowned hippie-rock band, the Grateful Dead) introduced electric instruments, and rockier sounds to bluegrass.
Country music faced a threat to its popularity in 1955 when a handsome young Mississippi singer named Elvis PRESLEY recorded a radical version of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” for Sun Records. Elvis’s unique (and, as perceived at the time, bizarre) concoction of country and rhythm and blues, known as rockabilly, suddenly made country music sound very tame and old-fashioned in comparison. As country’s popularity began to wane in the face of rock’n’roll, the industry in Nashville made a conscious decision to change musical direction.
Studio producers Owen Bradley (at Decca) and Chet ATKINS (at Capitol) borrowed stylistic ideas from pop music, adding lush strings and large vocal choruses to recordings of artists such as Jim REEVES and Eddy Arnold. Country music had found its successful reply to rock’n’roll—although a good deal of what was known as the “Nashville sound” turned out to be middle-of-the-road schmaltz.
Patsy CLINE, however, was the exception that proved the rule. An unabashed honky-tonker with a magnificent voice, Cline might have seemed an unlikely candidate to benefit from such “sweetening” treatment (and Cline herself was initially very resistant to what she saw as a dilution of her sound), but Bradley’s production on her recordings proved to be nothing short of brilliant. Her performances on “I Fall to Pieces,” and the Willie NELSON song “Crazy,” made Cline the superstar of country music in the early 1960s, a reign cut short by her untimely death in a plane crash in 1963. Ever since, many young music lovers have been drawn by Cline in to a genre they otherwise may not have considered.
To every action, of course, there is usually a reaction. Many country fans who disliked the new—to them garish—sound of Nashville, found comfort in the stark, desperate music of Johnny CASH (another Sun Records artist), or with the easy-going Roger Miller, a consummate songwriter whose “King of the Road” was one of the biggest hits of the 1960s. And in Bakersfield, California, a new school of country was formed which emphasised the edgy electric twang of the honky-tonk. Bakersfield’s Buck Owens and the Buckaroos became one of the most popular country acts of the 1960s, and the so-called Bakersfield Scene also produced one of country’s finest singers and songwriters—Merle HAGGARD. Haggard’s consistently superb recordings during the late 1960s and early 1970s would provide inspiration for countless country acts that followed.
The 1960s also marked the arrival of women as a force in country music. Loretta LYNN, despite her impoverished background and unsophisticated vocal style, emerged as a homely feminist with such tunes as “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’“ and “The Pill.” Tammy WYNETTE, who would become George Jones’s wife and partner, rose to prominence with the decidedly unfeminist “Stand by Your Man.” And Dolly PARTON gained notoriety as a gifted young songwriter, eventually becoming one of country music’s most popular acts. Along with Parton, new country stars such as Glen Campbell, Mac Davis, Charley Rich, Kenny ROGERS, and even such non-country acts as John Denver, Olivia Newton-John, and Anne Murray, came to define country music in the 1970s.
The emphasis from Nashville was on making country music palatable to mainstream radio listeners, and many of the homely elements were discarded in the process. These middle-of-the-road pop and country hybrids found an audience as formerly rural country fans migrated to the suburbs of the new South, but the recordings sound embarrassingly trite in retrospect.
This dilution of country music once again produced a reaction, crystallising in a rebellious group of artists. Such longtime singers and writers as Waylon JENNINGS and Willie Nelson—who became known as “the outlaws”—worked outside the established Nashville power structure to make music that sported a leaner, harder sound than Nashville’s typically smooth, sanitised output. Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger album, a bestseller in 1975, marked the high point of the outlaw movement, and established the singer as a musical icon.
In 1980, a movie called Urban Cowboy kicked up another honky-tonk craze, but this time the music was a pale imitation of the real thing. Slickly produced work by the likes of Eddie Rabbit, Alabama, and Barbara Mandrell may have set the shiny boots of the suburban middle classes a-tappin’, but true country music fans did not succumb. In 1985, once that particular fad had evaporated, the New York Times went as far as pronouncing country music dead.
The death knell sounded by the Times turned out to be premature, as Nashville’s mid-1980s void was filled by such new traditionalists as Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, the Judds, and Ricky Skaggs; rebel visionaries like Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Lyle Lovett, and k. d. lang; and left-of-centre veterans like Emmylou HARRIS—who had risen to prominence in the 1970s as a partner to country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Far from the death of a genre, this uprising of talent contributed to one of the most artistically fertile periods in the history of country music.
Then, as the 1990s began, a former marketing student named Garth Brooks distilled the commercially viable elements of the new traditionalism, combined it with the radio-friendly styles of rock giant Bruce SPRINGSTEEN and singer-songwriter James Taylor, and created a multi-platinum selling monster. Suddenly, the industry was no longer content to groom the fine talent that was bubbling up. Nashville wanted the next Garth Brooks.
Commercial country music in the wake of Garth Brooks has become an unseemly (and, ironically, unsuccessful) combination of pop, rock, twang, and hokum. As sales have slumped, even industry insiders have begun to bemoan the blandness of country’s current acts.
Yet, there are stirrings that suggest the next renaissance may be on the horizon. It may come from honky-tonk: classic stylist Junior Brown thrives on the fringes of the industry. It may come from bluegrass: Alison Krauss, a young fiddle virtuoso with a gorgeous soprano voice, has emerged as one of country’s most distinctive new artists. It may come from the classic Nashville Sound: a teenager named Leann Rimes conquered the country and pop charts in 1996 with her Patsy Cline-like hit, “Blue.” Or it may even come from rock; many “alternative-country” bands have been drawing breath directly from the legacies of Gram Parsons, George Jones, and Hank Williams. One or more of these styles is likely to triumph commercially and once again save country music from its own excesses.
To the uninitiated listener, it is all too easy to pigeonhole country music as a hopelessly corny genre. In fact, as singer David Allen Coe once noted, “The perfect country and western song [must mention] Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk.” But country music’s vital link to its ancient American folk roots will always allow it, periodically, to draw fresh sap and continue to grow and change with the times.
Greg Bower
SEE ALSO:
BLUES; CAJUN; FOLK MUSIC; GOSPEL; JAZZ; NASHVILLE SOUND/NEW COUNTRY; POP MUSIC; POPULAR MUSIC; PRODUCERS; ROCK’N’ROLL; SOUL.
FURTHER READING
Allen, B., ed. The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Country Music (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994);
Bufwack, M. A., and R. K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music (New York: Henry Holt, 1995);
Dawidoff, Nicholas. In the Country of Country (London: Faber, 1997);
Tosches, N. Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock’n’Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996);
Vaughan, Andrew. The World of Country Music (London: Studio Editions, 1992).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Old-time country
The Louvin Brothers: Radio Favorites 1951–57.
New Country and other recent developments
Garth Brooks: No Fences;
Mary-Chapin Carpenter: Come On, Come On;
Steve Earle: Guitar Town;
Nanci Griffith: Once in a Very Blue Moon;
k. d. lang: Shadowland;
Lyle Lovett: The Road to Ensenada;
Randy Travis: Storms of Life.
Bluegrass (classic and “newgrass”)
Alison Krauss: I’ve Got That Old Feeling;
Various artists: The Country Gentlemen;
Mountain Music Bluegrass Style.