Nelson, Willie

(b. 1933) COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER.

Willie Hugh Nelson was born in Fort Worth, Tex., on 30 April 1933 and was reared in the little central Texas town of Abbott, where he was exposed to a wide variety of musical influences. He grew up singing gospel songs in the Baptist church but also played in honkytonks all over the state. Before he was a teenager, he began playing guitar in the German-Czech polka bands in the “Bohemian” communities of central Texas; he listened to the country music of Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, and Floyd Tillman, but he was also an avid fan of jazz and vintage pop music. All of these forms clearly influence the music he plays today.

Despite his skills as a guitarist and unorthodox singer (with his blues inflections and off-the-beat phrasing), Nelson’s ticket to Nashville came through his songwriting. In 1960 he moved to Nashville, where he became part of an important coterie of writers, which included Hank Cochran, Harlan Howard, and Roger Miller. Nelson made a major contribution to country music’s post–rock-and-roll revival with such songs as “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello, Walls,” “Night Life,” and “Crazy,” all of which were successfully recorded by other singers.

Recording for RCA Victor in the mid-1960s, Nelson became widely admired by his colleagues as a “singer’s singer,” but he did not achieve the stardom that he sought. In 1972 he relocated to Austin, Tex., where he became part of an already-thriving music scene that was strongly oriented toward youth who had grown up listening to rock and urban folk music. Nelson made a calculated attempt to appeal to this audience by changing his physical image: he let his hair grow long, grew a beard, and began wearing a headband, an earring, jeans, and jogging shoes (a striking contrast to the well-groomed, middle-class appearance he had affected during his Nashville years). He also publicized himself with his huge annual “picnics,” first held in Dripping Springs, Tex., in 1972 and 1973 and later staged in a variety of Texas communities, usually on the Fourth of July. These festivals were intended to bridge the gap between youth and adults, while bringing together varied lifestyles and musical forms. The picnics, however, soon lost their appeal to older people or to traditional country fans and instead became havens for uninhibited youth and for musicians who seemed most comfortable with a country-rock perspective.

Willie Nelson, country music singer, 1980s (Columbia Records, New York)

After winning the youth audience, Nelson then captured the adult market. In 1975 he recorded a best-selling album called The Red Headed Stranger, and one song from the album, Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” became the No. 1 country song of the year (it is ironic that the first superhit recorded by this master songwriter was a song written by someone else). Nelson’s ascent to superstardom and his building of a large and diverse audience were accomplished without significant departures from his traditional style. Indeed, his repertoire became even more traditional as he reached back to the performance of older gospel, country, and pop songs. No one in American music performed a more eclectic sampling of songs. He also preserved his unorthodox style of singing and sang over a rather spare and uncluttered scheme of instrumentation, which was dominated by his own inventive, single-string style of guitar playing.

Nelson has won many country music awards since the mid-1970s, including the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award in 1979, but his appeal has extended far beyond the country music world. Nelson has collaborated with a diverse array of stars from various genres of music, including Toby Keith, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Merle Haggard, and Paul Simon.

Nelson has received favorable reviews for his roles in several movies, such as The Electric Horseman (1979) and Wag the Dog (1997). Nelson also played Uncle Jesse in the 2005 cinematic remake of The Dukes of Hazzard. He has been feted constantly by the American media, and he has entertained often at political events, including the Democratic National Convention in 1980, during the Carter presidency. Few country singers have enjoyed such broad exposure. In addition to performance, Nelson has invested his energies in charity work, such as establishing the Farm Aid concert in 1985 and organizing a concert in 2005 for the victims of the Indian Ocean earthquake with UNICEF. Nelson continues to tour, and during breaks from touring he spends time at his Pedernales estate outside of Austin, Tex.

BILL C. MALONE
Madison, Wisconsin

Willie Nelson, The Facts of Life and Other Dirty Jokes (2002), Willie Nelson: Teatro (2001); Willie Nelson and Bud Shrake, Willie: An Autobiography (1992); Jan Reid, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (1974); Al Reinert, New York Times Magazine (26 March 1978); Clint Richmond, Willie Nelson: Behind the Music (2000); Lola Scobey, Willie Nelson (1982).

 

Neville Brothers

RHYTHM-AND-BLUES, SOUL, AND FUNK SINGERS.

The Neville brothers—Art, Aaron, Charles, and Cyril—are likely the best-known musical family to come out of New Orleans in recent decades. Both as individuals and as a group, they have made crucial contributions to several genres of popular music. Building on early careers in the fields of R&B and soul, the brothers were instrumental in defining the funk sound of the 1970s by reconnecting New Orleans music with its Caribbean and Afro-diasporic roots.

Art, Charles, and Aaron were born in 1937, 1938, and 1941, respectively. Music and dance were central in their upbringing. Although not a musician, their father, Arthur, was close to singer-guitarist Smiley Lewis, and their mother, Amelia, had performed in a dance team with her younger brother, George Landry. Known to his nephews by the nickname “Uncle Jolly,” Landry was a gifted piano player who, like their father, traveled the world as a merchant seaman.

As they grew up, Art learned to play barrelhouse-style piano, Aaron built his skills as a vocalist by singing gospel music, and Charles studied the saxophone. The brothers played in various groups, and by the time Cyril was born in 1948, Art was well on his way to making a name for himself in the local music scene. His group, the Hawketts, recorded a song called “Mardi Gras Mambo” for radio DJ Ken “Jack the Cat” Elliot. The record, released by Chess in 1954, was widely popular and quickly became an enduring staple of the Carnival season, although the performers saw none of the profits.

Charles, who also played with the Hawketts, dropped out of school at age 15 to tour as a tenor saxophone player with Gene Franklin’s House Rockers. R&B star Larry Williams took several of the brothers under his wing and, along with producer Harold Battiste (who ran the New Orleans office of L.A.-based Specialty Records), helped Art develop as a solo artist. He cut several sides for Specialty, including “Cha-Dooky-Doo” and “Ooh-Whee Baby,” before moving to the Instant label in 1962, where he had a local hit with the ballad “All These Things.”

Aaron began recording songs for local label Minit in 1960 and was working as a longshoreman when he had a hit record with the Allen Toussaint–produced ballad “Tell It Like It Is” in late 1966. The song showcased his impressive falsetto range and spent 17 weeks on the BillboardR&B charts, peaking at No. 1 and earning him a gold record in the early part of 1967. Unfortunately, this success overwhelmed the start-up independent Par-Lo record label, which soon folded. With few royalties arriving, Aaron went on the road, backed by his brother Art’s group, to exploit his hit record.

Art Neville and the Neville Sounds was a large group, which included, among others, Art, Aaron, and Cyril Neville on percussion and vocals. The group played regularly at the Nite Cap until 1967, when Art Neville and the rhythm section departed, forming a new four-piece group, which would become known as the Meters, releasing a string of albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Aaron, Cyril, and other remaining members formed another group, called the Soul Machine. Charles, meanwhile, had his musical career interrupted by a three-and-a-half-year stint in the state prison at Angola, after being arrested on minor drug charges. Upon release, he moved to New York City, where he found work playing with a white soul group, Tony Ferrar and the Band of Gold.

By 1976 George “Chief Jolly” Landry had become centrally involved in the city’s Mardi Gras Indian scene and teamed up with the four brothers in 1976 to record the Wild Tchoupitoulas album for Island Records. The effort marked the beginning of a new era in the brothers’ careers, with New Orleans Carnival and parade music becoming even more central than before. Soon afterward, they formed the Neville Brothers, which has been their musical home ever since.

After building their local reputation, the brothers secured a record deal with Capitol, releasing their eponymous debut in 1978. The eclectic album was poorly promoted, and the brothers soon moved to A&M Records, where they released Fiyo on the Bayou in 1981. They documented one of their frequent appearances at New Orleans bar Tipitina’s on 1984’s Live Nevillization and won a Grammy for their song “Healing Chant” from their 1989 album Yellow Moon. Through most of the 1990s, they continued to record for A&M, moving to Columbia late in the decade, where they released Valence Street in 1999.

MATT MILLER
Emory University

Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music since World War II (1986); Art Neville, Aaron Neville, Cyril Neville, and Charles Neville, The Brothers: An Autobiography (2000).

 

New Orleans Sound

New Orleans has played a central role in the development of American—and especially African American—popular music and dance styles. Although jazz remains its most famous product, the city has made key contributions to rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, funk, and rap. Within the context of the United States, New Orleans’s uniquely diverse and layered history of cultural intermixture has helped the city to maintain a central presence in the national popular music culture, even as it remains on the margins of the corporate music industry.

Settled by the French in 1718, Louisiana depended heavily upon enslaved black labor, which in its early decades was extracted largely from the Senegambia region. A high level of cultural cohesion and continuity among these slaves, combined with the relatively tolerant attitude of the French, contributed to the continuation and adaptation of West African–originated cultural practices in musical and other contexts, which in turn significantly influenced the development of a creolized culture in the colony generally.

The numbers of slaves and free blacks grew under a brief period of Spanish control and were augmented by refugees from the revolutions in San Domingo and Cuba. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the beginning of American control, the city became an important commercial center heavily invested in the slave trade. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, large numbers of enslaved and free blacks from New Orleans and its hinterlands regularly gathered in city markets to buy and sell produce and to engage in a variety of leisure activities, including music and dance. The most famous of these was a large field off of Rampart Street, which became known as Congo Square. The gatherings there had largely ended by the Civil War, but their mythic reputation as a manifestation of African-originated cultural practices has persisted.

The assumption of control by the United States introduced several important changes. The full implementation of a more restrictive Anglo-Protestant approach to race and social control would take more than a century, but an influx of English-speaking Americans began to alter the character of the city almost immediately. Blacks from the surrounding Delta region flowed into the city, their numbers surging after the Civil War and Emancipation. These migrants generally settled in the less desirable parts of the Uptown area, upriver from the French Quarter; French-speaking blacks remained tied to an area down-river called Downtown, which included neighborhoods like Faubourg Tremé. The French-speaking blacks enjoyed traditions of education, mutual aid, and formal musical instruction, but the American blacks brought with them a more rural musical sensibility rooted in blues and string band music. The interaction of these two distinct but compatible musical traditions formed the basis for the emergence of jazz in the final decades of the 19th century.

Charles “Buddy” Bolden, a black barber, cornetist, and bandleader from Uptown, is widely credited with the introduction of jazz as it is generally understood—highly syncopated ensemble dance music in which improvisation plays a central role. Bolden failed to reap the full rewards of what he had introduced in the 1890s—he never recorded and retired from playing relatively early—but his efforts laid the groundwork for the development of a new direction in New Orleans music. Like many of his contemporaries, Bolden was able to draw from a rich array of environmental musical influences that existed in New Orleans, which ranged from military bands to the cries of street vendors hawking their wares.

Jazz developed in diverse forms and contexts. Building upon the rag-time genre, piano players like Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton entertained patrons with propulsive dance music in various establishments of the Storyville tenderloin district, which operated legally between 1897 and 1917. Other venues—including barrooms, ballrooms, steamboat excursion rides, dances of all kinds, and outdoor gatherings—called for larger and louder music, and the city soon saw the proliferation of the five- to seven-piece ensemble groups playing “hot” jazz music characterized by chaotic-seeming collective improvisation.

By the time the secretary of the navy ordered the closing of Storyville in 1917, jazz was already being disseminated throughout the country. River towns like Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago were a natural destination for New Orleans musicians, and several established themselves in New York. Some players, like the early cornet innovator Bunk Johnson, remained in the Gulf South, while others, like Joseph “King” Oliver and, later, his young protégé Louis Armstrong, struck out for greener pastures upriver. Chicago became a home away from home for many New Orleans musicians, who by leaving their native city avoided some of the effects of Jim Crow segregation.

In the closing decades of the 1800s, large numbers of Italians and Irish had immigrated to New Orleans, and these groups also contributed to the ranks of early jazz artists and audiences. The first band to make a jazz recording was the white Nick LaRocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz band in 1917, which produced the first million-seller for RCA Victor. Other important figures in the development of New Orleans jazz in the 1910s and 1920s include cornetist Freddie Keppard, clarinetist Sidney Bechet, and bandleader George Vital “Papa Jack” Laine.

The combined effects of the Depression and World War II severely curtailed the ability of New Orleans musicians to record, although a vital vernacular music culture persisted. The city’s Carnival (the largest in the United States) has helped to foster a collective musical sensibility and has presented opportunities for celebration, self-expression, and the occupation of public spaces, which blacks rarely failed to exploit. So-called Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs and Carnival societies like the Zulus hire brass bands for members’ funerals, which often feature the now-familiar mixture of somber music on the way to the graveyard followed by celebratory and expressive dance music after interment. In a tradition that dates back to the 19th century, parades with brass bands are usually accompanied by a “second line,” an informal contingent of spectator-participants who dance and accompany the band on percussion instruments, including tambourines, glass bottles, and other improvised materials. Musical techniques derived from street parade music have formed a crucial component of the city’s distinctive musical sensibility over the last century.

The music of the Mardi Gras Indians—groups of working-class blacks organized along neighborhood lines who parade in elaborate Native American–inspired costumes during Carnival season—has also exercised significant influence over popular music forms emanating from New Orleans in the last century. The rehearsals and public appearances of these groups are characterized by music making that relies heavily upon percussion ensemble and the collective performance of chanted lyrics in a call-and-response format.

During the postwar years, a thriving music scene developed again in New Orleans, now based around a genre known as rhythm and blues, or R&B. Bands led by Roy Brown and Dave Bartholomew were among the top acts in the city during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Working with California-based Imperial Records in the 1950s, Bartholomew produced a string of national hits for the amiable piano player and singer Antoine “Fats” Domino, who remains one of the most popular artists to emerge from New Orleans in any time period. A host of other talented R&B artists came out of the city in these years, including Smiley Lewis, Jewel King, Lloyd Price, and the teen piano sensation James Booker, among others. In the 1950s, L.A.-based labels like Imperial and Specialty Records mined the New Orleans scene for marketable talent and also sent performers there to record with expert musicians and arrangers.

The city’s relationship with the emerging rock-and-roll genre was relatively brief but crucial in terms of the influence that New Orleans–based studio musicians, like drummer Earl Palmer and saxophone player Alvin “Red” Tyler, exercised over the developing rhythmic sensibility of the genre. With artists like Huey “Piano” Smith, Jimmy Clanton, and others, Ace Records released many pioneers of the style and drew “Little” Richard Penniman to the city, where he made his early recordings in 1955 and 1956 and hired the band the Upsetters to back him on the road.

The Dew Drop Inn, a combination bar and hotel where the city’s top black performers and sidemen shared the stage with female impersonators and burlesque dancers, was a musical hot spot during these years, along with other clubs like the TiaJuana and the Caldonia. Among the many talented performers from this period, Roy “Professor Longhair” Byrd is one of the most celebrated, although he was only moderately successful during his peak of recording activity in the 1950s. Longhair flavored his barrelhouse piano style with Caribbean accents and bouncing left-hand rhythms, producing a style that, for many, would come to represent the city’s musical identity.

During the 1960s New Orleans was the home of a thriving independent music scene, with producers like Wardell Quezergue and Allen Toussaint frequently using Cosimo Matassa’s recording facilities and studio band. Nothing can quite match the success of Fats Domino in the 1950s, but the 1960s saw a string of national hits emerge from the city by the likes of Chris Kenner, Robert Parker, the Dixie Cups, Johnny Adams, and Irma Thomas, among others. The city’s musical reputation attracted international stars like Paul McCartney and Robert Palmer, who both recorded there during the mid-1970s.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, New Orleans–based artists like the Meters and Dr. John increasingly began to draw inspiration from the parade and Carnival traditions of the city. Aided by the inauguration of the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival, the city experienced an R&B revival of sorts in the 1970s, reviving the career of Professor Longhair, among others. Other dimensions of the city’s musical heritage also reached wider audiences: several Mardi Gras Indian groups released albums during the 1970s, and the brass band form began a revival, with groups like the Dirty Dozen, which broke new ground by infusing the form with a swinging funkiness. Groups like Re-Birth, the Hot 8, and others continue to produce some of the most compelling and propulsive brass band music to be heard anywhere in the United States.

The city’s musical distinctiveness continued into the rap era. A dance-oriented style called “bounce” took over the local market in the early 1990s and by the end of that decade had helped to propel artists like Juvenile into the national spotlight. However, the Katrina disaster of 2005 severely disrupted the deeply rooted traditions and cultural practices of working-class and poor black communities, a loss that will doubtlessly affect the ability of New Orleans to produce innovative forms of dance music in the future.

MATT MILLER
Emory University

Danny Barker, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville, ed. Alyn Shipton (1998); John Broven, Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans (1988); Court Carney, Popular Music in Society (2006); Jeff Hannusch, I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues (1985); Curtis D. Jerde, Black Music Research Journal (Spring 1990); Jerah Johnson, Louisiana History (Spring 1991), Popular Music (April 2000); Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, eds., Jazzmen (1939); Michael P. Smith, Black Music Research Journal (Spring 1994); Alexander Stewart, Popular Music (October 2000).

 

Oliver, King

(1885–1938) JAZZ MUSICIAN.

Joseph “King” Oliver was born in or near New Orleans and became an early black jazz cornetist and bandleader. By 1900 he was playing cornet in a youthful parade band. From 1905 to 1915 Oliver became a prominent figure in various brass and dance bands and with small groups in bars and cafés. He soon gained the title “King” in competition with other leading local cornetists. In 1918 he joined a New Orleans band playing in Chicago, and by 1920 he was leading his own group there. He toured with this band in California in 1921 and, returning to Chicago the next year, enlarged it as King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. This handpicked ensemble boasted some of New Orleans’s best black instrumentalists, including Johnny and “Baby” Dodds (clarinet and drums, respectively) and Oliver’s brilliant young protégé, Louis Armstrong (second cornet). The Creole Band’s beautifully drilled performances at Chicago’s Lincoln Gardens and its tour through the Midwest created a sensation among northern musicians, and in 1923 it made the most extensive series of recordings (some three dozen) of any early jazz band.

When several members, including Armstrong, left the band in late 1924, Oliver formed a new, larger dance orchestra with saxophones, called the Dixie Syncopators. This sporadically successful orchestra, with changing personnel, played in Chicago from 1925 to 1927 and at New York’s Savoy Ballroom in 1927. Between 1926 and 1928 the orchestra made a number of recordings of uneven quality, though a few were popular hits. By 1930 Oliver’s career as a soloist had ended. From 1930 to 1936 he led a succession of small orchestras across the country, though a severe dental condition prevented him from playing. After 1936 he lived in Savannah, with an ailing heart, and spent his last year there running a fruit stand and working as a janitor in a pool hall. He died on 8 April 1938.

One of the foremost first-generation New Orleans jazz cornetists, Oliver was a central figure in the transfer of rag-time and of the black blues and gospel song from nearby rural areas to the New Orleans urban band tradition. The recordings of his Creole Jazz Band are the best and most extensive documentation of how vocal blues and instrumental ragtime were fused by emerging jazz bands into a new music of distinctively black southern origins.

JOHN JOYCE
Tulane University

Ray Bisso, Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver (2001); Lawrence Gushee, in Jazz Panorama, ed. Martin Williams (1962); Frederic Ramsey Jr., in Jazzmen, ed. Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles E. Smith (1939); Martin Williams, King Oliver (1960).

 

OutKast

RAP GROUP.

The Atlanta-based rap duo known as OutKast—composed of Andre Benjamin (known as “Dre” and, after 1999, “Andre 3000”) and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton—is one of the most successful southern rap groups and has been instrumental in focusing national attention on the “Dirty South,” the burgeoning rap music scenes and industry in Atlanta and other major southern cities. The duo has produced a series of singles and albums that have earned widespread critical acclaim, with each successive effort reaching wider audiences, and has built a reputation for eclectic and experimental rap and pop music, which nevertheless remains grounded in the environs, experiences, and cultural values of black, working-class urban southerners.

The two aspiring rappers began their collaboration while students at Tri-Cities High School in the East Point area of Southwest Atlanta, finding common ground in a preference for sharp dressing and New York rap groups like A Tribe Called Quest. Their recording career began in 1994, when they auditioned for producer Rico Wade, who worked out of his unfinished basement (called “the Dungeon”) as part of a production team known as Organized Noize. After recording the 17-year-old rappers in the Dungeon, Wade soon secured a deal for them with LaFace Records, an Arista-backed company operated by Antonio “LA” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, known primarily for R&B groups like TLC and Xscape.

Their first single, “Player’s Ball,” was a Christmas song set in the context of Atlanta’s “player” culture and spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard rap charts in 1993. Their debut album, 1994’s Southernplayalisticadillacmusik, featured richly textured production that was slower than most southern rap of the time and lyrics that, although still strongly oriented toward the spaces and culture of black Atlantans, rejected the hook-based approach of many southern bass rappers in favor of more complexly rendered themes and vocal performances. The album sold more than a million copies, reaching the Top 20 on the Billboard album charts and earning the group the “best new artist of the year award” from Source magazine in 1995.

In the 1996 release ATLiens, Patton and Benjamin ventured into production, efforts that resulted in the hit song “Elevators (Me and You).” The album met with widespread critical and commercial acclaim, selling more than a million and a half copies. The pair solidified their creative control by producing most of the songs on their next album, 1998’s Aquemini, which reached sales of 2.5 million copies. The album’s hit song, “Rosa Parks,” provoked a lawsuit by the song’s namesake and civil rights–era legend, which was eventually settled in the group’s favor.

The 2000 album Stankonia was a tour de force for OutKast and its label LaFace. The album sold five million copies and broke new ground as the first all-rap record to contend for the prestigious “Album of the Year” award at the Grammy awards. “Ms. Jackson” became the duo’s first No. 1 pop single, and the album won two Grammy awards out of five nominations. Subsequently, they toured as the opening act for hip-hop singer Lauryn Hill, using a live backup band and cementing their position as representatives of hip-hop music’s creative vanguard.

Following the release of Stankonia, the pair started their own record label, Aquemini Records, and in mid-2001 (a year that also saw the introduction of another venture, OutKast Clothing) Aquemini released its first record, by rapper Slimm Calhoun. OutKast released Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2003, which proved to be an enormous commercial, critical, and crossover success, earning the duo three Grammy awards, including “Album of the Year.” The album produced two hit singles, “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move.” Beginning in 2004, the pair further diversified by coproducing and starring in the $27 million film production Idle-wild, which, along with an accompanying sound track album composed by the group, was released in 2006.

OutKast’s career both contributed to and benefited from the emergence and subsequent development of Atlanta as the Southeast’s rap music capital. Hailed in Source as “the country’s newest and hottest hip-hop center” in 1994, by 2002 rap music was estimated to contribute half a billion dollars to Atlanta’s economy. Over the course of the last decade, artists and labels from the city have increasingly dominated the “Dirty South” movement, which has helped the South move from a rap music backwater to a national center of rap music production. With a career that now has run for more than a decade, OutKast remains central to Atlanta’s reputation as a center for innovative and compelling interpretations of the rap form.

MATT MILLER
Emory University

Chris Nickson, Hey Ya! The Unauthorized Biography of Outkast (2004); Roni Sarig, Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing (2007).

 

Parsons, Gram

(1946–1973) ROCK SINGER.

Born 5 November 1946 in Winter-haven, Fla., Gram Parsons was one of the most influential popular musicians of his generation. As a teenager, a devoted follower of Elvis Presley, Parsons performed with rock-and-roll bands from 1959 until 1963, when he joined an urban folk music group, the Shilos. After briefly attending Harvard in 1965, he joined the International Submarine Band and began drawing upon his southern background in an early attempt to synthesize country and rock. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Parsons devoted himself to what he called “cosmic American music”—essentially a dynamic combination of southern-derived styles with a solid country core.

The International Submarine Band dissolved in 1967, just prior to the release of Safe at Home, arguably the first complete country-rock album. In 1968 Parsons joined the popular folk-rock group the Byrds and, in tandem with longtime member Chris Hillman, led the band in the direction of country music. The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, released in 1969, was a landmark in the evolution of country rock. It also featured one of Parsons’s finest compositions, “Hickory Wind,” an evocative tribute to his southern childhood. Parsons and Hillman went on to organize what became the definitive country-rock band, the Flying Burrito Brothers. As a Burrito, Parsons began to deepen his vision of the South, which had first emerged with “Hickory Wind.” In his songs as well as his lifestyle, Parsons often portrayed himself as a southern country boy set adrift in the contemporary urban maelstrom. His finest song, “Sin City” (1969), was the classic statement of this theme.

After leaving the Burritos in 1970, Parsons produced little significant work until the release of his first solo album, GP, in 1973. The album featured Emmylou Harris on vocals and confirmed his mastery of the country-rock idiom. Throughout the album, the South was portrayed as an almost mythical land of stability and steadfastness.

On 19 September 1973, Gram Parsons died in Joshua Tree, Calif. An autopsy was inconclusive as to the cause of death. Several posthumous works, including Grievous Angel (1974), Sleepless Nights(1976), and Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels—Live 1973 (1982), attest to his exceptional gifts as a singer and songwriter. Much of his work continues to inform contemporary popular music, especially in the country field. The principal carrier of his legacy since his death has been his former partner, Emmylou Harris.

STEPHEN R. TUCKER
Tulane University

Richard Cusick, Goldmine (September 1982); Ben Fong-Torres, Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons (1998); Sid Griffin, Nashville Gazette (April–June 1980); Judson Klinger and Greg Mitchell, Craw-daddy (October 1976); Jason Walker, God’s Own Singer: A Life of Gram Parsons (2002).

 

Parton, Dolly

(b. 1946) ENTERTAINER.

Dolly Parton is often described as a contemporary “Cinderella,” a fairy tale princess, or a country gypsy—a platinum blonde heroine who escapes poverty in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, achieves fame and fortune in Nashville and later Hollywood, and lives happily ever after. More realistically, she is a talented and creative artist and businesswoman.

Dolly Parton was born in Locust Ridge in Sevier County, Tenn., the fourth of twelve children, to Avie Lee Owens and Randy Parton. Her grandfather Owens was a minister, and her early life with family and community centered around religion and the church. She learned to love storytelling, music, and singing, as well as to adhere to a rigid Christian moral code. Her mother sang the traditional folk songs she had learned from a harmonica-playing Grandmother Owens. By the time she was five years old Parton was imagining lyrics and tunes, and by the time she was seven she had written her first song. An exceptionally intelligent child, Dolly Parton used the rich southern folk environment surrounding her to create poetry and music.

She began her singing career as a child on the Cas Walker Radio Show, broadcast from Knoxville, and she released her first record, “Puppy Love,” in her early teens. At 18, after she graduated from high school, she moved to Nashville, and, despite a difficult beginning, which she describes in her song “Down on Music Row” (1973), she became a popular recording and television partner for country artist Porter Wagoner. Together, they recorded 13 albums and won awards for Vocal Duo of the Year in 1968, 1970, and 1971. In 1967 Dolly Parton released her first solo album. She has recorded over 30 albums for Monument and RCA. She has written and recorded hundreds of her own compositions, which are usually autobiographical songs, work songs, or sentimental, moralistic ballads, often sung in a traditional country style reminiscent of the Carter Family, an authentic southern folk group that was among the first to record country music during the early 20th century.

Based upon Billboard’s year-end hit charts, among her most successful singles have been “Mule Skinner Blues” (1970), “Joshua” (1971), “Jolene” (1974), “I Will Always Love You” (1974), “The Seeker” (1975), “All I Can Do” (1976), “Here You Come Again” (1978), “Heart-breaker” (1978), “Two Doors Down” (1978), “You’re the Only One” (1979), “Baby, I’m Burning” (1979), “Starting Over Again” (1980), “But You Know I Love You” (1981), and “Islands in the Stream,” a duet with Kenny Rogers (1983). She was Female Vocalist of the Year in 1975 and 1976 and was the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year in 1978. In 1980 Billboard listed her among the top female artists in country music and Dolly, Dolly, Dolly and 9 to 5 among the top albums.

Dolly Parton, country music singer and actress, 1987 (Columbia Records, New York)

Dolly Parton achieved celebrity status by appealing to both country and pop music audiences and by entering the fields of television, film, and freelance writing. She has been featured in numerous periodicals and has appeared on the cover of Playboy (1978), the Saturday Evening Post (1979), Parade (1980), and Rolling Stone (1980). In 1976 she became the first woman in country music history to acquire her own syndicated television show, and she has since starred in several films, 9 to 5 (1981), The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), Rhinestone (1984), Steel Magnolias (1989), and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005). She published a book of poems titled Just the Way I Am (edited by Susan P. Shultz, 1979), wrote a novel, Wild Flowers, and published an autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994). Parton and Herchend Enterprises in 1986 opened Dollywood, a theme park based on Parton’s life and located at Pigeon Forge, Tenn. It remains among the most popular vacation destinations in the South. She has also donated more than one million books to preschool children across the United States, and she provides scholarships to high school students in Sevier County, Tenn. In return, the county honored her with a life-size statue in front of the courthouse.

Parton has received numerous awards. She has received seven Grammy awards—and garnered 42 nominations—and 10 awards from the Country Music Association—with 42 nominations. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984. Parton was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999. That same year she joined with independent label Sugar Hill Records to create the acoustic album The Grass Is Blue. An instant favorite among critics and longtime fans, it won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s album of the year and a Grammy for best bluegrass album. She followed it with Little Sparrow in 2001 and Halos & Horns in 2002. The patriotic For God and Country appeared in 2003 and was followed by the CD and DVDLive and Well a year later. Those Were the Days from 2005 found Parton covering her favorite pop songs from the 1960s and 1970s. She has received two Academy Award nominations, first for “9 to 5,” which appeared in the film by the same name in 1982, and then in 2006 for her song “Travelin’ Thru,” which she wrote specifically for the film Transamerica. Parton was awarded the Living Legend medal by the U.S. Library of Congress on 14 April 2004 for her contributions to the cultural heritage of the United States. This was followed in 2005 with the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given by the U.S. government for excellence in the arts.

Dolly Parton has demonstrated the strength of a southern cultural and musical background, and she retains a loyalty to her home place and her people. The lyrics she writes in songs like “Jolene,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” and “Coat of Many Colors” portray strong women who hail from the working-class South. Moreover, in film, television, and music, Parton herself is a country woman with stamina, intelligence, independence, and a sense of humor. She has popularized the idea that mountain women in particular are not the stereotypical hillbillies viewed in comic strips or popular situation comedies, but rather are complex, intelligent, articulate, and loving. Dolly Parton’s music and personality will have a lasting impact upon popular images of women in the South.

RUTH A. BANES
University of South Florida

Chet Flippo, Rolling Stone (December 1980); Alanna Nash, Dolly (1978); Dolly Parton, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994); Playboy (October 1978); Cecelia Tichi, ed., Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars (1998); Vertical files on “Dolly Parton,” Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Nashville, Tenn.

 

Patton, Charley

(c. 1891–1934) BLUES SINGER.

Few people have had as great an impact on American music as has Charley Patton. Not only was Patton the first superstar of the blues, but many other forms of music today, such as gospel, R&B, soul, and, most particularly, rock and roll, were directly influenced by his work.

Charley was born to Bill and Annie Patton around 1891 near the central Mississippi towns of Bolton and Edwards. At an early age he had a predilection for making music, and he learned to play the guitar when still very young. But Charley grew up in a hard-working and religious farming family, and his father considered playing the guitar a sin tantamount to selling one’s soul to the devil. His father often disciplined him for playing music, but Charley continued performing ragtime, folk songs, and spirituals at picnics and parties in Henderson Chatmon’s string band, most likely for all-black audiences at first and then for whites who could afford to pay better.

In 1897, seeking to capitalize on the economic opportunities that the Mississippi Delta had begun to offer planters and day laborers, Bill Patton packed up his family and relocated north to Will Dockery’s farm. It was at Dockery Farms that Charley invested his musical ability in the burgeoning blues. A number of guitar players already lived there, and Charley began to study the raw and rhythmic blues-playing technique of Henry Sloan, eventually crafting an extraordinarily inventive style of his own, which incorporated hitting heavy bass notes and playing slide guitar with a knife.

In the 22 years that followed his arrival at Dockery Farms, Charley never completely disavowed his religious upbringing. He continually vacillated between the roles of hard-drinking, womanizing rambler and god-fearing preacher. The rambling bluesman in him won out most often, but even then he stayed relatively close to home, never traveling farther than western Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, or northeastern Louisiana to play gigs. While in Jackson, Miss., in the summer of 1927, Henry C. Spier, a white music-store owner, arranged for Charley to go to Richmond, Ind., to record. Charley spent June 14 in a Gennett Records recording studio recording 14 songs. That recording session produced some of his most celebrated work, including “Pea Vine Blues,” “Tom Rushen Blues,” and “Pony Blues,” the latter becoming an immediate “race record” hit. Later in that year, Charley traveled to Grafton, Wis., to record again, this time with fellow Deltaresident bluesman and fiddler Henry “Son” Sims. He recorded several more times, and his last recording session took place in New York City in January 1934.

Ever the Delta performer, Charley sang and recorded songs that included people, places, and events in his community. “Tom Rushen Blues” bemoans the possibility of a friendly sheriff losing his office to one not so amenable to public drunkenness: “Laid down last night, hopin’ I would have my peace / I laid down last night, hopin’ I would have my peace / But when I woke up Tom Rushen was shakin’ me.” In “Green River Blues” he sings “I’m goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog,” the junction of the Southern (Yazoo) and the Dog (Mississippi Valley) railroad lines, which lay just a few miles south of Dockery Farms, and in “Pea Vine Blues” he sings about a lover leaving on a train that ran to and from Dockery: “I think I heard the Pea Vine when it blowed. / I think I heard the Pea Vine when it blowed. / It blow just like my rider gettin’ on board.” In “High Water Everywhere (Pts. 1 & 2)” Charley sings about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, a flood that devastated much of the region: “Look-a here the water now, Lordy, / Levee broke, rose most everywhere / The water at Greenville and Leland, / Lord, it done rose everywhere / Boy, you can’t never stay here / I would go down to Rosedale, / but, they tell me there’s water there.”

Over his short yet illustrious recording career, Charley recorded a variety of songs, including blues, which he sang in a loud, rough voice (much of which was nearly incomprehensible), and religious songs such as “You Gonna Need Some body When You Die” (recorded under the pseudonym Elder J. J. Hadley), “Oh Death,” and “I Shall Not Be Moved.” His recordings earned him much widespread recognition, but his impact on American music stems primarily from those with whom he played, like Tommy Johnson, Son House, Big Joe Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. Bukka White once said his ambition in life was “to be a great man—like Charley Patton.” Other blues musicians copied his style, and it can be reasonably argued that every rock and roller has been influenced by his style and music, whether consciously or not. His influence extends further than blues and rock and roll, though. Gospel patriarch Roebuck Staples, who also grew up on Dockery Farms, once said of Charley, “He was one of my great persons that inspired me to play guitar. He was a really great man.”

Known today as the “Father of Delta Blues,” Charley Patton died at 350 Heathman Street, in Indianola, Miss., on 28 April 1934, shortly after returning from his final recording session.

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.
University of Mississippi

Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (1995); David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in Folk Blues (1982), Blues World (August 1970); Gérard Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues (1997); Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music (1977); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981); Gayle Dean Wardlow, Blues Unlimited (February 1966); Gayle Dean Wardlow and Edward M. Komara, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues (1998).

 

Pearl, Minnie

(1912–1996) COMIC FIGURE.

Minnie Pearl, the stage character created and performed by Sarah Colley, was one of the most popular and beloved performers in country music. Born on 25 October 1912 to a prominent family in Centerville, Tenn., Colley graduated from one of the South’s premier women’s schools, Nashville’s Ward-Belmont, and aspired afterward to a theatrical career. In 1934 she began work for the Sewell Production Company, which organized dramatic and musical shows in small towns across the South. Colley became director of the company, and while promoting a play in Sand Mountain, Ala., she met a woman who became the model for her later comic creation. The hill country woman told her wry stories that reflected a humorous outlook on life, which appealed to Colley, who was soon repeating the stories and emulating the woman’s temperament in creating the character of Minnie Pearl.

Minnie Pearl impressed audiences with her look. She wore a checked gingham dress, with cotton stockings, simple shoes, and most notably a straw hat with silk feathers and a dangling $1.98 price tag. “Howdeeee! I’m jest so proud to be here,” Pearl screamed as she came on stage, and audiences soon learned to deliver the friendly greeting “Howdeee” back at her. She told stories and gossip of the fictional Grinder’s Switch, which Colley based on the small-town doings of Centerville. Her routines revolved around her relatives and the towns people, such as Uncle Nabob, Brother, Aunt Ambrosia, Doc Payne, Lizzie Tinkum, and Hezzie—Minnie’s somewhat slow-witted yet marriage-evasive “feller.”

Minnie Pearl first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in 1940 and would be a fixture on the show for 50 years. She was a regular on the television series Hee Haw from 1969 to 1991 and later appeared often on the cable television talk show, Nashville Now, with Ralph Emery. In 1975 she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Colley, who married pilot and businessman Henry Cannon in 1947, was a far cry from the simple country girl of her alter ego. She was a gracious embodiment of Nashville’s gentrified society and active in numerous humanitarian causes. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she became a public spokes-woman in the 1990s for prevention and treatment of the disease, and the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, and the Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation all honor her philanthropic work.

Colley died on 3 March 1996 after suffering a stroke, but the memory of her character, Minnie Pearl, survives as one of the South’s most memorable comic figures.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
University of Mississippi

Minnie Pearl, Minnie Pearl: An Autobiography (1980).

 

Peer, Ralph

(1892–1960) MUSIC PUBLISHER AND TALENT SCOUT.

Although he was born in Kansas City, Mo. (on 22 May 1892), and although he never expressed a great fondness for southern folk music, Ralph Sylvester Peer became the single most important entrepreneur for country and blues recordings. He discovered, or was instrumental in the careers of, dozens of southern artists, both black and white, including Louis Armstrong, the Memphis Jug Band, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Mamie Smith, the Georgia Yellow Hammers, Fiddlin’ John Carson, Ernest Stoneman, Grayson and Whitter (with their initial recording of the murder ballad “Tom Dooley”), the Rev. J. M. Gates (one of the first black preachers to record extensively), the Rev. Andrew Jenkins (a prolific “event song” composer of items like “The Death of Floyd Collins”), and Gene Autry (who began as an imitator of Jimmie Rodgers). He initiated the practice of bringing recording crews into the South to document black and white folk music; he created the idea of having “blues” and “hillbilly” numerical series on commercial phonograph records; he was one of the first to publish and copyright country and blues songs; and in the 1930s and 1940s he became an innovative and trend-setting publisher of international reputation.

Peer’s father was a Columbia Record Company phonograph dealer in Independence, Mo., and by the time he was 20, Ralph Peer was working full time in the retail record business. By 1920 he was in New York working for the Okeh Record Company (actually the General Phonograph Corporation), then one of the smaller of the record companies and one looking for ways to get an edge on its bigger competitors. It found one, when on 10 August 1920 Peer recorded black Cincinnati vaudeville performer Mamie Smith singing “Crazy Blues,” a composition by a Georgia native named Perry Bradford. The record sold 7,500 copies within a week after its release and became the first in a long line of commercial recordings of blues by black artists. Three years later, in June 1923, Peer stumbled into a similar discovery for white folk music; on a field trip to Atlanta he recorded a millhand and radio personality named Fiddlin’ John Carson. Peer thought Carson’s singing was “pluperfect awful” but agreed to release his rendition of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” an 1871 pop song by Will Hays. It duplicated the success of “Crazy Blues,” and soon Peer had initiated an “old-time music” record series on Okeh to parallel its blues series.

From 1923 to 1932 Peer made dozens of trips into southern cities—Dallas, El Paso, Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Charlotte, and Bristol—seeking out and recording on the spot hundreds of blues, gospel, jazz, country, Cajun, and Tex-Mex performers. On one such trip, to the Virginia-Tennessee border town of Bristol in August 1927, he discovered two acts that were to become cornerstones for commercial country music—the Carter Family and “blue yodeler” Jimmie Rodgers.

Central to all of this, though, was Peer’s unusual interest in both black and white music and his perception of ways in which the two could mutually influence each other. He theorized that both genres were just emerging from their vernacular regional base into the national limelight. He encouraged acts like the Allen Brothers, the Carolina Tar Heels, and Jimmie Rodgers to incorporate blues into their music and felt that this was one of the reasons that Rodgers enjoyed a wider national appeal than did the Carters.

In 1925 Peer left the Okeh Company and went to work for the Victor Company, trading his huge Okeh salary for more modest gains but an additional incentive: the right to control the copyrights on the new song materials recorded by his artists. Peer began to look for artists who could create original material, which he could copyright for them and place in his newly formed Southern Music Publishing Company (1928); such artists would get payment not only for records but for song performance rights as well. The increased emphasis on new material encouraged many blues and part-time country singers to become professionals and prompted the music as a whole to become more commercialized. And throughout the 1930s and 1940s he continued to build a publishing empire (which exists today as one of the country’s largest, the Peer-Southern organization) and to excel even at casual hobbies, such as horticulture, for which he received a gold medal for his important work. Though in later years he expressed disdain for the country and blues artists he developed (“I’ve tried so hard to forget them,” he told a reporter), and though some of his artists felt that he had exploited them, Peer laid the foundation for the commercialization of American vernacular music and thrust the rich southern folk music tradition into the mainstream of American popular music.

CHARLES K. WOLFE
Middle Tennessee State University

Nolan Porterfield, Journal of Country Music (December 1978); Charles K. Wolfe, in The Illustrated History of Country Music, ed. Patrick Carr (1979).

 

Penniman, Richard (Little Richard)

(b. 1933) ROCK-AND-ROLL SINGER.

Born into a large black family, in Macon, Ga., on 5 December 1933, Penniman adopted his nickname, Little Richard, at about age eight, when he began singing at church and school functions. By his early teens, Little Richard was performing on the road all across the South. He sang in minstrel shows, attracting audiences and selling snake oil. He sang the blues in bands following migrant workers as far afield as Lake Okeechobee in Florida, and he journeyed into cities to find gay clubs, where he played Princess Lavonne in the first of his several transvestite acts. Before he was 20 he had recorded, with little profit, for RCA twice and for Peacock Records once. These songs were conventional jump blues that made him sound like a melancholy Dinah Washington.

Success came in New Orleans in September 1955 when he joined Robert “Bumps” Blackwell on Specialty Records and made “Tutti Frutti,” one of the first and most important rock records. “Tutti Frutti” was a sublimated version of a bawdy song he had performed in sideshows for years but had never considered recordable. He and Blackwell then followed with a series of influential rock-and-roll hits. “Miss Ann” was about loving a white woman and included a 500-year-old rhyming folk riddle from the English oral tradition. “Long Tall Sally,” backed with “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” narrated the antics of standard black folk figures such as John and Aunt Mary, along with more contemporary ones like Sally, who was “built for speed.” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” emerged from the randy lore of prostitutes, circuses, and after-hours clubs and was reshaped as pop and teen lore—as when he purred to Molly, “When you rock ’n’ roll, can’t hear your mother call.”

By 1957, however, Little Richard was called away from rock and roll, entered Bible school, and began preaching. Since then he has made several attempts to return to the world of rock and roll that he helped create, and his performance as a rock-and-roll singer in the 1986 movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills brought good reviews and new attention. Nevertheless, he has not regained the power he had in the mid-1950s to mine the underground lore of the American South and fix it in an iconic style for the international youth culture.

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in 1986, Little Richard was among the first inductees. His pioneering contribution to the genre has also been recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In 2005 Little Richard starred in a popular commercial series and worked on a pop single with Michael Jackson benefiting victims of Hurricane Katrina. Although he has been called back to performing since the mid-1980s, Little Richard’s popularity has not matched that of his early career.

W. T. LHAMON JR.
Florida State University

W. T. Lhamon Jr., Studies in Popular Culture (1985); Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (1994); Langdon Winner, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll, ed. Jim Miller (1976).

 

Pickett, Wilson

(1941–2006) SOUL ANDR&BSINGER.

The “Wicked” Wilson Pickett had one of the most fiery and distinctive voices of 1960s soul music. Many historians and fans agree that few artists could match Pickett’s deep, guttural intensity in the studio and onstage while he was in his prime during his years of recording for Atlantic Records. Born in rural Plattville, Ala., on 18 March 1941, Pickett was one of 11 children in a family of God-fearing sharecroppers. Here he got his first taste of music, singing in local Baptist church choirs as a child. But like many of his generation, Pickett tired of the hardships of the agrarian life and headed north in his late teens to find better opportunity.

Landing in Detroit, Pickett fell into singing with a local gospel group called the Violinaires, who in their brief career accompanied the likes of the Soul Stirrers and the Swan Silvertones at church gigs around the country. It was not long, though, before the pull of the secular music world of R&B became too strong for Pickett, and he joined an up-and-coming vocal group called the Falcons, which also featured Sir Mack Rice and Eddie Floyd. The union would prove successful as the Falcons found a Top 10 R&B hit in 1962 with the searing “I Found a Love,” featuring none other than Pickett on lead vocals.

Realizing his own solo potential, Pickett soon left the Falcons and was eventually signed by Atlantic Records in 1964. After a few initial misfires, Pickett struck gold when Atlantic sent him down to Memphis to record with its then-partner, Stax Records, where he began to hit his stride. He teamed up with Stax golden-boy producer, songwriter, and guitarist Steve Cropper, and the duo’s first effort, “In the Midnight Hour,” resulted in a definitive hit on the R&B and pop charts in 1965. The flurry of hits to follow in the next six years would prove to be the most successful era of Pickett’s career. Gritty work outs like “634-5789 (Soulsville, USA),” “Mustang Sally,” “Funky Broadway,” and “Land of 1,000 Dances” would set a benchmark in the Deep Soul movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Pickett did not confine himself to recording at Stax during these years. Several of his albums were recorded at the legendary FAME studios, another partner of Atlantic, in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with such prolific studio musicians, producers, and songwriters as Chips Moman, Spooner Oldham, and Rick Hall. Pickett even teamed up with young FAME studio musician Duane Allman on a blistering cover of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” while in Muscle Shoals in 1969. Also during the late 1960s, Pickett collaborated on many popular songs with famed soul singer and songwriter Bobby Womack.

Pickett returned north in 1970 to record one of his last popular albums on Atlantic, Wilson Pickett in Philadelphia. Pickett’s commercial career soon started to wane, though, and after recording one more album for Atlantic in 1971 Pickett left the label. He would spend the 1970s at RCA struggling with mediocre material and new trends, such as disco, that did not always suit his gospel and soul past. During the 1980s Pickett all but dropped off the recording map, though he did occasionally perform.

After spending almost two decades battling drug addiction and having several run-ins with the law, Pickett reemerged in 1999 with the critically acclaimed It’s Harder Now on Bullseye Blues. The album gave him a comeback career on blues and soul circuits, earning him three W. C. Handy Awards and a Grammy nomination.

In 2004 Pickett retired from touring because of declining health, and two years later, on 19 January 2006, he died of a heart attack in his Reston, Va., home, leaving behind two daughters and a musical legacy matched by few of his era or any other.

MARK COLTRAIN
Hillsborough, North Carolina

Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music (1984); Peter Shapiro, The Rough Guide to Soul and R&B(2006).

 

Powell, John

(1882–1963) MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER.

Powell was born in Richmond, Va., where his father, a schoolteacher, and his mother, an amateur musician, provided his primary musical education at home. He then studied music with his sister and piano and harmony with F. C. Hahr, a onetime student of Liszt. After receiving his B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1901, he studied piano with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna (1902–7). There he also studied composition with Carl Navratil (1904–7). Powell made his debut as a pianist in Berlin in 1907. After four years of giving concerts in Europe, he returned to the United States, touring the country as a pianist and playing some of his own works. He continued to perform for many years in leading cities of Europe and America.

Powell composed many orchestral works, arrangements of folk songs, and choral settings; he also wrote three piano sonatas, one violin concerto, two piano concertos, and an opera, Judith and Holofernes. His other works include Rhapsodie Negre (piano and orchestra), 1918; Sonata Virginianesque (violin and piano), 1919; In Old Virginia (overture), 1921; At the Fair (suite for piano, also for orchestra), 1925; Natchez on the Hill (three country dances for orchestra), 1932; A Set of Three (orchestra), 1935; and Symphony in A Major (orchestra), 1947.

One of Powell’s most important achievements lies in the area of ethno-musicology. A methodical collector of the South’s rural songs, he was the founder of the Virginia State Choral Festival and the moving spirit behind the annual White Top Mountain Folk Music Festival. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Powell was honored by his native state when Governor John S. Battle designated 5 November 1951 as John Powell Day. Powell died in Charlottesville, Va., in 1963.

For the most part southerners have contented themselves with inherited music, folk songs, and contemporary tunes. Apart from Powell, southern composers have remained virtually unknown except to other musicians. During the first half of the 20th century, however, Powell received national recognition and acclaim not only as a virtuoso performer of the classical repertoire at home and abroad but also as a composer of distinctively American music. Although Powell used African American elements in his Rhapsodie Negre and Sonata Virginianesque, his abiding concern was with the cultivation of Anglo-American folk music, of which there existed a rich heritage in the South. His Virginian antecedents and environment had given him a profound sense of intimacy with the founders of the American nation.

Powell felt strongly about the value of those Anglo-Saxon cultural and ethical forces that he believed had motivated the molders of the American past; he wished to preserve them for future generations and ensure the persistence of those Anglo-Saxon ideals that he regarded as characteristically American. By the early 1920s patient research and study had convinced Powell that American folk music derived from Anglo-Saxon sources was of fundamental importance to the cultural life of the United States and to the development of a truly national school of American music.

L. MOODY SIMMS JR.
Illinois State University

Daniel Gregory Mason, Music in My Time, and Other Reminiscences (1983); L. Moody Simms Jr., Journal of Popular Culture (Winter 1973).

 

Preservation Hall

Preservation Hall, a New Orleans institution, celebrates the emergence of jazz as a popular musical innovation in the South. Philadelphians Allan and Sandra Jaffe founded the hall in the early 1960s at the suggestion of (and on property owned by) artist Larry Borenstein. Endeavoring to revitalize the roots of jazz, it has supported a resurgence of interest and activity in classic New Orleans jazz.

At its outset, Preservation Hall provided a stage for fine old black jazz musicians who were unemployed. It also resuscitated a nearly extinct institution of musical life in the Crescent City—the community hall. Figures of the New Orleans revival, such as George Lewis, Jim Robinson, and Alvin Alcorn, took up musical residence there. Repeatedly throughout the past four decades, classic jazz musicians of the city have looked to Preservation Hall to renew the old idiom.

Like Perseverance Hall and San Jacinto Hall before it, Preservation Hall serves a total community. It addresses social and economic problems as well as cultural needs of the city’s jazz people. The preservationist impulse itself accounts for the fundamental contribution of Preservation Hall. In an effort to preserve jazz, the Jaffes and their associates have recycled it, establishing the classic jazz aesthetic for a new era. The hall has in fact reinvented and revitalized its community for the future by reaching decisively into the past.

Preservation Hall has succeeded by combining imported, updated marketing techniques with an abiding appreciation for local, traditional lifeways. Its success rests in large part upon the generous life support it has provided to old jazz greats. Preservation Hall emerged as part of a national folk revival in the 1950s and 1960s, and its activities have sought from the beginning to underscore the primal claim to jazz of black Americans.

Hurricane Katrina devastated the musical culture of New Orleans, including affecting Preservation Hall. The institution closed in August 2005 for several months after the building flooded. The first post-Katrina performance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band was on 27–28 April 2006. Benjamin Jaffe, son of the owners, salvaged from the flood historic master tracks, which became the basis for Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions, a compilation of rare recordings, photographs, and text about Preservation Hall, which was released in July 2007.

CURTIS D. JERDE
W. R. Hogan Jazz Archive Tulane University

Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones, Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music since World War II (1987); Al Rose and Edmond Souchon, New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album (1967; rev. ed., 1978).

 

Presley, Elvis

(1935–1977) ROCK-AND-ROLL SINGER.

Presley is probably the most famous southerner of the 20th century. Born in Tupelo, Miss., and reared in Memphis in near poverty, he became an international celebrity and one of the wealthiest entertainers in history. He has sold a billion record units worldwide, more than any other entertainer. Elvis had 149 singles on Billboard’s popular music charts, with 114 in the Top 40, 40 in the Top 10, and 18 singles reaching No. 1.

In 1954 Presley made his first recordings for Sam Phillips’s Memphis-based Sun Records in a style that drew from diverse sources—gospel (black and white), blues (rural and urban), and country. In effect, he and his band forged a dynamic new musical synthesis, which later became known as “rockabilly.” In 1955, after joining the Louisiana Hayride, a popular country show broadcast from Shreveport, Presley toured extensively throughout the South and acquired a vast and fervent following. National recognition came in 1956 with the success of his first RCA Victor release, “Heartbreak Hotel,” a series of network television appearances, and a movie, Love Me Tender. He was often the subject of controversy, for his frenetic performances and his conspicuous adoption of black-derived material and musical styles.

From 1956 to 1966, including his celebrated stint in the army (1958–60), Presley dominated popular music. He also starred in 31 feature films. After a brief decline in popularity during the mid-1960s, he began a sustained comeback in 1968 and 1969 with an acclaimed television special, and his television specials in 1973 and 1977 remain among the highest-rated musical specials. During this period Presley returned to live performances for the first time since 1961.

Elvis Presley, the “King of Rock and Roll,” age 22, 1957 (Graceland, Inc., Memphis)

In the 1970s Presley again became a major figure in American popular culture. He broke attendance records for his Las Vegas shows, and from 1969 to 1977 he performed 1,100 concerts across the nation. As the decade progressed, he often returned to the southern-rooted material and styles of his youth. Songs like “Amazing Grace” (1971), “Promised Land” (1973), and especially “American Trilogy” (1972) dramatized and reiterated Presley’s affinity for the South.

His death in 1977 and the subsequent outpouring of public interest in his life and music served to expose the many tensions and contradictions in southern culture, which he had so vividly symbolized. He was insolent yet courteous; narcissistic yet humble; pious (reflecting the Pentecostalism of his childhood) yet often hedonistic, especially in his final years; extremely wealthy yet ever conscious of his poor origins. His diet, accent, name, and, most of all, his music, remained indelibly southern. His Memphis home, Graceland (open to the public since 1982), one of the most popular tourist attractions in the South, is an enduring reminder of the quintessentially southern character of Elvis Presley. It attracts over 600,000 annual visitors, and in 2006 Graceland was designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1992 the U.S. Postal Service honored Presley with a postage stamp, which became the best-selling commemorative stamp in history.

STEPHEN R. TUCKER
Tulane University

Peter Guralnick, Careless Love: The Un making of Elvis Presley (2000), Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994); Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen, Elvis Day by Day (1999); Valerie Harms, Tryin’ to Get to You: The Story of Elvis Presley (2000); Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (rev. ed., 1982); Dave Marsh, Elvis (1982); Alanna Nash, The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley (2003); Stanley Oberst and Lori Torrance, Elvis in Texas: The Undiscovered King, 1954–1958 (2001); Jac Tharpe, ed., Elvis: Images and Fancies (1979).

 

Price, Leontyne

(b. 1927) GRAND OPERA AND CONCERT SINGER.

Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Miss., where she grew up playing the piano and singing in the church choir. She graduated from Oak Park High School in 1944 and Wilberforce College in Ohio four years later. She then attended Juilliard School of Music on a scholarship, with financial aid from the Alexander F. Chisholm family of Laurel. Virgil Thomson selected her to sing the role of Saint Cecilia in a revival of his Four Saints in Three Acts on Broadway and at the 1952 International Arts Festival in Paris. After an audition with Ira Gershwin, she won the female lead in an important revival of Porgy and Bess opposite William Warfield, playing to packed houses from June 1952 until June 1954 on Broadway and in a world tour. In 1953 composer Samuel Barber asked her to sing the premiere of his Hermit Songs at the Library of Congress, and in 1954 she gave a Town Hall recital to enthusiastic reviews.

The NBC Opera Theater’s production of Tosca in January 1955 marked her professional debut in grand opera, although her first performance in a major opera house came two years later in San Francisco, as Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. In succeeding seasons she returned to San Francisco to interpret the title role of Verdi’s Aïda, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Leonora in Il Trovatore, the lead in the American premiere of Carl Orff’s The Wise Maiden, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera, Leonora in La Forza del Destino, Giorgetta in Il Tabarro, and the title role in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. With the Lyric Opera of Chicago she first sang Massenet’s Thaïs, one of her few failures, and the role of Liù in Puccini’s Turandot. She also appeared in Handel’s Julius Caesar and Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea in concert form with the American Opera Society.

Her Metropolitan Opera debut came on 27 January 1961, as Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. In October of that year she became the first black to open a Metropolitan Opera season, appearing as Minnie in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West. She later sang Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Pamina in The Magic Flute, and Fiordiligi in Così Fan Tutte at the Metropolitan. She opened the new house at Lincoln Center as Cleopatra in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. She has performed with the Vienna State Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, the Paris Opera, La Scala, the Verona Arena, the Berlin Opera, the Hamburg Opera, and Teatro Colon. In 1961 she sang recitals at the World’s Fair in Brussels and has given concerts throughout the world. She has recorded extensively, including American popular songs and black spirituals. She received 19 Grammy awards, more than any other classical singer, and was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. She often returns to Laurel, Miss., and gave one of the first nonsegregated recitals there. She retired after a final performance on 3 January 1985.

Price performed recitals in the United States and Europe after her retirement, and she gave a memorable concert at Carnegie Hall in October 2001 honoring the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack. In 1997 she wrote a children’s book, Aida, which became the basis for a Broadway musical.

RONALD L. DAVIS
Southern Methodist University

Sir Rudolf Bing, 5000 Nights at the Opera (1972); Arthur J. Bloomfield, 50 Years of the San Francisco Opera (1972); Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Achievements of America’s Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (1999); Hugh Lee Lyon, Leontyne Price: Highlights of a Prima Donna (1973); Helena Matheopoulos, Diva: Great Sopranos and Mezzos Discuss Their Art (1992).

 

Price, Ray

(b. 1926) COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER.

Ray Price, in a music career that has lasted more than 55 years, helped country music survive the death of Hank Williams and the introduction of rock and roll by creating a more forceful, rhythm-driven form of honky-tonk music. Later, in the 1960s, he broadened country music’s audience by moving toward a lush, sophisticated sound.

He was born Noble Ray Price on 12 January 1926 in the east Texas farming community of Peach in rural Wood County. His parents split up when he was a young boy. He grew up spending summers working on his father’s farm in Perryville, Tex., and attending school in Dallas while living with his mother. He also took classical voice lessons for several years, encouraged by his step-father, an Italian immigrant who loved opera. The vocal control and power he learned would later set him apart as a singer who could soar above his arrangements with a clarity and power that many other country singers lacked.

After serving as a U.S. Marine in World War II, Price began singing in Dallas-area nightclubs and, before long, on the city’s Big D Jamboree radio show. He recorded his first songs for Bullet Records in 1951 and the following year signed with Columbia Records. Moving to Nashville, he briefly roomed with Hank Williams.

Price had several Top 10 hits early in his career, including “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)” and “Release Me,” but it wasn’t until 1956 that he scored a No. 1 hit, with “Crazy Arms.” The latter established Price’s signature sound, a 4/4 shuffle beat spiced by single-note fiddle and a stinging steel guitar. Other country dance floor hits followed, including “I’ve Got a New Heartache,” “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You,” “City Lights,” “Invitation to the Blues,” and “Heartaches by the Number.”

In the 1960s Price shifted from traditional country music to a smoother style featuring sweet violins rather than raw fiddles. Although songs like “Make the World Go Away,” “The Other Woman,” and his emotion-drenched version of “Danny Boy” all did well, it was not until 1970, when he recorded a Kris Kristofferson song, “For the Good Times,” that he returned to the No. 1 spot.

Price also has been known for identifying significant songwriters early in their careers. He cut the first major hits of Kristofferson, Bill Anderson, and Roger Miller, and he recorded early hits by writers Harlan Howard, Willie Nelson, Hank Cochran, Danny Dill, and Mel Tillis. He also was known for hiring top musicians for his Cherokee Cowboys band, including steel guitarists Jimmy Day and Buddy Emmons, fiddlers Tommy Jackson and Buddy Spicher, and guitarist Pete Wade. Future country stars Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Johnny Paycheck, and Johnny Bush were all members of his band before going on to launch their own singing careers.

Price has continued to perform into his eighties, his voice still rich and resonant. In March 2007, he released an album, Last of the Breed, with old friends Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, both of whom consider Price a primary influence and, as Nelson put it, “the best country singer I’ve ever heard.”

MICHAEL MCCALL
Country Music Hall of Fame

 

Pride, Charley

(b. 1938) COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER.

A little over a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Charley Pride accomplished a similar feat in country music. Born in Sledge, Miss., in the depths of the Great Depression to a family of poor cotton laborers, Pride not only opened new avenues of acceptance to minorities but set high standards of excellence in the field of country music.

Many blacks in the Mississippi Delta were drawn to the blues, but Pride was more interested in country music, especially the songs of Hank Williams. At night he would listen to country music radio programs, memorizing the words of their songs. The only member of his family with any musical inclination, Pride scraped up enough money when he was 14 to buy his first guitar, which he learned to play by listening to different picking styles. (Pride received only $3 per 100 pounds of cotton he picked with his 10 brothers and sisters.) When Pride left Mississippi three years later, he departed not to pursue a career in music but to try for athletic success through baseball.

Pride’s luck with baseball was short lived. After stints with the Memphis Red Sox and Birmingham Black Barons, teams in the Negro American League, and two years in the army in the late 1950s, Pride eventually made it to the minor leagues, playing in 1960 for a team in Helena, Mont. Pride often sang between innings; the response he received from the venture encouraged him to sing more. Through his landlady in Helena he got his first musical break, singing in a local country bar. Still hungry to play major league baseball, Pride earned a tryout in 1961 from the California Angels. He did not make the team, and he returned to Helena, where he worked for a refining plant and sang in area nightclubs. The nightclub performances led to an invitation from Red Sovine in 1963 to do a recording audition in Nashville. Pride auditioned in Nashville for Chet Atkins the following year and signed with RCA Victor after the session.

Since 1965, when he recorded his first hit single, “Snakes Crawl at Night,” he has accumulated numerous gold records and country music awards. His first album, Country Charley Pride (1966), garnered the 1967 Most Promising Male Artist Award from the Country Song Roundup. (Fearing the album would not sell well in the racially torn South, RCA released Country Charley Pride without Pride’s picture on the cover.) In 1971 and 1972 he was named Male Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Association. During the same period he released six albums that became gold and received three Grammy awards, the first for Best Sacred Performance (“Did You Think to Pray”), the second for Best Gospel Performance (“Let Me Live”), and a third for Best Country Vocal, Male (Charley Pride Sings Heart Songs). Billboard gave its Trendsetter Award to Pride in 1970. In 1976 he received Photoplay’s Gold Medal Award, and in 1980 Cash Box named him its Top Male Country Artist of the Decade.

Highway sign seen leaving Tutwiler, Miss. (Highway 3), honoring black Mississippi country singer Charley Pride (James G. Thomas Jr., photographer, University of Mississippi)

Pride’s gold albums include Country Charley Pride (1966), The Country Way (1968), Just Plain Charley (1970), Charley Pride 10th Album (1970), Charley Pride Sings Heart Songs (1971), Did You Think to Pray (1971), and The Best of Charley Pride, vol. 2 (1972). Other top albums recorded by Pride are Charley (1975), I’m Just Me (1977), You’re My Jamaica (1979), and There’s a Little Bit of Hank in Me (1980). Among his recent albums are Comfort of Her Wings (2003) and Pride and Joy: A Gospel Music Collection (2006). He released gold and Top 10 singles such as “I Know One” (1967), “Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger” (1967), “Let Me Live” (1971), “Did You Think to Pray” (1971), “Amazing Love” (1973), “We Could” (1974), “I Got a Lot of Hank in Me” (1980), “Roll on Mississippi” (1981), and “Never Been So Loved” (1981).

Pride declined an initial invitation in 1968 to become a cast member of the Grand Ole Opry, but he joined the cast in May 1993. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.

ELIZABETH MCGEHEE
Salem College

Charley Pride, Pride: The Charley Pride Story (1994); Michael Streissguth, Voices of the Country: Interviews with Classic Country Performers (2004).

 

Rainey, Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett (Ma Rainey)

(1886?–1939) BLUES SINGER.

Acknowledged as the “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey brought rural blues to American musical life. Rainey was one of the first popular stage entertainers to incorporate blues into her repertoire, and in so doing, she brought blues from folk culture to the American mainstream through her touring performances and recordings. During an era when smooth, female blues singers dominated the urban scene, she played an important role in connecting the work of these women to that of less-polished, male country blues artists. Rainey emerged as a cultural icon, particularly representing rural southern black life and early expressions of black feminism.

Ma Rainey was born Gertrude Pridgett, probably on 26 April 1886, in Columbus, Ga. Columbus was a stop on the minstrel circuit, and Rainey’s family, although poor, abounded with singers, including her grandmother and both parents, Thomas Pridgett Sr. and Ella Allen-Pridgett. Rainey exhibited musical talent from a young age, beginning her career at the age of 14 in a local talent show, “Bunch of Blackberries,” at the Springer Opera House in Columbus in 1900. Soon after, she began traveling in vaudeville and minstrel shows, and in 1904 she met and married William “Pa” Rainey, a minstrel show manager. Together, she and Pa Rainey toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, Tolliver’s Circus, Musical Extravaganza, and other tent shows across the United States and Mexico.

Although Rainey had not encountered the blues in Columbus, extensive traveling brought her into contact with the form by 1905, and she began to incorporate it into her repertoire. In 1912 Rainey met Bessie Smith, who joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in Tennessee. Rainey befriended Smith, helping her to develop her vocal talents, but the two performers remained distinctive stylistically. Although they sang together for only a short time, the two would become known as the most important figures in the development of classical blues.

After separating from Pa Rainey in 1916, Ma Rainey toured with her own band, Madam Gertrude Ma Rainey and Her Smart Sets. Rainey recorded her first work for Paramount in 1923, becoming one of the first women to record the blues professionally (several years after the first recordings by Mamie Smith). Her first session featured the number “Bi-Weevil Blues,” and later sessions included collaborations with Louis Armstrong and the original release of “See See Rider,” one of the most famous and most recorded blues songs of all time, with more than 100 versions. The success of her early albums led to Rainey’s being part of the 1924 Paramount promotional tour, and her popularity continued to spread. She was known for her professional attitude and shrewd business sense, as well as her raw, “moaning” voice. As a stage presence she made a strong impression, with her large, gold-capped teeth, thick, straightened hair, sparkling jewelry, and sequined ensembles and with an ostrich plume in her hand. Her songs and vocal style evinced her deep personal connection to poverty, jealousy, sexual abuse, and the harsh existence of sharecrop-ping. Her ability to capture the essence of southern black life endeared her to a wide southern black audience. She was outspoken on women’s issues and acted as a role model for female entertainers to take charge of their own careers. Rainey was also bisexual, and the lyrics of her song “Prove It on Me” suggest her love for women and her privileging of female culture and female sexual agency. For these reasons, she is proudly reclaimed from the abuses of history by contemporary black feminist thinkers.

Rainey continued to record and tour throughout the 1920s, performing with a wide variety of blues artists of the day. She recorded her last session in 1928 in Chicago with pianist Tommy Dorsey and guitarist Tampa Red. Despite the declining popularity of her style of blues in the 1930s, she continued to tour, often appearing in tent show performances. She retired from music in the mid-1930s and spent her remaining years in Columbus operating two venues that she owned. Ma Rainey died of heart disease at age 53 in 1939.

Ma Rainey influenced generations of artists in many genres and mediums and became a symbol of strength and spirit in African American culture. Allusions to Ma Rainey and her impact span African American literature in the 20th century, as well as popular music, such as Bob Dylan’s 1965 track “Tombstone Blues.” In his 1932 collection, Southern Road, poet Sterling Allen Brown pays tribute to her in a poem titled “Ma Rainey,” and she also strongly influenced the creation of the Shug Avery character in Alice Walker’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple. Playwright August Wilson wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 1982, a play based on her career in Chicago in the 1920s. Dealing with issues of race, art, religion, and the historic exploitation of black recording artists by white producers, the play pays tribute to the impact of Rainey’s early professional success as a black woman and the power of the music that she brought to the American mainstream.

FRANCES ABBOTT
Emory University

Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998); Daphne D. Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (1988); Sandra Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (1981); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (1997).

 

Redding, Otis

(1941–1967) SOUL SINGER.

Otis Redding epitomized the sound of soul music in the South in the 1960s. The “Big O,” as he came to be known, was born in 1941 in Dawson, Ga., and was raised in nearby Macon, one of six children of a Baptist minister. Singing in church throughout his youth, Redding became increasingly fascinated by the rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll sounds to be heard on Macon radio, especially those of local luminary Little Richard, the Georgia Peach.

By 1956 Redding was playing locally with Johnny Jenkins and the Pine-toppers; by 1957 he was managed by Phil Walden (later of Allman Brothers and Capricorn Records fame); by 1958 he was married; and by 1960 he had cut his first single, “Shout Bamalama,” for Bethlehem Records. The single revealed an exciting singer who had yet to grow beyond Little Richard imitation.

Deciding to try his luck elsewhere, Redding moved to California. He spent six months washing cars and recording two more singles, one for Finer Arts, the other for Alshire, both of which flopped. Back in Macon, Redding hooked up with guitarist Jenkins once again. The latter attracted the attention of Atlantic Records through a local hit entitled “Love Twist.” Atlantic arranged for Jenkins to record at the still largely unknown Stax Studio in Memphis in 1962, and Redding was able to record “These Arms of Mine” and “Hey, Hey Baby” at the end of the session. Jenkins’s material remains unissued; Redding’s recording became his first single and launched a career that was to end on 10 December 1967 when his plane, en route from Cleveland to Madison, Wis., plunged into Lake Monona. All the original members of his band, the BarKays, died in the crash with Redding, except for Ben Cauley and James Alexander. His funeral, held nine days later in Macon, was attended by 6,000 fans and a who’s who of soul musicians and singers. He was survived by his wife, Zelma, and their three children.

Between 1962 and 1967 Redding recorded prolifically. He was able to adapt to almost any material, recording songs as diverse as Bing Crosby’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” as well as a host of originals that are now standards such as “Respect” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” In contrast with many of the soul singers of the period, Redding was equally at home with ballads and with up-tempo dance numbers. Many of the original compositions were cowritten with Steve Cropper, the guitarist for the Stax house band Booker T. & the MG’s. Cropper also produced Redding’s records and, on most of these, the MG’s, coupled with the Bar-Kays’ horns, provided the backup. Cropper was white, as were half of the Stax session musicians. This relatively rare musical integration was a large factor in making southern soul from Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala., so distinctive in the 1960s.

Redding’s single style was immediately recognizable. His voice had a “catch” to it, and he was a master of timbral and dynamic variation and of rhythmic subtlety. In contrast to most soul performers, Redding never employed backup vocalists on his recordings. A typical record, such as “Try a Little Tenderness,” continually adds instruments as it progresses, with everyone gradually playing louder while the rate of activity increases, Redding’s voice becomes strained, the plane of sound gradually shifts upward, and the amount of call and response increases; finally, the tension is released through a syncopated drum break, over which Redding is so emotionally charged that he is reduced to singing vocables.

Live, Redding was the classic soul performer. He was always in action, continually sweating and discarding superfluous clothes as the performance went on. He generally used Booker T. & the MG’s or the Bar-Kays as a backup band, but, as with the material, the type or quality of band did not really affect him.

Otis Redding, soul singer (Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis)

He toured extensively from 1964 to 1967, achieving 17 hits on the rhythm-and-blues charts in the process (seven more Otis Redding records hit after his death). He had formed his own label, Jotis, recording Billy Young, Loretta Williams, and Arthur Conley, and he had also developed his own publishing company, Redwal Music. Redding was successful in Europe and was just starting to break through to the American white audience at the time of his death. Six months prior to that he had had a widely successful performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the song he was working on at the time of his death, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” ironically became his first No. 1 hit. It reflected a somewhat softer sound and, perhaps, indicated a new direction.

ROBERT BOWMAN
Memphis, Tennessee

Clive Anderson, in The Soul Book, ed. Ian Hoare (1975); Geoff Brown, Otis Redding: Try a Little Tenderness (2003); Scott Freeman, Otis! The Otis Redding Story (2002); Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music (1984); Jane Schiesel, The Otis Redding Story (1973).

 

Reece, Florence

(1907–1986) WRITER AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST.

Florence Reece is the author of several poems, short stories, and songs. A coal miner’s daughter from Sharp’s Chapel, Tenn., she is best known for her struggle song “Which Side Are You On?,” written to rally support for the 1930 United Mine Workers’ strike in Harlan County, Ky. No political ideologue, Reece wrote her song out of a sense of desperation when her husband, Sam, was blacklisted, beaten, and driven from their home because of his activities as a union organizer among his fellow miners. As she watched her children and others in the community suffer hunger and deprivation, Reece attempted to deal with her anger by writing these lyrics on the back of a calendar, reflecting the centuries-old southern folk tradition of articulating and simplifying complex personal and social problems through songs and storytelling. Along the picket lines across the South, her simple statement, rising out of a great frustration with the unfair exploitation of laborers and identifying the need for solidarity among all workers, quickly became a familiar chant sung to the tune of the old hymn, “I Am Going to Land on That Shore”:

If you go to Harlan County
There is no neutral there.
You will either be a union man,
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Which side are you on?

Reece’s militant assertion that the poor and the powerless “had to be for themselves, or against themselves” is the message that made “Which Side Are You On?” as meaningful to civil rights workers in Harlem during the 1960s as to the miners of Harlan County during the 1930s.

Reece, who came from the same impoverished section of Tennessee as Roy Acuff, continued to write prose and verse, finding her voice in the traditional themes of country and western music—motherhood, home, and country. In 1981 she published a collection of her work, Against the Current, which shows her abiding concern with social commentary and the problems of her people:

If you take away their food stamps,
And all their other means,
What’re you going to feed them on?
They can’t live on jelly beans.

BARBARA L. BELLOWS
Middlebury College

John W. Hevener, A New Deal for Harlan: The Roosevelt Policies in a Kentucky Coal Field, 1931–1939 (1978), Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Miners, 1931–39 (1978); Loyal Jones, Appalachian Journal (Fall 1984).

 

Reed, Jimmy

(1925–1976) BLUES SINGER.

Jimmy Reed was born Mathis James Reed on 6 September 1925, the youngest of 10 children. His parents, Joseph Reed and Virginia Ross, were sharecroppers on a Delta plantation near the small hamlet of Dunleith, Miss. Reed attended public schools briefly, but after he finished third grade he began working in the fields full time. When he was about 10, a family member gave him his first acoustic guitar, and Reed also started playing harmonica.

In the late 1930s, after his family moved to Shaw, Miss., Reed joined a gospel quartet. Although it was doing well, he eventually decided to leave the group and move in with his brother and work on plantations near Duncan, Miss. He would often slip out of the fields and go up to the house to listen to bluesman, such as Sonny Boy Williamson I, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Robert Jr. Lockwood, who were performing on the King Biscuit Time radio show. Jimmy also met Eddie Taylor, a young guitarist who was trying to make a living by traveling the Mississippi Delta and playing the blues. The two musicians would form a rocky musical relationship, which would last until Reed’s death.

There is still some discussion about Taylor’s influence on Jimmy Reed’s musical style. “The Jimmy Reed style is my style,” Taylor himself often stated. “He don’t have no style. And I got the style from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson.” Reed did not agree with his partner, however. “[Eddie Taylor] ain’t had nothing to with it, no more than just durin’ the time when we was down South,” he said. In any case, Taylor and Reed would often play together after a day of work in the fields. After a falling out with a white overseer, Reed decided to leave Mississippi and head for the big city. He was 18 years old.

In Chicago, Reed briefly worked as janitor at the YMCA and as coal hiker at the Hefter Coal Company, before he was drafted into the navy in 1943. After the war Reed started playing his harmonica and guitar in blues clubs around Gary, Ind., and in Chicago. In 1949 Taylor also moved north, and together the two boyhood friends performed in the bars on Chicago’s South Side. Four years later they began recording for the Vee-Jay label, and in 1955 Reed scored his first hit with “You Don’t Have to Go.”

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Jimmy Reed was one of the most popular blues artists in the United States. His music appealed to a broad audience and cut across the color line, although Reed primarily played for white people at the height of his career. Numbers like “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby,” “Honest I Do,” “Baby, What You Want Me to Do,” “Big Boss Man,” and “Bright Lights, Big City” all became instant classics. Reed had 11 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts and over a dozen on the R&B charts. His music was popular among British bands, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Elvis Presley, Ike and Tina Turner, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry were some of the artists who recorded versions of his songs. Reed’s songs not only became blues standards but also crossed over into other music styles, such as rock and roll, soul, and country and western.

But Jimmy Reed’s thriving career also had its darker sides. Like so many other blues singers, he saw most of the profits that were made on his records disappear into the bank accounts of various record corporations. The strenuous life on the road took a heavy toll on his health. Moreover, Reed suffered from epilepsy and chronic alcoholism, which proved to be a deadly combination. By the late 1960s his popularity had waned considerably. The Big Boss Man, as he was known, tried to make a comeback during the 1970s, but by that time his days as a successful bluesman were over. He died on 29 August 1976 after a show at the Savoy in San Francisco.

MAARTEN ZWIERS
University of Mississippi

Jim O’Neal, Living Blues (May/June 1975); Will Romano, Big Boss Man: The Life & Music of Jimmy Reed (2006).

 

R.E.M.

ROCK BAND.

R.E.M. was formed in 1980 by University of Georgia students Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe in Athens, Ga., and is known as a pioneering college rock band that bridged the gap between the post-punk era of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the alternative-rock era of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stipe and Buck met at Wuxtry Records in downtown Athens and soon joined Mills and Berry (who had played music together while in high school in Macon, Ga.) to write songs and play at parties in the college town. The name “R.E.M.” was chosen randomly from a dictionary by Stipe. The band was known for a unique sound, which was created by Stipe’s low, mumbling vocals, Buck’s oft-labeled “jangly,” chord-driven lead guitar, Mill’s progressive, melodic bass playing, and Berry’s adept drumming, which combined a variety of genres and styles. Their first full-length album, Murmur, was chosen by Rolling Stone magazine as the album of the year in 1983, an acknowledgment that jump-started five years of constant touring and recording under the I.R.S. label. In 1988 R.E.M. signed with Warner Brothers and released some of its most critically acclaimed albums, including Out of Time (1990) and Automatic for the People (1992). In 1997 Bill Berry left the band to pursue farming, and R.E.M. continued as a trio. Although forced to reassess its songwriting process, the band has adapted and subsequently released albums that have been praised for their depth, tone, and quality of songwriting.

The many R.E.M. albums reflect a sense of the South, primarily through Stipe’s lyrics, which, while considered a bit enigmatic, integrate southern sayings. Murmur features the song “Sitting Still” in which Stipe sings “Up to par, Katie bars the kitchen signs but not me in,” using the phrase “Katie bar,” meaning that one should prepare for coming trouble. The album Fables of the Reconstruction (1985) demonstrates some of the most overt references among the band’s early music. “Can’t Get There from Here” uses the common saying when asking for directions south of the Mason-Dixon Line as the title of the song, while the tune “Life and How to Live It” is about the late, mentally disturbed, Athens, Ga., writer Brivs Mekis. “Maps and Legends” is dedicated to the late Georgia folk artist Howard Finster, who designed the cover of the band’s second album, Reckoning (1984). The final song on the record, “Wendell Gee,” was named for a used car salesman who lived in Pendergrass, Ga. “Swan Swan H,” from Lifes Rich Pageant (1986), is about the period of Reconstruction in the South and references Johnny Reb and the making of items from bones (presumably from casualties of war). The signature hit from Out of Time, “Losing My Religion,” echoes earlier songs by using a common southern phrase describing how an individual can be driven almost to distraction, in the case of the song, by a simple crush. R.E.M.’s later music still retains references to the South, as in Reveal’s (2001) “Chorus and the Ring,” when Stipe sings, “It’s the knowing with the wink that we expect in southern women.”

Visually, R.E.M. uses the work of southern artists and institutions in its music videos, album art work, and album titles. Rev. Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens, in Pennville, Ga., served as the setting for the video to “Radio Free Europe” (Murmur), as did folk artist R. A. Miller’s whirligig farm outside of Gainesville, Ga., for the video for “Pretty Persuasion” (Reckoning). The video for “Low” (Out of Time) uses pieces of art from the Georgia Museum of Art’s collection, featuring the painting La Confidence (c. 1883) by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau. Most notable is the band’s use of “Automatic for the People,” the motto of Weaver D’s, a soul food restaurant owned by Dexter Weaver in Athens.

R.E.M.’s impact on Athens is multi-faceted. Its influence on the music scene in the city continues and has resulted in constant national attention for local up-and-coming bands. The band members have shifted their focus to local issues by supporting many local charities and historic preservation efforts as well as lending their support to local politicians.

In 2006 R.E.M. was inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

RENNA TUTEN
University of Georgia

Marcus Gray, It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion (1993); Rodger Lyle Brown, Party out of Bounds: The B-52’s, R.E.M., and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia (1991); R.E.M.: The Rolling Stone Files: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Articles, Facts, and Opinions from the Files of Rolling Stone (1995).

 

Revival Songs

The poetry and music of revivalism has been a major influence in American popular culture, especially in the South. In the first camp meetings, around 1800, preachers found the psalms and hymns of congregational worship inadequate: traditional hymns did not sufficiently emphasize the individual’s quest for salvation through specific stages (conviction, conversion, assurance) recognized by revival preachers; moreover, hymnbooks were of little use in largely illiterate gatherings often held at night. In response to the camp-meeting environment, Americans created two major forms of popular religious song during the period from 1810 to 1860.

“Camp-meeting songs,” or “spiritual songs,” were strophic poems, often in narrative form, stressing the stages of conversion and often referring to various groups at camp meetings: preachers, exhorters, mourners, backsliders, and young converts, as in the following stanza from George Atkin’s “Holy Manna”:

Is there here a trembling jailer,

Seeking grace, and fill’d with fears?

Is there here a weeping Mary,

Pouring forth a flood of tears?

Brethren, join your cries to help them;

Sisters, let your prayers abound;

Pray, O pray that holy manna

May be scatter’d all around.

Written in a great variety of poetic meters, these songs were often set to secular tunes, including those of folk songs, traditional dances, military marches, and popular theater airs.

“Revival spiritual songs,” or “choruses,” consisted of couplets or quatrains, often taken from British evangelical hymnody, alternating with refrains:

On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,

And cast a wishful eye,

To Canaan’s fair and happy land,

Where my possessions lie. [Samuel Stennant]

CHORUS: I am bound for the promised land,

I’m bound for the promised land,

Oh, who will come and go with me?

I am bound for the promised land.

Often elements of the revival chorus appear between the lines of the original hymn:

I know that my redeemer lives,

Glory, hallelujah.

What comfort that sweet sentence gives, [Samuel Medley]

Glory, hallelujah,

CHORUS: Shout on, pray on, we’re getting ground,

Glory, hallelujah,

The dead’s alive, and the lost is found.

Glory, hallelujah.

Revival spiritual songs, with their call-and-response patterns, met the need for a flexible format in which new songs could be created and learned immediately by a large gathering.

Camp-meeting songsters, books containing revival poetry, were first published around 1810. The first southern collection of music for camp-meeting songs was Ananias Davisson’s Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (Harrisonburg, Va., 1820). Davisson’s book, designed for “his Methodist friends,” contained many camp-meeting songs and a few revival choruses. During the 1840s the music of many more revival spiritual songs was printed in southern tunebooks, including B. F. White and E. J. King’s The Sacred Harp (1844) and William Houser’s The Hesperian Harp (1848). After the Civil War, the black spiritual emerged, essentially the same as the revival spiritual, despite differences in the date and circumstances of its notation. Indeed, the prevalence of call-and-response forms in African American music and the presence of blacks at early camp meetings suggest that mutual influences may have played a role in the spiritual song traditions of both races.

The revival movements of the late 19th century favored a new style of music based on urban models, especially the sentimental parlor song. “Gospel hymns” like “Sweet By and By” (S. F. Bennett and J. P. Webster) and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (E. A. Hoffman and A. J. Showalter) have reached beyond the revival context. Many have entered the Sunday worship of southern denominations, where they are considered “old standard” hymns, to the virtual exclusion of the camp-meeting genres that preceded them. Late 19th-century gospel hymns were also the model for the flourishing repertoire of shape-note gospel convention and quartet music.

DAVID WARREN STEEL
University of Mississippi

Dickson D. Bruce Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (1974); George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933); Ellen Jane Lorenz, Glory, Hallelujah! The Story of the Camp-Meeting Spiritual (1978).

 

Ring Shouters

Ring shouting is the oldest African American song form still practiced in America. It combines worship song and distinctive dance. Separate from spirituals, ring shouts were often performed at important religious holidays by rice-and cotton-plantation slaves in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, where a high percentage of slaves were African-born and maintained much of their native heritage.

A ring shout begins in a church meetinghouse when a lead singer, or “songster,” begins the song while seated next to a “sticker,” who sets the rhythm by beating the wooden floor with a broom handle or other stick. Behind them a cluster of singers, called “basers,” clap hands or stomp feet and answer the leader’s lines in a call-and-response fashion. Gender roles are strictly followed. The songster, sticker, and basers are always male. Slowly the women, dressed in the attire of their ancestors, including floor-length dresses and head-rags, move in to form a ring. Moving counterclockwise, they shuffle their feet, making sure not to cross them. Crossing one’s feet is considered dancing and deemed inappropriate. Women join the basers in singing answers to the songster. Those in the ring sway, raise hands, and swoop down low to the ground to reinforce the message being sung.

During slavery, ring shouts were often conducted in secret. Observances of the tradition date back to 1845. During and after the Civil War, ring shouts were frowned upon by northern white missionaries, one writing that it was “too African, [too] dangerously extravagant.”

In her landmark book, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942), Lydia Parish recorded ring shout songs from McIntosh County, Ga. By then ring shouts were only practiced by the remote Gullah populations of the Low-country.

By 1980 the tradition was thought to have died out, until folklorist Fred Fussell and Frankie and Doug Quimby heard rumors that “Watch Night,” or New Year’s Eve, was still celebrated with all-night shouts at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in the Bolden community of McIntosh County.

With the encouragement of the Quimbys and others, outsiders have witnessed the normally private form of worship by the McIntosh Ring Shouters in local festivals on St. Simons and Sapelo Islands. Occasionally the Shouters perform outside the region as well.

WILLIAM S. BURDELL III
St. Simons Island, Georgia

The McIntosh County Shouters: Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia (Smith-sonian/Folkways, cassette or CD, 1984); Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942; reprint, 1992); Art Rosenbaum, Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (1998); Clate Sanders, producer, Down Yonder: The McIntosh County Shouters, Georgia Public Television, video.

 

Ritchie, Jean

(b. 1922) FOLK SINGER.

Although she grew up a traditional musician in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Kentucky, having sung an extensive repertoire of folk ballads and songs taught to her by other family members during her childhood, Jean Ritchie has also been a commercially successful singer and songwriter who was nationally influential during the urban folk music revival of the mid- to late 20th century.

Born on 8 December 1922, in the small community of Viper, in Perry County, Ky., Jean Ritchie was the youngest of the 14 children born to Balis and Abigail Ritchie (both parents were of Scots-Irish descent). The Ritchie family was locally renowned for keeping alive the older regional music traditions that had originated in the British Isles and been transported to (and transformed within) Appalachia by settlers during the 18th and early 19th centuries. When in the late 1940s Jean Ritchie began performing and recording those ballads and songs outside her home community, many folklorists and folk music revivalists saw her as a living embodiment of an otherwise dying culture—those people shared the perception of English scholars Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles, who, in their classic study, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (originally published in 1917 and considerably revised in 1932), lamented the dramatic decline of traditional balladry among the people of Appalachia after the World War I era.

Upon graduating from high school, Ritchie left Viper to attend college. In 1946, after receiving the B.A. degree in social work from the University of Kentucky, Ritchie moved to New York City to work at the Henry Street Settlement, a social service and community arts organization. There, she incorporated her family’s ballads and songs into her educational programs for urban children, an experience that helped Ritchie realize the value of her Appalachian cultural heritage. Her reputation as an authentically traditional singer spread across New York City, which then was the epicenter of the burgeoning national urban folk music revival, and by the late 1940s she was appearing in folk music clubs in other cities. In 1949 Ritchie recorded ballads and stories for folklorist Alan Lomax and the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Ritchie’s first commercial recordings were released in 1952 on an album issued by the Elektra label; later that year, she received a Fulbright award to study traditional music in the British Isles. In 1954 Ritchie released the album Field Trip on her own label, Greenhays Recordings. That album juxtaposed field recordings of traditional ballads and songs she had made in England, Scotland, and Ireland with recordings of her own performances of those same ballads and songs from her family’s repertoire. Among Ritchie’s other important recordings were her 1961 two-album set on the Folkways label, British Traditional Ballads in the Southern Mountains; the 1963 live album for Folkways, Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City; Ritchie’s 1977 album on Green-hays, None but One, which combined her recordings of traditional material with several performances of her own song compositions (more extensively produced than her earlier recordings to appeal to a new audience, this album received a critics’ award from Rolling Stone magazine); and her 1992 Green-hays album The Most Dulcimer, which showcased her playing on the instrument known as the Appalachian dulcimer. Ritchie is generally credited with having popularized that instrument during the urban folk music revival of the late 20th century.

Much of Ritchie’s performance repertoire has long consisted of her family’s beloved traditional ballads and songs; yet she has also sung Old Regular Baptist hymns as well as commercial songs she learned from listening to records or the radio. Although she did not have extensive formal musical training, Ritchie was always a sophisticated performer who was quite influential. (Bob Dylan was alleged to have based the melody of his protest song “Masters of War” on Ritchie’s rendition of the traditional British mummer’s song “Nottamun Town.”) Additionally, Ritchie has been widely respected for her songwriting. Her best-known songs—“Now Is the Cool of the Day,” “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore,” “Black Waters,” “Blue Diamond Mines,” and “My Dear Companion”—have been recorded by numerous musicians working in such popular music genres as revivalist folk, bluegrass, country rock, and Americana.

Finally, Ritchie is a noted author of books. Her classic memoir, Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955), memorably conveyed her experience of growing up within a highly musical culture in rural, pre–World War II eastern Kentucky. The book featured transcriptions of many of the traditional ballads and songs sung by members of her family. Other books by Ritchie include a popular instrument instruction manual, The Dulcimer Book (1963), and her collection of transcribed folk music from Appalachia, The Swapping Song Book (1965).

For her life’s work, Ritchie has received several prestigious awards, including, in 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts’ Heritage Fellowship and, in 2003, the University of Kentucky Associates Medallion for Intellectual Achievement. Also in 2003, Ritchie was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame.

TED OLSON
East Tennessee State University

Karen L. Carter-Schwendler, “Traditional Background, Contemporary Context: The Music and Activities of Jean Ritchie to 1977” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1995); H. Russell Farmer and Guy Mendes, producers, Mountain Born: The Jean Ritchie Story, Kentucky Educational Television, 1996.

 

Rodgers, Jimmie

(1897–1933) COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER.

Generally acknowledged as “the Father of Country Music,” James Charles “Jimmie” Rodgers, who was born 8 September 1897 in Meridian, Miss., was a major influence on the emerging hillbilly recording industry almost from the time of his first records in 1927. Although Rodgers initially conceived of himself in broader terms, singing Tin Pan Alley hits and popular standards, his intrinsic musical talent was deeply rooted in the rural southern environment out of which he came, as seen in the titles of many of his songs: “My Carolina Sunshine Girl,” “My Little Old Home Down in New Orleans,” “Dear Old Sunny South by the Sea,” “Mississippi River Blues,” “Peach Pickin’ Time Down in Georgia,” “Memphis Yodel,” “In the Hills of Tennessee,” the original “Blue Yodel” (“T for Texas”), and others.

In adapting the black country blues of his native South to the nascent patterns of commercial hillbilly music of the day, Rodgers created a unique new form—the famous “blue yodel”—which led the way to further innovations in style and subject matter and exerted a lasting influence on country music as both art form and industry. Through the force of his magnetic personality and showmanship, Rodgers almost single-handedly established the role of the singing star, influencing such later performers as Gene Autry, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, and Willie Nelson.

The son of a track foreman for the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, Rodgers in his twenties worked as a brakeman for many railroads in the South and the West. Stricken by tuberculosis in 1924, he left the rails soon after to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a professional entertainer. After several years of hard knocks and failure, he gained an audition with Ralph Peer, an independent producer who had set up a temporary recording studio in Bristol, Tenn., for the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor). There, on 4 August 1927, Rodgers made his first recordings. Within a year he reached national popularity and received billing as “The Singing Brakeman” and “America’s Blue Yodeler.” In 1929 he built a home in the resort town of Kerrville, Tex., and moved there in an effort to restore his failing health. The onset of the Depression and increasing illness further slowed the progress of his career, but throughout the early 1930s he continued to record and perform with touring stage shows. By the time of his death in New York City at 35, in May 1933, he had recorded 110 titles, representing a diverse repertoire that included almost every type of song now identified with country music: love ballads, honky-tonk tunes, railroad and hobo songs, cowboy songs, novelty numbers, and the series of 13 blue yodels. In November 1961 Rodgers became the first performer elected to Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame, immortalized as “the man who started it all.” The Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Museum, in Meridian, Miss., hosts the annual Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival, which began in May 1953.

Jimmie Rodgers, the “Father of Country Music,” 1929 (Jimmie Rodgers Museum, Meridian, Miss.)

NOLAN PORTERFIELD
Cape Girardeau, Missouri

Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-Year History (1968); Nolan Porter-field, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (1979); Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers, My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers (1975).

 

Scruggs, Earl

(b. 1924) BLUEGRASS MUSICIAN.

Earl Eugene Scruggs was born on 6 January 1924, in Cleveland County, N.C., on a farm near the small community of Flint Hill. He was the youngest of five children. His father, who played the banjo, died when Scruggs was four; his mother, brothers, and sisters all played music. By the time he was six he was playing string band music with his brothers. Scruggs learned fiddle and guitar but specialized in the five-string banjo. Before he was a teenager he developed a distinctive three-finger picking style based on that of older men in his neighborhood. In his teens Scruggs played locally with professional bands, but World War II put a temporary end to this; he worked in a textile mill until 1945. In December 1945 he became a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys on WSM’s Grand Ole Opry. In personal appearances and recordings with Monroe, Scruggs created a sensation with his banjo playing, and he quickly became one of the most emulated instrumentalists in country music.

In 1948 Scruggs left Monroe and teamed up with his partner in the Blue Grass Boys, guitarist-singer Lester Flatt, to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. In 1953, after modest beginnings on small radio stations, their broadcast career was given a considerable boost by the sponsorship of a flour manufacturer, Martha White Mills. In 1955 they joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry, where they became one of its most popular and widely traveled acts. During the late 1950s they were responsible for popularizing bluegrass with folk music audiences outside the South. Their greatest exposure came through their association in 1962 with the popular CBS television series The Beverly Hillbillies, for which they recorded the theme and incidental music. Many of their Mercury (1948–50) and Columbia (1951–69) recordings are still available. A key figure in the success of Flatt and Scruggs was Earl’s wife, Louise Certain Scruggs, who acted as the band’s booking agent and publicist, a role she performed for her husband until her death in 2006. In 1969 Flatt and Scruggs won a Grammy award for Scruggs’s instrumental “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” That same year they separated.

Earl began performing with sons Gary and Randy, and by 1972 they had organized as the Earl Scruggs Revue. With his banjo amplified, Earl fronted a band that featured country-rock repertoire and sound. The Revue (which eventually included another son, Steve) toured successfully throughout the 1970s, playing to younger, more urban audiences than those for which he and Flatt had performed. They recorded 16 albums for Columbia. By 1980 Scruggs was working as a single act, recording and appearing with various musicians, including the Dillards, Tom T. Hall, and Ricky Skaggs.

In 1971 Scruggs was closely involved with the conception and production of the award-winning album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which brought together members of the California rock group the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with pioneer Nashville musicians. In this and other activities he has shown an interest in bridging the social and musical gaps between the rural South of his youth and the urbanized world of his sons.

Scruggs was an inaugural inductee into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 1991. In 2002 he won a Grammy award for a new 2001 recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” the same song that garnered him the award in 1969. The 2001 song came from a collaborative album entitled Earl Scruggs and Friends, which featured performances from a diverse array of artists, including Elton John, Sting, and Johnny Cash. On 13 February 2003, Scruggs received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

NEIL V. ROSENBERG
Memorial University St. Johns, Newfoundland

Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (1985), in Stars of Country Music, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCullough (1975); Earl Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the Five-String Banjo (1968).

 

Seeger, Mike

(b. 1933) FOLK REVIVAL MUSICIAN AND FOLKLORIST.

Mike Seeger has arguably been the single figure most responsible for bringing traditional music of the American South to urban audiences around the world. Although other members of his illustrious family, especially his parents, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, and his half brother, Pete, have earned equal or greater renown for the varied aspects of their careers in American music, Mike’s undivided attention to championing authentic southern traditional music, and specifically its musical aspects rather than sociopolitical potential, secures his position as its premier ambassador.

Born on 15 August 1933 into one of America’s most important musical families, Mike Seeger was surrounded by music from his early childhood. His parents were among the most important early figures in the American art music world to develop a deep interest in American vernacular music. Charles Seeger started as a composer and conductor but went on to earn the title “Father of American Musicology.” Ruth Crawford was a preeminent woman composer of the early 20th century. Both became involved with the Library of Congress’s efforts to document traditional southern music, which was deemed threatened by the forces of modernization and commercialization. This music sounded throughout the Seeger household, and although Mike did not seriously approach learning to play a musical instrument until his teens, all the Seeger children participated in Saturday singings. Once he did get interested in learning the southern instrumental styles, starting with the autoharp, Mike soon mastered a number of instruments in a wide variety of playing styles, and he has continued to expand his instrumental arsenal over the ensuing decades. This includes banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, jaw harp, and quills.

By his early twenties, Mike Seeger had become a major force in bringing to the attention of urban audiences undiscovered or forgotten southern music greats. Some of the seminal albums of authentic southern music in the early stages of the 1950s and 1960s folk boom were produced by Seeger for Moses Asch’s Washington, D.C.–based Folk-ways records. These included American Banjo: Three-Finger and Scruggs Style (1957) and Mountain Music Bluegrass Style (1959)—two albums that augured the popular acceptance of bluegrass as a distinctive genre of southern acoustic string band music. Negro Folk Songs and Tunes (1957) introduced the highly influential Piedmont finger-style guitarist Elizabeth Cotton, who had been working as a domestic in the Seeger household. The Stoneman Family and Old Time Southern Music (1957) and McGee Brothers and Arthur Smith: Oldtimers of the Grand Ole Opry brought stalwarts of early hillbilly music to the attention of the nascent urban folk revival scene. And The Country Gentlemen (1959) and The Lilly Brothers and Don Stover (1961) documented the migration of bluegrass to northern cities. Through the peak years of the folk revival, Seeger organized concerts and tours that featured many forgotten southern legends. Among others, this list includes Eck Robertson, Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, Wade Ward, Kilby Snow, May-belle Carter, and Tommy Jarrell.

Meanwhile, having mastered a number of southern traditional musical styles, Mike Seeger also launched his performing and recording career. With Mike Cohen and Tom Paley, he formed the New Lost City Ramblers, likely that era’s most important urban folk revival string band and one that influenced countless urban youngsters to follow suit. The Ramblers countered the major trend in popular music circles—that of performing diluted, often sing-along, versions of southern traditional music as popularized by artists such as the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Equally important, and increasingly so after Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley in 1963, the Ramblers seamlessly integrated bluegrass with older musical styles, earning for blue-grass a sense of folk authenticity that many fastidious old-time and folk music enthusiasts were wary of according this commercial form. By the latter half of the 1960s, as folk music became integrated with electrified rock, it became difficult for a traditional musician to sustain a professional career as part of an acoustic string band, and Seeger increasingly concentrated on a solo career, which continues today. Along the way, there have been a number of collaborations, including reunion concerts with the Ramblers and one album with the Strange Creek Singers featuring Seeger, Schwarz, Hazel Dickens, Lamar Grier, and Seeger’s wife, Alice Gerrard.

Among many honors, Seeger has received four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, six Grammy award nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rex Foundation’s Ralph J. Gleason Award. For his extensive knowledge of southern music and culture, Seeger has been called upon to act as adviser to a number of agencies concerned with preserving southern traditional heritages, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Department of State, and the Smithsonian Institution. He has served on the board of directors for the Newport Folk Festival, the National Folk Festival, and the American Old Time Music Festival.

AJAY KALRA
University of Texas at Austin

Mark Greenberg, Sing Out! 38, no. 4 (1994); Dick Spottswood, Bluegrass Unlimited (May 1985).

 

Shape-Note Singing Schools

The singing school was early America’s most important musical institution. It offered a brief course in musical sight reading and choral singing, was taught by a singing master according to traditional methods, and used tunebooks, which were printed manuals containing instructions, exercises, and sacred choral music. Singing schools arose from British antecedents around 1700 as part of an effort to reform congregational singing in colonial churches.

In New England the movement grew quickly and culminated in the first school of American composers and in the publication of hundreds of sacred tunebooks (1770–1810). Singing schools existed in the South as early as 1710, when they are mentioned in the diary of William Byrd II of Virginia. The movement spread during the 18th century as a pious diversion among affluent planters along the Atlantic Seaboard. After the Revolutionary War, itinerant Yankee singing masters established singing schools in the inland and rural South. Both Andrew Law (1749–1821) of Connecticut and Lucius Chapin (1760–1842) of Massachusetts were teaching in Virginia by the 1780s; in 1794 Chapin moved to Kentucky, where he taught for 40 years. Singing schools offered young southerners a rare chance to socialize. Even today, many older southerners associate singing schools with their courting days.

The spread of singing schools through the South was aided by the invention of shape or patent notes. This system, first published by William Little and William Smith in The Easy Instructor (Philadelphia, 1801), used four distinctive note heads to indicate the four syllables denoting tones of a musical scale (fa, sol, la, and mi) then employed in vocal instruction, making unnecessary the pupil’s need to learn and memorize key signatures. Denounced by critics as uncouth, the simplified notation caught on in the South and West, where it became standard for sacred music publication. In 1816 Ananias Davisson (1780–1857) and Joseph Funk (1777–1862), both of Rockingham County, Va., became the first southern singing masters to compile and publish their own tunebooks. By 1860 more than 30 sacred tunebooks, all in shape notes, had been compiled by southerners, although many of these were printed outside the South, at Cincinnati or Philadelphia. One of the most popular of these was The Southern Harmony, by William Walker, of Spartanburg, S.C.: 600,000 copies were sold between 1835 and the beginning of the Civil War. The Sacred Harp (1844), by Georgia singing masters B. F. White and E. J. King, is still in print and is the basis of a flourishing musical tradition in six southern states.

Southern singing masters continued to teach the music of their Yankee predecessors but also introduced “folk hymns,” melodies from oral tradition, which they harmonized in a native idiom and set to sacred words. Many, including tunes for “Amazing Grace” and “How Firm a Foundation,” have remained popular and have become symbols of rural southern religion. Camp-meeting and revival songs with new refrains also formed part of the southern tunebook repertoire, especially after 1840. Southern singing masters established organizations such as the Southern Musical Association (1845) and the Chattahoochie Musical Association (1852, still active). These and other state and local conventions provided a forum where established teachers met to sing together, to examine and certify new teachers, and to demonstrate the accomplishments of their classes.

After the Civil War, singing schools and shape notes became increasingly identified with the South, while declining in popularity in other regions. Most teachers switched from the four-shape system to a seven-shape system to keep pace with new teaching methods. Leading singing masters established “normal schools” for the training of teachers. Periodicals such as The Musical Million (Dayton, Va., 1870–1915) helped to link teachers in many areas of the South. Small, cheap collections of music published every year began to supplant the large tunebooks, with their fixed repertoire. Although folk hymns and revival songs continued to be published, gospel hymns derived from urban models entered the southern tradition.

In the 20th century, singing schools have declined over most of the region but have survived in a few areas. They seldom last more than two weeks of evening classes, and may be as brief as one week. Pupils pay at least a token fee, but few teachers, if any, attempt to make a living as singing masters. Contemporary singing schools fall into three categories: (1) “Tunebook” schools are associated with surviving 19th-century books such as The Sacred Harp or The Christian Harmony. These schools preserve much of the 18th-century American repertoire and performance practice. (2) Denominational schools are sponsored by churches, especially by those (Primitive Baptist, Church of Christ) that prohibit instrumental music in their worship. These schools use denominational hymnals and, like their 18th-century predecessors, attempt to train skilled sight readers for congregational singing. (3) Shape-note gospel singing schools are associated with the “little-book” seven-shape gospel repertoire. These schools, often sponsored by local singing conventions or by publishing companies, have declined since mid-century as community “sings” have been replaced by quartet performances. All three types of singing schools are regarded by their adherents as important means of transmitting musical knowledge, skills, and traditions to future generations.

DAVID WARREN STEEL
University of Mississippi

Buell E. Cobb Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (1978); Harry Eskew, “Shape-Note Hymnody in the Shenandoah Valley, 1816–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1966); George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933).

 

Shore, Dinah

(1917–1994) ENTERTAINER.

Francis Rose Shore was born on 29 February 1917 in Winchester, Tenn., to Solomon and Anna Stein Shore, Jewish Russian immigrants who owned a dry goods store in the town. At the age of two, Shore was stricken with polio. Although her family managed to obtain excellent care for the child, she was left with a somewhat deformed foot and a limp. The Shore family moved to Nashville in 1925, and Francis Rose became active in school and in extracurricular activities, including cheerleading, sports, and music. The young woman’s activities became more focused on music, and by the time she graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1938 she had made her radio debut on WSM. Pursuing a career in music led Shore to New York City, where she auditioned frequently for radio shows, singing the song “Dinah.” Disc jockey Martin Block labeled her “the Dinah girl,” resulting in Shore’s stage name.

Shore became a singer on WNEW in New York, as well as on NBC in 1938, and signed a contract with RCA Victor in 1940. Her first starring show was the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, produced by NBC radio, and she joined Eddie Cantor’s radio program Time to Smile in 1941. As the decade progressed, Shore starred in her own radio programs for General Foods and Proctor & Gamble and entertained American troops in the European Theater of Operations. She also starred in many films, including Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), Belle of the Yukon (1944), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), and Fun and Fancy Free (1947). She starred in The Dinah Shore Show from 1951 to 1956 and The Dinah Shore Chevy Show from 1956 to 1963, becoming a rare entity in the entertainment industry, a woman with a variety show—and a successful one at that. In the 1970s Shore shifted her focus to numerous variety and talk shows, which she continued into the early 1990s. She was the recipient of Emmy awards in 1956, 1957, 1973, 1974, and 1976.

Dinah Shore was associated with the South throughout her career, due to her down-home, girl-next-door image and her accent. Her early recording of “Blues in the Night” established this image, and later recordings such as “Buttons and Bows” and “Pass the Jam, Sam” used it to create hits and a large following. Playing upon her southern identity also produced a laugh for The Carol Burnett Show in the skit “Went with the Wind,” when Shore portrayed the character Melanie from Gone with the Wind.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Shore came full circle back to Nashville when her final television shows were shown on TNN, the last being “Dinah Comes Home” (1991), in which she returned to the Grand Ole Opry. Shore died in Beverly Hills, Calif., on 24 February 1994.

RENNA TUTEN
University of Georgia

Bruce Cassidy, Dinah! A Biography (1979).

 

Silas Green Show

Silas Green from New Orleans was a traveling minstrel show that was owned, written, managed, and performed by black people. For over a half century (1907–58) the Silas Green Company toured urban and rural communities exclusively in the South and established itself as an institution among its black and white segregated audiences. Approximately ten months a year, six nights a week, the show traveled throughout Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The family-oriented comedy and musical show combined the theatrical traditions of minstrelsy and black musical comedy. White minstrelsy created the “blackface,” and the writers of Silas Green retained the use of the burnt cork makeup for the main characters of their show. The comedy, however, was acted out in the context of a loosely woven plot that had continuity—a break with minstrelsy that was pioneered by Cole and Johnson in 1898 with A Trip to Coontown, the first black musical comedy. The comic story of the Silas Green Show was interspersed with several chorus line numbers, one or two blues singers, and specialty acts that displayed a wide range of versatile talents. The musical sounds of Silas Green from New Orleans echoed the creative and innovative talents of black Americans. The band played ragtime, jazz, and swing tunes composed by southern and northern blacks, heralding and disseminating the music of its people throughout the South.

During the show’s most successful years, in the 1930s and 1940s, the troupe numbered up to 75, and the tent in which the production was performed nightly had the capacity to accommodate an audience of more than 2,500 people. Buses, automobiles, and a Pullman car were used to transport the troupe, for it was important in the hostile racial environment of the South that the show travel as a unit. Furthermore, most of the local black communities could not provide all of the sleeping and eating facilities for the members of the company. The Pullman car and trailers provided these necessities.

Throughout its existence, Silas Green from New Orleans was black owned and controlled. The first owner of the company was “Professor” Eph Williams, a former circus performer and owner. Eph Williams acquired the show known as the Jolly Ethiopians from S. H. Dudley Sr. and Salem Tutt Whitney and renamed it the Silas Green Company. After Williams’s death in 1921, Charles Collier, a protégé of Williams, bought the show and is credited with reorganizing and rejuvenating it. Collier died in 1942; his wife, Hortense, maintained the company until 1944 when she sold it to a partnership of Rodney Harris, Charles Morton, and Wilbur Jones. Jones soon bought out his partners and was the sole owner until he took it off the road in 1958. According to Jones, the three main factors contributing to the show’s demise were increased overhead expenses, the popularity of television, and heightened racial tensions in the South brought on by the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

Silas Green from New Orleans was probably the longest-running black-owned minstrel show in the United States. Noted personalities such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Dewey “Pig-meat” Markham, Mamie Smith, Nipsey Russell, Johnny Huggins, and the comedy team of Butterbeans and Susie were members of the cast for varying lengths of time.

ELEANOR J. BAKER
Bloomington, Indiana

Chicago Defender (2 July 1921, 24 June 1922, 16 April 1932); James W. Johnson, Black Manhattan (1968); John Johnson, Ebony (September 1954); Major Robinson, Our World (April 1949).

 

Smith, Bessie

(1894–1937) BLUES SINGER.

When Bessie Smith made her first recordings, in 1923, she carved out for herself a permanent niche in blues and jazz history. By that time, her magnificent voice, captured by the relatively primitive acoustical equipment of the day, was already well known and greatly admired throughout the South.

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., on 15 April 1894, Smith had her first show business experience when she was about eight: accompanied by her brother Andrew with his guitar, she danced and sang for small change on a Ninth Street corner. It was another brother, Clarence, who in 1912 arranged for her to join a traveling troupe led by Moses Stokes. With this company, which also included Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith launched her professional career.

Within a year Bessie Smith had left the Stokes troupe and started to build a faithful following among southern theater audiences, especially in Atlanta, where she became a regular attraction at the 81 Theater. In the 1920s, she rose to the pinnacle of her profession and became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day. So great was her popularity that her appearances caused serious traffic jams around theaters from Detroit to New Orleans. During eight years as an exclusive Columbia Records artist, she made 156 sides, some of which saved that company from bankruptcy, and all of which, over a half century later, are still in catalogs throughout the world.

Promotional hype dubbed her “Empress of the Blues,” and the title remains unchallenged, but Bessie Smith was not restricted to that idiom. She was, along with Louis Armstrong, the consummate jazz singer, and her majestic delivery became a major inspiration to such successful and diverse singers as Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Janis Joplin.

A victim of the Great Depression, new musical trends, and a changing entertainment scene, Bessie Smith saw her career plummet in the early 1930s, but it was on the upswing as the decade went into its last lap. Sadly, the great singer was not to enjoy the comeback that seemed inevitable in 1937, nor would she ever know the enormous impact of her artistry on American music. On 26 September 1937, as she traveled from Memphis for an appearance in Clarksdale, Miss., a car accident took her life. Her tragic death inspired contemporary playwright Edward Albee’s drama, The Death of Bessie Smith.

CHRIS ALBERTSON
New York, New York

Chris Albertson, Bessie (1972); Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998); Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (1996); Alexandria Manera, Bessie Smith (2003).

 

Southern Culture on the Skids

ROCK BAND.

A little bit silly, a little bit raunchy, and a whole lot of fun, Southern Culture on the Skids, or SCOTS, as it is known to its fans, has been a popular and influential band since the mid-1980s. Guitarist and singer Rick Miller cofounded the group in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 1985, partly as a protest against the alternative southern rock of R.E.M. and others, as well as the heavily commercialized pop and country then dominating the airwaves. By 1988 the group had re-formed as a trio when Miller, the principal songwriter, joined up with singer and bassist Mary Huff and drummer Dave Hartman. In this configuration, SCOTS has released numerous extended-play albums and singles and at least 10 full-length albums, including the 1996 commercial success Dirt Track Date. Though still based in Chapel Hill, the band has made its living mostly by touring, and it is primarily through its wacky, high-energy concerts that SCOTS has built its strong and loyal fan base in the South, and across North America.

Growing up in North Carolina, Miller was exposed to country singers like Roger Miller and Tammy Wynette by his father, who had a business building mobile homes. Miller also spent time with his mother in southern California, where he discovered punk, surf, and rockabilly. Huff and Hartman both hail from Virginia, where they each played in a number of different bands, ranging from country to hard rock to punk and rockabilly. These influences inform the group’s unique combination of roots rock, swamp rock, rockabilly, surf, traditional country, and 1960s “countrypolitan” musical styles.

The band’s philosophy has always been to create music that is fun and that gets people on their feet, and its live shows have become legendary for their fast pace and audience participation. During the song “Eight Piece Box”—which is ostensibly about fried chicken but is riddled with double entendres—the band members throw fried chicken into the crowd and invite people onto the stage to eat and dance. For dessert, they sometimes toss moon pies or pass around a big bowl of banana pudding. And they often stage limbo contests or get audience members to wrestle each other while wearing Mexican wrestler masks.

As its name suggests, the band typically sings about the seedier parts of southern life, including trailer parks, cheap motels, honky-tonks, muscle cars, and drive-ins (in 2002 it provided the music for the gore film Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat). In addition to singing about sex (as in “Ditch Diggin’” and “Camel Walk,” which is about a fetish for snack crackers), the band celebrates the pleasures of dancing (“Soul City” and “I Learned to Dance in Mississippi”), drunkenness (“Liquored Up and Lacquered Down”), moonshine (“Corn Liquor”), southern food (“Too Much Pork for Just One Fork”), and mobile homes (“Doublewide” and “My House Has Wheels”). It also incorporates southern kitsch into its image, with Miller usually dressing in bib overalls or white loafers and Bermuda shorts, Hartman wearing skinny-brim straw hats, and Huff sporting a beehive hairdo and Capri pants or a vinyl miniskirt.

The group has inspired numerous bands across the country to exploit the stereotypes of white-trash culture for shock value and comedy. Yet SCOTS owes its widespread appeal and staying power to its distinctive blend of satire and affection, for it celebrates what it also laughs at. As captured in the chorus “white trash—don’t call me that,” it identifies with all aspects of southern culture, even as it cultivates a certain detachment, making it impossible to tell where parody becomes homage and vice versa. Miller calls this brand of humor “surruralism,” and on top of bringing musical success to SCOTS, it also places it squarely within the literary traditions of important southern writers like Flannery O’Connor, whom it often cites as a major influence.

MICHAEL P. BIBLER
University of Manchester

Michael Canning, St. Petersburg Times (16 January 1998); Roger Catlin, Chicago Sun-Times (31 May 1996); Randy Harward, Salt Lake City Weekly (4 October 2001); Eddie Huffman, Option (February 1996); Jason MacNeil, Country Standard Time (February 2007); Chris Morris, Billboard (8 July 1995); Nick Rogers, State Journal-Register (Springfield, Ill.) (7 July 2005).

 

Spears, Britney

(b. 1981) POP SINGER.

It is unlikely that those holding the keys to the Valhalla of Southern Music are ever going to let Britney Spears do more than loiter in the lobby. In part, this reflects conflicts over the definition and boundaries of “southern music,” particularly whether the pop style Spears has ridden to fame can count in any meaningful way as southern. But her fans and critics at the vernacular level settled the matter in the affirmative long ago. For them it is the arc of her life and the constellation of her values, rather than the qualities of her music, that reveal the outline of an enduring South.

Born in 1981 in Kentwood, La., Spears pursued a performing career from an early age. Local beauty pageants and talent shows and later appearances off-Broadway and on The New Mickey Mouse Show all moved her slowly up the career ladder. But it was not until 1998 that she hit pay dirt of staggering proportions. In her debut single “. . . Baby One More Time” and in the accompanying music video, Spears struck the same cultural nerve Elvis had twanged generations earlier, combining an intriguing and volatile mix of come-on sexuality and charming southern innocence. Critics and fans arrived at wildly different plots for her along the southern belle curve, but both sides were convinced that wriggling before them was the latest manifestation of that perpetually beguiling creature, the Southern Woman. For a time, fans savored the sweet country girl image she cultivated, and Spears melted skeptical journalists with a down-home personality softened by a Dixie accent, impeccable manners, and frequent references to her Southern Baptist faith. “Pop’s reigning queen,” cooed Teen People in the summer of 1999, “is first and foremost a nice Southern girl.”

Over the next few years, however, critics served giant feasts of crow. From the debut of her controversial first music video, in which she made naughty with the camera wearing a cinched-up schoolgirl uniform, they had insisted that her cute southern style was all flummery concealing a white-trash sensibility. Subsequent albums, videos, and events provided skeptics increasing satisfaction, diving as Spears did into ever raunchier territory. Indeed, the red latex catsuit for “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” in 2000 formed only a mild prelude to her strutting around in a bodysuit intended to make her look naked, French-kissing Madonna on national television, and, in a kind of coup de grâce, ending a Las Vegas evening in 2004 with a 55-hour wedding to an old Kentwood pal. Numerous marital, parenting, and fashion gaffes, vicious public fights with Mama, periodic rumors of substance abuse, unflattering paparazzi photos, and an escalating tempo of bizarre behavior have rocketed her into the firmament of a popular culture studded with celebrities derided as wealthy white trash.

Yet what sets Britney Spears apart from her dubious companions, aside from the astonishing figure of 31 million albums sold in the United States alone, is a Louisiana childhood that surfaces regularly among Britney-watchers as an explanation for almost everything good and bad about her life. Thus, though her music is perhaps in no recognizable way southern, she still has earned her place as one of the most widely recognized southerners in contemporary popular culture.

GAVIN JAMES CAMPBELL
Doshisha University

Gavin James Campbell, in Pop Perspectives: Readings to Critique Contemporary Culture, ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale (2008), Southern Cultures (Winter 2001).

 

Stax Records

From a meager and tentative start in 1959 as Satellite Records, by the mid-1960s Stax had become the record label most responsible for defining the commercially successful and widely influential “Memphis Sound.” Although Memphis, as one of the most significant cultural crossroads in the South, had supported a number of vibrant live music scenes throughout the foregoing part of the 20th century and the city’s hybrid sounds had received their first major national exposure when artists initially recorded by Sam Phillips left Memphis for greener pastures, it was Stax and its alumnus Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio that sent Memphis-recorded music to the top of the national pop charts. Stax, with its gritty, muscular “southern soul” or “deep soul” sound, provided an uncompromised rootsy counterpoint to northern-urban black-pop crossover attempts by Motown and soul crooners such as Sam Cooke and Ben E. King.

Its sound and success also shaped the trajectory of the Muscle Shoals–area recorded music, an equally successful and influential southern sound. Booker T. & the MG’s, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett became and have remained household names, and Stax’s 1960s sound was famously commemorated for successive generations in the 1981 movie The Blues Brothers and its sequel Blues Brothers 2000.

Although Stax struggled to stay afloat in racially torn Memphis after Martin Luther King’s assassination and finally folded in 1976, it was not before hitting a second stylistic and commercial peak with psychedelic soul and funk. The premier exponent of that sound, Isaac Hayes, won multiple Grammy awards and an Oscar in 1972 for his score for the classic blaxploitation movie Shaft and set the tone for black popular music for at least the next decade.

Booker T. & the MG’s (Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis)

In 1957 Jim Stewart, a banker and an erstwhile country fiddler, started the Satellite record label in his wife’s uncle’s garage in Memphis. Next, convincing his older sister, Estelle Axton, to invest in a recording venture by mortgaging her house, he bought an Ampex monaural recorder and moved to a deserted grocery store in Brunswick, 30 miles east of Memphis. Finding little talent in the small community, Satellite rented the erstwhile Capitol movie theater at 924 East McLemore Avenue in Memphis and rechristened it Soulsville U.S.A. LaGrange, Ga.–born white guitarist, songwriter, and producer Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman helped in securing that deal and proved integral to the fledgling operation before leaving to work at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals and later his own American Studios back in Memphis.

Satellite did not have a focus on black music until the company’s first break came, with WDIADJ Rufus Thomas recording “Cause I Love You” with his daughter Carla. The regional popularity of the record led New York’s Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler to offer Satellite a purportedly distribution-only deal. Carla Thomas next scored the studio’s first national hit with her self-composed “Gee Whiz.” Wexler signed the teenaged Thomas to his own Atlantic label on which he also released the song, thus starting an arrangement through which important Atlantic-signed artists, many from the North, would record at Stax and later also at Muscle Shoals area studios and at Chips Moman’s Memphis-based American Sound Studio. Such arrangements became a significant route for southern sounds to enter the popular mainstream.

Satellite’s next hit came in July 1961 with the Mar-Keys’ instrumental “Last Night.” Released initially on Satellite, the record shot to No. 2 on the national pop charts. Threats of litigation by another company with the same name prompted the new name “Stax,” from the initial letters of Stewart’s and Axton’s last names. Controversy surrounds the details of which musicians were featured on the spliced-together record, but the band that toured in the wake of its popularity was all white and featured seven members, two of whom, guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, would soon constitute half of the most famous studio house band in American popular music, Booker T. & the MG’s. Booker T. Washington and Al Jackson Jr., organist and drummer, respectively, were the earliest African American musicians to play sessions at Stax and formed the other half of that legendary combo. The Mar-Keys’ Wayne Jackson partnered with Andrew Love to form the Memphis Horns. Over the next six years, both in the studio and on the road, Booker T. & the MG’s and the Memphis Horns, and often the reconstituted Mar-Keys and the Bar-Kays, backed numerous Stax and Atlantic acts that appeared on regional and national pop charts with increasing frequency. Among these were Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, William Bell, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, Johnnie Taylor, and Albert King. Additionally, the exceptional success of the MG’s as an individual recording act inspired many studio backup bands, including the Bar-Kays, War, and MFSB, to launch individual careers and encouraged studio musicians to form “supergroups” such as Stuff and Fourplay. Keyboardist, composer, and arranger Isaac Hayes and lyricist David Porter constituted a major songwriting and production team at Stax during this period, especially for Sam & Dave.

The year 1968 proved a landmark in Stax’s history. In February, Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” overdubbed and released posthumously after Redding’s plane crash in December 1967, became Stax’s first pop chart topper. The racial tensions resulting from the April assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and Atlantic Records’ decision to end its partnership with Stax, taking with it all the recorded masters, sent the company into a tailspin. Stax was eventually sold for over two million dollars to the Paramount Pictures subsidiary Gulf-Western. Estelle Axton exited the picture, and African American executive vice president Al Bell, who had been hired in 1965, took increasing charge of the company.

Bell and Stewart borrowed money from Deutsche Grammophon to buy back Stax in 1970 and negotiated a distribution deal with Columbia. Although the 1964–67 period is remembered as Stax’s creative zenith, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers found artistic and exceptional commercial success with their updated sounds during the post-1968 period. It must be noted, however, that Stax often sent its artists down to Muscle Shoals to record, and, among others, the Staples’ hit “I’ll Take You There” was recorded at the Muscle Shoals Sound studio for Stax. Other successful Stax acts from this period include Mel and Tim, Little Milton, the Soul Children, the Emotions, the reconstituted Bar-Kays, the Dramatics, Shirley Brown, and gospel singer Rance Allen. In 1972 Al Bell bought Stewart’s share in the company; Stewart continued as chief executive, however. Under Bell, Stax attempted to diversify, investing in a Broadway play, signing black comedian Richard Pryor to the new Partee subsidiary, and even recording an album by the Rev. Jesse Jackson on the Respect subsidiary. One of the company’s most ambitious projects was August 1972’s WattStax concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during the Watts Summer Festival. The multiagency benefit event featured all the main artists on Stax’s roster and was attended by an audience of over 100,000—and comparisons to Woodstock were made.

Al Bell and Johnny Baylor, a black New York record executive Bell had hired in 1968, had drastically different approaches—and not always aboveboard—to running the now-multimillion-dollar empire, contrasting with the amicable family-business environment of the early years. Through increasing legal problems and multiple federal investigations starting in 1973, the label continued recording, albeit with decreasing commercial success; only the Staple Singers charted in the Top 20 in its last three years. Based on petitions filed by creditors, a bankruptcy court shut down the Stax operation in January 1976. Although an environment of rapidly changing musical tastes precluded any subsequent historic landmarks for its remaining alumni—save perhaps actor Richard Pryor, Steve Cropper, and later Isaac Hayes—Stax’s place in American popular music had long been secured.

AJAY KALRA
University of Texas at Austin

Rob Bowman, Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (1997); James Dickerson, Goin’ Back to Memphis: A Century of Blues, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Glorious Soul (1996); Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986; rev. ed., 1999).

 

Still, William Grant

(1895–1978) MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER.

Known as the “dean of Afro-American composers,” William Grant Still spent more than 50 years composing, conducting, and playing music that reflected a fusion of his spiritual and musical imagination, his diverse ethnic ancestry, and 20th-century American culture.

His mother came from black, Spanish, Indian, and Irish stock and his father from black, Indian, and Scotch stock. Still was born on 11 May 1895, on a Woodville, Miss., plantation near the Mississippi River. He lived there only nine months before his father, a teacher and bandleader, died. His mother moved the family to Little Rock, Ark., where she began teaching. When Still was nine, his mother married a postal clerk, who entered Still’s life with a Victrola and opera records. The voice of Still’s maternal grandmother filled their home with spirituals. He later wrote, “I knew neither wealth nor poverty, for I lived in a comfortable middle class home.”

Still left home to study at Wilber-force University. His mother wanted him to be a physician, but Still had already taught himself to play the violin and wanted to be a musician. He left Wilberforce for the navy during World War I, eventually returning, against his mother’s wishes, to study music at Oberlin College. He worked as a young musician with W. C. Handy in Memphis and New York, played the oboe in Eubie Blake’s band, and orchestrated for Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw. In the 1920s he studied composition with George W. Chadwick at the New England Conservatory and in New York with the French ultramodernist Edgard Varèse, who led Still into a dissonant, melodic, and traditional style, reflecting his black heritage. “I made an effort to elevate the folk idiom into symphonic form,” Still said. Two Guggenheim Fellowships in the 1930s allowed him to concentrate on composition.

As a black man, Still achieved many “firsts.” He wrote the theme for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He conducted wor’s all-white radio orchestra in New York. In 1931, when composer Howard Hanson conducted Still’s Afro-American Symphony in Rochester, N.Y., Still became the first African American to have written a symphony performed by a major orchestra. In 1936 he was the first black to conduct a major orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and two decades later, leading the New Orleans Symphony, he became the first black to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South.

During the 1940s, when he wrote “And They Lynched Him on a Tree” and “In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy,” his works sounded a social conscience theme. For violin and piano, he wrote Peruvian and Mexican ballads. His operas, with librettos often written by his wife, Verna Arvey, told of Haiti, Spanish colonial America, Africa, and roadside, gasstation life in America. Poet Langston Hughes wrote the libretto for Still’s Troubled Island. Still lived in Los Angeles, and Hollywood benefited from his presence. He arranged for Columbia and Warner Brothers and wrote the scores for the Perry Mason and Gun-smoke television series and for the films Lost Horizons and Pennies from Heaven.

In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowships, Still received honorary degrees and many awards. In 1974 Still’s opera A Bayou Legend premiered in Jackson, Miss., and Governor Bill Waller named Still a “distinguished Mississippian.” Though not a churchgoer, on every composition he wrote, “With humble thanks to God, the Source of inspiration.” At age 83, on 3 December 1978, Still died in Los Angeles from a heart ailment.

BERKLEY HUDSON
Providence, Rhode Island

Catherine Reef, William Grant Still: African-American Composer (2003); Catherine Parsons Smith, William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions (2000); Judith Anne Still, ed., William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music (2d ed., 1995); Judith Anne Still, Michael J. Dabrishus, and Carolyn L. Quin, William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography (1996).

 

String Band Tradition

Primarily a mid-19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, string bands have been, and continue to be, one of the South’s major folk music ensemble forms. They derive from both Anglo- and African American musical cultures, although they are more frequently associated with whites than with blacks. String bands consist of a number of musicians, generally from three to six, most of whom play acoustic stringed instruments. The fiddle, present in the South from the earliest days of colonization, and the banjo, an instrument that developed in the 19th century from African roots, are typically the core instruments, usually joined by at least one guitar, an instrument that grew in popularity during the early years of the 20th century. These are the major instruments, but it is not uncommon to find others, including the mandolin, string bass, and piano. If there are vocalists—and there usually are—they are inevitably also instrumentalists.

A string band usually has in its repertoire a large number of tunes for square dancing, songs generally representative of the broad corpus of southern folk song, and recent country hit songs. The music is infectious, with fiddles speeding through the melody, propelled by a banjo played in various old-time “rapping” or “knocking” or up-picking styles and a guitar or two accentuating the beat with chords and, perhaps, connecting runs. Instrumental styles tend to be regionally defined. Singing is generally solo, although more modern harmonic vocal techniques are used increasingly.

String bands dominated the first decade of country music recordings, indicating the music’s deep-seated ties to and familiarity within local communities. Groups had such colorful names as the Skillet Lickers, Dr. Smith’s Champion Hoss Hair Pullers, Fisher Hendley and his Aristocratic Pigs, and Seven Foot Dilly and his Dill Pickles.

By the mid- and late 1930s, though, the form had become less profitable for the record companies. Bands continued to be part of their communities, playing for such occasions as dances, picnics, and house parties. Their influence continues, providing a substantial foundation for string-based musical styles such as bluegrass and western swing. Many of the old “hillbilly” records from the 1920s and 1930s have been reissued and are available on releases by independent record companies, as well as a few major-label compilations.

Starting in the 1950s, revivalist musicians, generally from outside the South, began first re-creating the music and then, later, in some cases, using the music as inspiration for more contemporary performance styles. This interest spread across the nation and abroad, and, although modest in size, it has proven tenacious. Ironically, the string band revival was at first slow to come to the South, but that is no longer the case. Visit any of the major fiddlers competitions, and you are likely to see musicians from many parts of the nation, including younger southern players who are drawn to a music that once seemed in danger of vanishing.

BURT FEINTUCH
University of New Hampshire

Bob Carlin, String Bands in the North Carolina Piedmont (2004); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (2d rev. ed., 2002), Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (1994), Southern Music—American Music (1979); Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (1977).

 

Stuart, Marty

(b. 1958) COUNTRY SINGER.

Musical prodigy, singer, songwriter, record producer, writer, photographer, raconteur, artifact collector, and archivist, Marty Stuart is among the most versatile figures in modern country music. He was born John Marty Stuart in Philadelphia, Miss., on 30 September 1958. Drawn to gospel, bluegrass, and country music almost from infancy, Stuart was already a skillful mandolin and guitar player by the age of 12, at which time bluegrass music icon Lester Flatt hired him for his band. After the ailing Flatt disbanded his group in 1978, Stuart toured with fiddler Vassar Clements and guitarists Doc and Merle Watson. Next he joined Johnny Cash’s band, where he remained until starting his own solo career in 1985. He also married Cash’s daughter, Cindy, a marriage that lasted only until 1988.

From his boyhood, Stuart had squirreled away country music memorabilia in his room. As his income grew and his contact with his musical heroes intensified, he became a more systematic collector of costumes, instruments, letters, song manuscripts, photos, and related material. He acquired a trove of Hank Williams artifacts so imposing that the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum borrowed it for an exhibition. Later, Stuart’s array, which he labeled Sparkle & Twang, was displayed at the Tennessee State Museum. Stuart also developed a passion for wearing and collecting the ornately decorated Nudie and Manuel stage costumes long favored by such traditional country acts as Porter Wagoner and Little Jimmy Dickens. The flashy dress and tall “rooster comb” hair became Stuart trademarks.

Stuart released his first album, Marty, with a Little Help from His Friends, in 1977. It did not gain him much critical attention, but the follow-up collection, Busy Bee Café, in 1982, did. Critics loved it. Stuart signed with Columbia Records in the mid-1980s but failed to chart any substantial hits there. He had better luck with his next label, MCA, where he scored five Top 10s, including “Hillbilly Rock,” “Tempted,” and “Burn Me Down.” His 1991 duet with Travis Tritt, “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’,” won them both a Grammy for best country vocal collaboration.

In 1992 Stuart became a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Five years later, he married fellow Opry star Connie Smith. Rutledge Hill Press published his annotated book of photographs, Pilgrims: Sinners, Saints, and Prophets, in 1999. The next year Stuart produced the sound track album for the Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz movie All the Pretty Horses.

Stuart became increasingly busy as a producer after the turn of the century, masterminding records for Billy Bob Thornton, Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, Andy Griffith, Kathy Mattea, and Porter Wagoner, among others. In 2007 he published his second photo book, Country Music: The Masters.

EDWARD MORRIS
Former country music editor of Billboard

Marty Stuart, Country Music: The Masters (2007), Pilgrims: Sinners, Saints, and Prophets (1999).

 

Sun Records

Sun Records was established in 1952 by Sam Phillips as the primary record label for commercial releases from that pioneering producer’s Memphis Recording Service (founded in 1949). By the mid-1950s, Sun Records, based in Memphis, had emerged as arguably the most significant recording company of that era—and indeed it stands as among the most influential independent recording companies in the history of American popular music. Sun Records played a major role in the evolution of four genres of American music: blues, rhythm and blues, country (through the label’s invention of the country music subgenre known as “rockabilly”), and, perhaps most crucially, rock and roll.

Elvis Presley’s version of “Mystery Train,” recorded at Sun Records and released on 20 August 1955 as the B-side of “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” (Charles Reagan Wilson Collection, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi)

Best known as the label that issued the initial recordings of Elvis Presley, Sun Records also released the earliest recordings of such legendary musicians as Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich. Other noteworthy musicians who recorded for Sun (and for Phillips International, an affiliated label) included bluesmen Little Walter, Little Milton, and James Cotton; rhythm-and-blues acts Little Junior Parker, Rufus Thomas, and Roscoe Gordon; country performers Harmonica Frank, Charlie Feathers, and Jack Clement; rockabilly pioneers Billy Riley, Sonny Burgess, and Warren Smith; and rock-and-roll instrumentalist Bill Justis.

Born 5 January 1923, Samuel Cornelius Phillips grew up outside Florence, Ala., the youngest of eight children. His parents lost virtually all their savings after the 1929 Wall Street crash, and the family remained poor through the Great Depression. During his teenage years, Phillips played music and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. In the early 1940s his father died, and he was compelled to quit high school to earn money for the family. Choosing radio as his profession, Phillips studied audio engineering at Alabama Polytechnical Institute in Auburn and was later hired as a radio announcer by station WLAY in Muscle Shoals, Ala. In 1942 he married Rebecca Burns from the nearby city of Sheffield. Over the next few years, Phillips worked for a succession of radio stations: WMSL (Decatur, Ala.), WLAC (Nashville), and WREC (Memphis). At WREC, he prerecorded his shows, which led him to develop strong radio production skills and an extensive knowledge of commercial recordings, particularly those featuring music by African American musicians.

In 1949, excited by the music he heard performed in and near Memphis, Phillips decided to establish the Memphis Recording Service (the first successful recording studio in that city). Renting a small building in Memphis at 706 Union Avenue and borrowing money for the purchase of equipment, Phillips printed a business card that proclaimed “we record anything—anywhere—anytime.” Many of the initial recordings from Phillips’s studio were 16-inch acetate discs cut at 78 rpm, though by 1952 he was using magnetic tape during recording sessions. Phillips leased most of the earliest recordings he produced in his studio—mostly of black musicians—to various labels. For instance, he sold the master recording of Jackie Brenston’s influential 1951 hit “Rocket 88,” as well as recordings by Chester Burnett (aka Howlin’ Wolf), to the Chicago-based label Chess Records. By early 1952, Phillips decided to release his recordings on his own label. (He named this label Sun Records because, as he was quoted as saying, “the sun . . . was a universal kind of thing. A new day, a new opportunity.”)

Through experimentation in his studio, Phillips, by the mid-1950s, had discovered Sun Records’ signature production sound, achieved in part through employing a duo recording machine system to produce an echo known as “slapback” and in part through using sound transformers to generate distinctively warm tones.

Phillips had established the Memphis Recording Service in order to record black as well as white musicians from the Memphis area. “My aim was to try and record the blues and other music I liked,” he once stated. He endeavored to preserve the music he liked, but Phillips also hoped to find new listeners for that music, stating that “I knew, or I felt I knew, that there was a bigger audience for blues than just the black man of the mid-South.” This hunch led Phillips—who was alleged to have said, “If I could only find a white boy who could sing like a Negro I could make me a million dollars”—to attempt to produce a newly blended music that combined elements of both black and white musical tradition. Catching the producer’s attention as possibly that “white boy” was a young singer who came to Phillips’s studio during the summer of 1953 to make a vanity recording. Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, Miss., but living in Memphis, was still a teenager when he first patronized the Memphis Recording Service, and Phillips nurtured Presley’s rapid artistic development, encouraging the singer to record diverse songs from several musical genres—ranging from blues (Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right”), to rhythm and blues (Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train”), to bluegrass (Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”), to mainstream pop (“I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” originally recorded by Patti Page and Dean Martin). Five Presley singles were issued by Sun Records through the summer of 1955, after which time Phillips sold Presley’s contract to RCA Records for $35,000. The singer’s Sun releases (along with Presley’s early RCA singles)—featuring Presley’s exciting and keenly interpretive vocals set against a background of propulsive yet spare instrumental accompaniment composed of electric lead guitar, acoustic rhythm guitar, upright bass, and, sometimes, drums—revolutionized American popular music. A number of Phillips’s subsequent 1950s-era productions for Sun—including such national hits as Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” (1955), Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” (1956), and Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” (1957)—likewise inspired a generation of musicians (whether American or British or from other parts of the world) to embrace rock-and-roll music—and, inevitably, rock-and-roll attitude, which encompassed such qualities as individuality and emotional freedom.

All of Sun Records’ best-known “stars” had left the label by 1963 for more lucrative contracts with major recording companies, and Phillips struggled to keep the small, independent label alive. The final Sun recording—a single by the group Load of Mischief—was released in January 1968, and in July 1969 Phillips sold Sun Records to Shelby Singleton, a Louisiana-based businessman. In the 1970s, Singleton reissued the Sun recordings produced by Phillips on an offshoot label called Sun International; that label also released new recordings by such revivalist acts as Sleepy LaBeef and Jimmy Ellis (aka Orion). After selling Sun Records, Sam Phillips essentially retired from the music industry. Over the next three decades, Phillips managed other business interests, yet he was increasingly recognized for his achievements with Sun Records during the 1950s. For example, Phillips was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 1986) and into the Country Music Hall of Fame (in 2001). He died of respiratory failure in Memphis on 30 July 2003.

TED OLSON
East Tennessee State University

Colin Escott, with Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll (1991); Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994).

 

Swamp Pop

A distinct rock-and-roll subgenre, swamp pop music combines New Orleans–style rhythm and blues, country-and-western music, and Cajun and black Creole music; it is indigenous to south Louisiana and a small part of east Texas. Swamp pop appeared during the mid- to late 1950s when teenage Cajun and black Creole musicians experimented with modern pop music elements. In doing so they unwittingly fused the sounds of artists like Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard with south Louisiana’s ethnic music traditions.

The swamp pop sound is typified by highly emotional vocals, simple, unaffected, and occasionally bilingual (English and Cajun French) lyrics, honkytonk pianos, bellowing sax sections, and a strong rhythm-and-blues back-beat. Upbeat compositions often possess the bouncy rhythms of Cajun and black Creole two-steps, and their lyrics frequently convey the local color and joie de vivre spirit that pervades south Louisiana. Slow, melancholic swamp pop ballads, however—with their tripleting keyboards, undulating bass lines, climactic turnarounds, and dramatic breaks—exhibit a despondency common to many traditional Cajun and black Creole compositions, born generations ago of widespread poverty, hard living, and the loneliness of rural existence.

Classics of the swamp pop genre include Dale and Grace’s “I’m Leaving It Up to You,” Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear,” Freddy Fender’s “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” Phil Phillips’s “Sea of Love,” and Jimmy Clanton’s “Just a Dream,” all national Top 10 hits. Of these, the first three reached No. 1 on national charts. Over 20 swamp pop recordings have broken into the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958. In swamp pop’s birthplace, however, fans and artists regard many obscure songs as essential to the genre’s repertoire. These standards include such regional favorites as Clint West’s “Big Blue Diamonds,” Tommy McLain’s “Sweet Dreams,” Randy and the Rockets’ “Let’s Do the Cajun Twist,” Johnnie Allan’s “South to Louisiana,” Rod Bernard’s “This Should Go on Forever,” and Cookie and the Cupcakes’ “Mathilda,” the latter of which is considered the unofficial anthem of swamp pop.

From its rural south Louisiana origins, swamp pop went on to exert an influence on popular music both in the United States and abroad. (The term “swamp pop” was actually coined by British music writer Bill Millar around 1970 and was popularized in the genre’s homeland by his compatriot and fellow music writer John Broven.) Notable swamp pop–influenced tunes include Bill Haley and the Comets’ rerecording of Bobby Charles’s “Later Alligator,” the Rolling Stones’ version of Barbara Lynn’s “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” the Honeydrippers’ rendition of “Sea of Love,” and the Beatles’ original composition “Oh! Darling,” which exudes the swamp pop ballad sound. (Contrary to popular belief, artists like Dale Hawkins, Tony Joe White, and Creedence Clearwater Revival did not perform swamp pop music, nor do they appear to have been influenced by the sound.)

Although live swamp pop music can still be heard in south Louisiana and east Texas nightclubs and sometimes at regional festivals, the sound tends to be overshadowed today by its Cajun and zydeco sister genres, and it is often ignored by preservationists.

SHANE K. BERNARD
Avery Island, Louisiana

Shane K. Bernard, Southern Cultures (Fall/Winter 1996), Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (1996); John Broven, South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous (1993).

 

Sweeney, Joel Walker

(c. 1810–1860) MUSICIAN.

Until recently “Joe” Sweeney enjoyed legendary status as the “inventor” of the five-string banjo. As a boy Sweeney learned to play the banjo from slaves on his father’s farm, where he was born, near present-day Appomattox, Va. According to the legend, he improved their African-derived instrument by fashioning a wooden hoop to replace the original gourd body and, more important, by adding (around 1831) a short, high-pitched fifth (or thumb) string to the original four. The long-held claim that he thus invented the five-string banjo is supported by little documentary evidence, and recent informed opinion challenges it, primarily on the basis of illustrations clearly showing that some slave banjos had short thumb strings well before Sweeney was born. Slave banjos were undoubtedly quite variable in form, so Sweeney’s real claim to fame is that he so popularized the particular form he grew up with that it became the standard. He was certainly the first documented white banjo player.

In the 1830s he traveled widely in the South, performing, in blackface, the music of his black mentors; and he became a mentor himself, apparently teaching a number of the early, influential minstrel banjo players. In the 1840s he became a national celebrity, performing first with circuses and then with minstrel shows in northern cities. Between 1843 and 1845 he toured and performed in England, reputedly including a performance for Queen Victoria. His brother, Sam, also an accomplished banjo player, was Jeb Stuart’s personal minstrel during the Civil War. Joel Sweeney played a critical role in making the banjo an important and permanent part of southern music, especially in initiating and encouraging its widespread use by whites.

ROBERT B. WINANS
Wayne State University

Gene Bluestein, Western Folklore (Winter 1964); Burke Davis, Iron Worker (Autumn 1969); Scott Odell, in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 2, ed. Stanley Sadie (1980); Arthur Woodward, Los Angeles County Museum Quarterly (Spring 1949).

 

Taylor, Koko

(b. 1935) BLUES SINGER.

Koko Taylor, born Cora Walton on a farm near Memphis, Tenn., to share-cropping parents, developed an early love for music, particularly for what she heard in church and on B. B. King’s Memphis radio show. Although her parents preferred her interest in gospel music, Taylor and her five siblings covertly made instruments and played blues music together. The young Taylor was especially influenced by and favored earlier blues queens, such as Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton.

In the early 1950s Taylor moved to Chicago and began working as a domestic, but at night she regularly went to blues clubs and often was invited to sit in with well-established bands. It was in just such circumstances that blues song writer Willie Dixon discovered Taylor in 1962, and within just a few years Taylor signed a contract with Chess Records and recorded several albums, which included singles written by both herself and Dixon.

Taylor emerged as a blues power-house in the 1970s, touring and playing at festivals, at which she shared the stage with the likes of B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and Muddy Waters. In 1975 she signed with Alligator Records and remains with the company today. The albums Taylor has recorded with Alligator include I Got What It Takes (1975), The Earthshaker (1978), From the Heart of a Woman (1981), Queen of the Blues (1985), Live from Chicago (1987), Jump for Joy (1990), Force of Nature (1993), Royal Blue (2000), and Deluxe Edition (2002), six of which have been nominated for a Grammy.

Taylor has been featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Living Blues, as well as on television programs, and has appeared in several films, including Blues Brothers 2000. Additionally, the blues community has repeatedly and consistently honored Taylor and her work. Taylor has been awarded the W. C. Handy Award (renamed the Blues Music Award in 2006) 25 times, more than any other female artist, for the categories of Contemporary Blues Female Artist, Entertainer of the Year, Female Artist, Traditional Blues Female Artist, and Vocalist of the Year. Taylor has also received a Grammy award and a Blues Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as numerous other awards, and she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1997.

Taylor’s overwhelming success in a male-dominated industry has earned her the praise of blues critics, who hail her as the currently reigning “Queen of the Blues,” placing her in a long tradition of blues queens with the likes of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Additionally, Taylor’s empowering lyrics and strong vocal style have influenced many younger female blues artists, including Shemekia Copeland and Bonnie Raitt.

AMY SCHMIDT
University of Mississippi

Barbara O’Dair, ed., Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock (1997).

 

Tharpe, Sister Rosetta

(1921–1973) GOSPEL SINGER.

Born Rosetta Nubin on 20 March 1921, in Cotton Plant, Ark., Sister Rosetta Tharpe is considered one of the greatest gospel singers of her generation. She was a flamboyant stage performer whose music also flirted with the blues and jazz genres. Billed as “Little Rosetta Nubin, the pint-sized singing and guitar playing miracle,” Tharpe began performing at age four. She accompanied her mother, Church of God in Christ evangelist Katie Bell Nubin, who played mandolin and preached at tent revivals throughout the South. The elder Nubin was a traveling missionary and shouter in the classic tradition. She was known on the gospel circuit as “Mother Bell.”

Tharpe was a prodigy and mastered the guitar by age six. She attended Holiness conventions and performed renditions of songs including “The Day Is Past and Gone” and “I Looked down the Line.” Tharpe truly honed her unique style, though, when her family relocated to Chicago in the late 1920s and she was exposed to blues and jazz music. Although she performed gospel music in public, she often played blues in private settings. Consequently her unique style reflected secular influences. She bent notes on her acoustic guitar like jazz artists, and her vocal phrasing and vibrato-tinged style drew heavy inspiration from the blues.

During the 1930s Tharpe moved to New York and began playing at Café Society Downtown, the city’s first major racially integrated nightspot. She also appeared at the Cotton Club on Broadway with Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. Eventually she signed a recording contract, a first for a gospel performer, and cut four sides for Decca Records in 1938. Tharpe’s first records were big hits and included Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Rock Me” and “This Train,” but she held her core audience by recording material like “Precious Lord” and “End of My Journey” and appealed to her growing white audience by performing rearranged, uptempo spirituals such as “Down by the Riverside.”

Tharpe loved her audience and enjoyed sharing her musical gifts. Significantly, Tharpe aligned herself with the secular music world with a sense of showmanship and glamour unique among gospel performers of her era. However, her forays into the secular music market proved controversial and shocked gospel purists. Switching to an electric guitar, Tharpe’s finger-picking style added a resonance to her guitar sound. By playing in nightclubs, she pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and pioneered pop gospel, bridging musical worlds and attracting a varied fan base of both black and white southerners and gospel and blues fans.

During World War II Tharpe was one of only two black gospel acts that recorded V-Discs for American soldiers overseas. She toured the United States with the Dixie Hummingbirds, and in 1944 she recorded with boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price. Their first collaboration, “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” cracked Billboard’s race records Top 10. In 1946 she teamed with the Newark-based Sanctified singer Madame Marie Knight, and their first single, “Up Above My Head,” was a huge hit. Over the next few years they played to large crowds across the church circuit. In the early 1950s Tharpe and Knight cut some straight blues sides, and Knight then left religious music entirely. Tharpe, however, remained a gospel artist, but her record sales and live performances dropped, as purists took offense at her foray into the musical mainstream.

By defying categories Tharpe lost much of her U.S. audience by the mid-1950s. Her comeback was slow, but by 1960 she had resurged enough to appear at the Apollo Theater with the Caravans and James Cleveland. She continued touring even after suffering a stroke in 1970 and died in Philadelphia on 9 October 1973. A number of musicians have identified Tharpe’s guitar playing and showmanship as an influence, including Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Keith Richards.

MARK CAMARIGG
Living Blues magazine

Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (1995); Tony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1997); Gayle Wald, American Quarterly (September 2003), Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (2007).

 

Thornton, Willie Mae “Big Mama”

(1926–1984) BLUES SINGER.

Born Willie Mae Thornton on 11 December 1926 in Montgomery, Ala., to a religious family—her father was a preacher and her mother sang lead in the church choir—“Big Mama” Thornton left home at age 14 to pursue a career in show business. She toured with Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue during the 1940s, where she honed her skills not only as a blistering vocalist but as a harp blower and drummer. She was a staple on the Houston, Tex., circuit when Duke/Peacock Records boss Don Robey signed her in 1951. She debuted on Peacock Records with “Partnership Blues” that year, backed by influential Duke/Peacock trumpeter and producer Joe Scott and his band.

It was her third Peacock session with Johnny Otis’s band that struck gold—Big Mama shouted “Hound Dog” (penned by songwriting royalty Leiber and Stoller) and soon hit the road as a newfound star. “Hound Dog” held down the No. 1 position on Billboard’s R&B charts for seven weeks in 1953. Sadly for Thornton, however, Elvis Presley’s 1956 cover was even bigger, obscuring Thornton’s legacy.

Though Thornton did cut some fine Peacock follow-ups through 1957, such as “I Smell a Rat,” “Stop Hoppin’ on Me,” “The Fish,” and “Just like a Dog,” she never again reached the hit parade. She recorded several quality 45s in the early 1960s for a handful of small labels, but they did little to revive her career. As a result of her tour of Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival Package, Thornton recorded a number of sides for Arhoolie Records, including her first rendition of “Ball and Chain” in 1968, putting Big Mama back in circulation. Janis Joplin covered “Ball and Chain” at the 1968 Monterey Pop Festival, and after Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, released the song on their album “Cheap Thrills,” Big Mama got a two-album deal with Mercury Records in 1969.

Thornton recorded for Vanguard and Buddah into the 1970s and maintained a healthy performance schedule in addition to many gigs. She appeared on the Dick Cavett Show and on the sound track for the film Vanishing Point.

In the early 1980s, after years of hard living, Thornton’s health fell into steady decline, resulting in her death on 25 July 1984, the year she was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame.

MARK COLTRAIN
Hillsborough, North Carolina

Lonnie Brooks, Cub Koda, and Wayne Baker Brooks, Blues for Dummies (1998); Gerhard Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues (1997).

 

Tubb, Ernest

(1914–1984) COUNTRY SINGER.

Ernest Tubb was a major personality in country music from the early 1940s to his death on 6 September 1984. He was a much-admired and -imitated vocal stylist, a pioneer in the popularization of the electric guitar, a patron of young talent, and one of the leading architects of the popular honky-tonk style of country music.

Tubb was born on 9 February 1914 in the tiny community of Crisp, Tex., about 40 miles south of Dallas. Like many young musicians of his era, Tubb fell in love with the music of Jimmie Rodgers, and for many years he affected a singing-and-yodeling style that was quite similar to that of the Mississippi Blue Yodeler. He never met his hero, but in 1936 Carrie Rodgers, Jimmie’s widow, became Tubb’s champion. She loaned him one of Rodgers’s guitars, helped him obtain bookings in south Texas, and persuaded the Victor Company to sign Tubb to a contract. The Victor affiliation resulted in eight recordings but brought Tubb little money or fame.

Success did not really come to Tubb until the early 1940s. In 1940 he made the first of his recordings with Decca (an association that lasted until 1975); he began performing on KGKO in Fort Worth and touring for Universal Mills as the Texas Troubadour; and in 1941 he recorded the enduringly popular “Walking the Floor over You.” On the strength of the song’s popularity, Tubb was invited to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry, becoming a permanent member of the show in January 1943. Tubb’s move to Nashville was symbolic and representative of the growing influence of “western” styles in country music. He was one of the first musicians to bring an electric guitar to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, an innovation that had already been heard on his records and in his Texas personal appearances. Tubb was a leading record seller and popular concert attraction in country music until the mid-1950s (when rock-and-roll and country-pop music emerged); and long after that period he continued to be one of the most active in-person performers in country music, averaging close to 300 personal appearances a year until the late 1970s.

Because of his evident commercial viability, Tubb was able to exert great influence in the country music field. He played a prime role in persuading his industry to replace the word “hillbilly” with “country”; he was one of the first country singers to make records with other established performers (such as the Andrews Sisters, Red Foley, and Loretta Lynn); he and his band of musicians, the Texas Troubadours, made crucial contributions to the development of the honky-tonk style of performance; and he provided encouragement and support to many younger entertainers such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Jack Greene, Willie Nelson, and Cal Smith. Tubb’s admission to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1965 was warmly endorsed.

BILL C. MALONE
Madison, Wisconsin

Ronnie Floyd Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (1998), Journal of Country Music (December 1978, December 1981), “The Texas Troubadours: Selected Aspects of the Career of Ernest Tubb” (M.A. thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, 1978).

 

Turner, Ike and Tina

(1931–2007; b. 1939) R&B, ROCK-AND-ROLL, SOUL, AND FUNK DUO.

Ike Turner in his early career and Ike and Tina Turner as part of one of the most exciting soul music revues in the 1960s and 1970s were significant contributors to the history of R&B, rock-and-roll, soul, and funk music. Born on 5 November 1931 in Clarksdale, Miss., Ike Wister Turner was witness to acts of unspeakable racist violence, including one that led to his father Iziah Turner’s slow death. Around the age of seven he started teaching himself the piano, initially practicing on one owned by a woman for whom he chopped wood. By the time he exited high school, he was heading his own band, Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, a group central to the transition of rhythm and blues to rock and roll. In 1951 the group traveled to Sam Phillips’s studio in Memphis to record “Rocket 88,” a single now often acknowledged as “the first rock and roll record.”

For the next three years, Ike was an active contributor to the Memphis rhythm-and-blues scene as a backup musician, bandleader, producer, talent scout, and entrepreneur. He soon started backing and recording on his own major artists in the area, including B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and Howlin’ Wolf. By 1954 Ike Turner had relocated to East St. Louis to participate in the thriving rhythm-and-blues scene in that city.

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on 26 November 1939 in Brownsville, Tenn., near Memphis and the small town of Nutbush, where her father was an overseer on a farm. In 1956, after her parents had separated, Anna Mae moved to live with her mother and sister Alline in St. Louis, where, hoping to break into showbiz, she frequented nightclubs, including ones where Ike Turner’s band played. The two became romantically involved in 1959, and in 1960 they released their first recording, “A Fool in Love,” when a singer Ike was supposed to record failed to show up and Anna, then pregnant with Ike’s child, stepped in. Ike renamed his act the Ike & Tina Turner Revue and expanded it to include backup female singers and dancers and an expanded horn section.

Over the next three years, the couple, who wed in 1962, placed “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” “I Idolize You,” “Poor Fool,” and other singles on the R&B charts, yet they were largely relegated to small labels and the chitlin’ circuit in the South. Their potential, however, did not go unnoticed, and Phil Spector recorded Tina Turner on “River Deep, Mountain High.” Ike was paid not to interfere with the product. Following an invitation to open for the 1969 Rolling Stones U.S. tour, Ike and Tina crossed over to rock audiences with fervent reworkings of such songs as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” the Beatles’ “Come Together,” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher.” While the duo captivated audiences worldwide, trouble had been brewing on the home front, and Tina divorced Ike in 1976. Ike’s career took a downward spiral, and trouble with chemical abuse led to his incarceration, resulting in his missing the ceremony wherein the duo was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Tina meanwhile continued to attempt a solo comeback. In 1984 she released her fifth solo album, Private Dancer. The album produced the hit singles “Private Dancer,” “Better Be Good to Me,” and the No. 1 and Grammy-winning “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” The album sold over five million copies. In 1985 Tina appeared in the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunder-dome, which featured two of her tracks: the Grammy-nominated “We Don’t Need Another Hero” and the Grammy-winning “One of the Living.” In 1986 she wrote her best-selling autobiography, I, Tina. In 2000 Tina dropped the Turner last name but secured her best showing in a decade with the album Twenty Four Seven.

Just as Tina, after two hectic decades of international solo stardom began to move into retirement, Ike, at age 70, picked up the threads of his career. With the autobiography Takin’ Back My Name (1999), the Grammy-nominated and W. C. Handy Award–winning album Here and Now (2001), and the Grammy-winning album Risin’ Up with the Blues (2006), Ike Turner finally emerged from his wife’s and his past’s sizable shadows.

AJAY KALRA
University of Texas at Austin

Mark Bego, Tina Turner: Break Every Rule (2005); John Collis, Ike Turner: King of Rhythm (2003); Ike Turner and Nigel Cawthorne, Takin’ Back My Name (1999); Tina Turner and Kurt Loder, I, Tina: My Life Story (1986).

 

Vaughan, James D.

(1864–1941) GOSPEL MUSIC PROMOTER.

James D. Vaughan played a major role in the popularization of gospel music in America during the first half of the 20th century. His promotion company, the James D. Vaughan Company, was founded in 1912 in the middle Tennessee community of Lawrenceburg and remained in operation until 1964. Vaughan’s enterprise began as a singing school and then was expanded to include sales of records, songbooks, and magazines. His first songbook, Gospel Chimes, was published under his own name in 1900. His company eventually published 105 songbooks, which enjoyed successful nationwide sales. Vaughan was a creative businessman who sent male vocal quartets to churches around the country to promote his music and books. He started one of the first commercial radio stations in Tennessee, WOAN, to play his music and plug his songbooks. In 1922 one of the Vaughan quartets made a recording of its music, and, although it was not made in the South, the record was one of the first specifically designed for a southern audience.

A devout member of the Church of the Nazarene, Vaughan was influential in the development and spread of gospel music from the 1920s through the 1960s. Vaughan helped preserve the shape-note singing tradition, and his gospel music helped lay the foundation for American country music. The gospel songbooks that Vaughan distributed had a profound impact on southern cultural life. Singing schools and conventions and gospel singing at church-related functions were immensely popular through the 1960s and involved thousands of southerners. Vaughan’s books were affordably priced, and each sold an average of 117,000 copies.

KAREN M. MCDEARMAN
University of Mississippi

J. L. Fleming, “James D. Vaughan: Music Publisher, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, 1912–1964” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1971); Bill C. Malone, Southern Music—American Music (1979); Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (1977).

 

Washington, Dinah

(1924–1963) BLUES AND JAZZ SINGER.

In his 2001 biography, Q, Quincy Jones describes Dinah Washington’s vocal style, saying she “could take the melody in her hand, hold it like an egg, crack it open, fry it, let it sizzle, reconstruct it, put the egg back in the box and back in the refrigerator and you would’ve still understood every single syllable.”

Born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on 29 August 1924, Dinah Washington and her family sought opportunity in the North, moving to Chicago in 1927. Her mother played piano at St. Luke’s Baptist Church, which proved important to her young daughter, as it was an instrument she soon learned in addition to her vocal pursuits. As with many R&B pioneers, spirituals made up much of Jones’s focus in her early years as a performer. In 1940 she found a place as gospel legend Sallie Martin’s accompanist on the road. Yet the world of secular music was already starting to take hold. Before she hooked up with Martin, the budding vocalist won first prize at a Regal Theater amateur contest.

According to music writer Bill Dahl, “Whether it was bandleader Lionel Hampton, booking agent Joe Glaser, or Garrick Stage Bar boss Joe Sherman” who supposedly gave Ruth the memorable stage name of Dinah Washington, “it was obvious that Jones was headed for stardom. A featured billing at the Garrick led Hampton to hire her to sing with his big band in 1943.”

Renowned jazz critic Leonard Feather happened to catch Washington with the Hampton band in December of 1943 at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and persuaded Keynote Records to sponsor her debut recording session, but recording opportunities proved scarce while she was working for Hampton. It was only a matter of months before Washington left Hampton’s band, recording three Los Angeles sessions for the Apollo label under her own name before signing with the then-fledgling Mercury. She cut her first album for Mercury in January 1946, and by the summer of 1948 her solo star was in rapid ascension.

During this time and throughout the 1950s, Washington ran with some jazz heavyweights. She recorded sessions with trumpeters Clifford Brown and Clark Terry, drummer Max Roach, and saxophonists Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Cannonball Adderley. Washington cleverly used Quincy Jones’s talents as an up-and-coming arranger and employed pianist Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and tenor saxophonist Eddie Chamblee in her combo for a number of gigs. Chamblee was also one of Washington’s many husbands.

Finally, in 1959, much to the chagrin of many critics, Dinah Washington made the full-fledged leap to pop stardom, with the old Dorsey Brothers hit “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes.” With the help of talent scout Clyde Otis, she mined more pop gold with “Unforgettable” and “This Bitter Earth.” It was also Otis’s idea to pair Washington with label mate Brook Benton for their seemingly playful duet “Baby, You Got What It Takes,” which hid serious tension between the two, with the end result a huge hit in 1960.

In Detroit, on 14 December 1963, at age 39, Dinah Washington died from an unintentional but lethal combination of alcohol and diet pills.

MARK COLTRAIN
Hillsborough, North Carolina

Nadine Cohodas, Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (2006).

 

Watson, Doc

(b. 1923) FOLK MUSICIAN.

Arthel “Doc” Watson is a unique song stylist, an influential guitarist, and the repository of a vast range of American music originating in the South. Born 2 March 1923 in Deep Gap, N.C., Watson has been blind from birth. He grew up in a farm family oriented toward religion and music. His father was a song leader in the Baptist church, and the Watson family read the Bible and sang hymns most evenings. Watson learned traditional folk songs from his grandparents and his father, and the first instrument he played was the harmonica. He remembers at age six hearing a cousin play the banjo, and a brother-in-law gave him one several years after that.

Throughout Watson’s youth, his father guided his musical education. Doc Watson’s father gave him a harmonica each Christmas for years when he was a child, helped his young son learn the banjo, and then in 1934 made him a better banjo of hickory, maple, and cat skin. His father gave him money to buy his first guitar after the young boy learned to play the Carter Family’s “When the Roses Bloom in Dixie.” From his father’s windup gramophone and the radio, Doc Watson remembers hearing songs by the Carter Family, the Skillet Lickers, Mississippi John Hurt, and Barbecue Bob. He still performs and records the songs he listened to growing up. In addition to his early education in traditional music, commercial country, and the blues, he learned jazz, big band, popular songs, and classical music while attending the North Carolina School for the Blind in Raleigh.

Doc Watson’s first stage performance was at age 17 during a fiddlers’ convention in Boone, N.C., where he played the “Mule Skinner’s Blues.” In 1941 he became a member of a group singing for local radio stations, and a woman at a local station gave him his nickname in this period. She suggested calling him “Doc” because “Arthel” was too formal.

Watson worked for nine years in the 1950s playing mostly electric guitar with Jack Williams and the Country Gentlemen, a five-piece dance band, and he continued playing traditional music at home with friends and family. Folklorist Ralph Rinzler came from the Smithsonian Institution in 1960 to record a friend of Watson’s, Clarence Ashley, and after Rinzler heard Watson, he encouraged him to seek a solo identity nationally. The Folkways album Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s became Watson’s first recording, and he was soon popular on the folk club and college campus circuit. Watson began recording for Vanguard Records in 1964, and the following year his 15-year-old son, Merle, began recording and touring with his father.

Doc Watson is an influential exponent of guitar flat-picking, which involves the use of a simple flat pick rather than a thumb pick or finger-picking. He is also an engaging storyteller, who explains the background to the songs he performs. Above all, his cultural significance is as an eclectic synthesizer of southern music. Watson absorbed the music of his time and place as a mid-20th-century rural southerner. He performs Jimmie Rodgers (“Miss the Mississippi and You”), the Delmore Brothers (“Blues Stay Away from Me”), Gaither Carleton fiddle tunes, A. P. Carter (“Keep on the Sunny Side”), Mississippi John Hurt (“Spikedriver Blues”), Barbecue Bob (“You Don’t Know My Mind Blues”), Bob Wills (“Hang Your Head in Shame”), and Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”). In concert he can draw from Ira Gershwin and Bob Dylan if requested. He has recorded over 30 albums.

Watson’s son traveled, performed, and recorded with his father and earned praise for his bottleneck slide guitar playing. He died in a tractor accident in 1986. MerleFest, one of the nation’s most important acoustic venues, has been held annually since 1988 on the grounds of Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, N.C. Doc Watson still lives with his wife, Rosa Lee, a few miles from his birthplace in North Carolina.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
University of Mississippi

Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music (1997); Irwin Stambler and Grellin Landon, The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music (2d ed., 1983).

 

WDIA

RADIO STATION.

In the fall of 1948, WDIA, in Memphis, Tenn., became the first radio station in the South to adopt an all-black programming format. The station was owned by two white businessmen, but the man most responsible for the format change at WDIA was Nat D. Williams, a local black high school history teacher. Williams was brought into the station to do his own show on an experimental basis, and it proved to be an overnight sensation. He was the first black radio announcer in the South to play the popular rhythm-and-blues records of the day over the airways. His show was so successful that within six months of its debut WDIA had changed its format from a classical music station to one appealing solely to black listeners and advertisers.

In addition to initiating an entirely new music format, Williams launched a wide variety of programming innovations at WDIA and recruited other talented blacks onto the airways. His first recruits were fellow high school teachers A. C. Williams and Maurice Hulbert. Both men went on to have long and distinguished careers in black radio. Nat Williams’s most famous recruit was a youthful B. B. King, who used the exposure on WDIA to initiate his career as the country’s premier urban blues artist. Rufus Thomas became one of the station’s most popular on-air disc jockeys. In addition to these black males, Nat D. Williams also recruited the South’s first black female announcers to WDIA’s airways; two of the best known were Willa Monroe and Starr McKinney, both of whom did programs oriented toward black women.

Gospel music, religious programs, and black news and public affairs shows were also prominent on WDIA. The most acclaimed public affairs program was called Brown America Speaks; it was also created and hosted by Nat D. Williams. The program addressed race issues from a black perspective and won an award for excellence from the prestigious Ohio State Institute for Education in radio in 1949. With the success of WDIA, other radio stations around the country also began to adopt black-oriented formats, and black radio became a fixture in commercial broadcasting nationwide. WDIA still programs for a black audience in Memphis, making it the oldest black-oriented radio station in the country.

BILL BARLOW
Howard University

Bill Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (1999); Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale: How WDIA-Memphis Became the Nation’s First All-Black Radio Station and Created the Sound That Changed America (1992); Robert Gordon, It Came from Memphis (1995); Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue: Life and Music on Black America’s Main Street (1981); Charles Sawyer, The Arrival of B. B. King: The Authorized Biography (1980).

 

Wells, Kitty

(b. 1919) COUNTRY SINGER.

Kitty Wells was born Muriel Ellen Deason in Nashville on 30 August 1919 to Myrtle and Charles Deason, both musicians. She sang and learned to play the guitar as a child and as a teenager sang with the Deason Sisters, consisting of herself, two sisters, and a cousin. After making her radio debut on wsix, Nashville, Deason met singer Johnnie Wright, whom she married in 1937. They performed together with Wright’s sister Louise, and later Jack Anglin, forming the Tennessee Hillbillies and the Tennessee Mountain Boys. The group separated at the onset of World War II when Anglin was drafted, but the Wrights continued to perform.

In 1943 Johnnie Wright gave his wife her stage name, Kitty Wells, after “Sweet Kitty Wells,” the folk ballad recorded by the Pickard Family. In the late 1940s Wells established a recording career with RCA but continued to focus on her growing family. Paul Cohen, a music scout for Decca, contacted the singer in 1952 to see if she would be interested in recording a response to Hank Thompson’s song “The Wild Side of Life,” a tune that describes a woman lured away from her husband by “the glamour of the gay nightlife.” Primarily interested in the paycheck, Wells countered with “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” explaining the point of view of the woman chastised in Thompson’s song. Thompson sang that God must have made honky-tonk angels, but Wells refuted this, singing that philandering men were to blame for this angel’s downfall. The controversial song immediately became No. 1 on the country music charts and remained there for six weeks, resulting in Kitty Wells becoming the first woman to have a No. 1 song.

Wells became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1953 but was banned from performing her “feminist” signature song on the air. Wells’s career continued to grow in the 1950s with 23 Top 10 hits, including “One by One,” a duet with Red Foley, the popularity of which set the stage for some of the great country duets of the 1960s through the present. Continuing to produce material explicitly expressing feminine feelings, such as “Paying for That Back Street Affair,” Wells opened the door for other artists such as Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton to accurately portray a woman’s feelings before and during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Wells continued to produce hits into the 1960s and 1970s and had her own television show, The Kitty Wells Show, in 1968. In 1976 she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and was awarded a Grammy award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. Although Wells has ceased touring, she continues to make public appearances.

RENNA TUTEN
University of Georgia

Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800–2000 (2003); A. C. Dunkelberger, Queen of Country Music: The Life Story of Kitty Wells (1977).

 

Whittaker, Hudson (Tampa Red)

(1904?–1981) BLUES SINGER.

Blues musician Tampa Red, known as “the Guitar Wizard,” was prominently featured on southern performance circuits in the 1920s, followed by a successful career as a staple of the Chicago blues scene in the 1930s and 1940s.

He was known as a master of slide or bottleneck guitar, playing with a distinctive and often-imitated style. One of the first black instrumentalists to make a recording, he enjoyed more than three decades in the studio, from 1928 to 1960.

Tampa Red was born Hudson Wood-bridge in Smithville, Ga., probably in 1904. Shortly thereafter he moved to Tampa, Fla., to live with his grandparents, the Whittakers, whose last name he adopted. Little is known about his childhood or the development of his musical talents. He performed for some time on the southern theater circuit before traveling to Chicago in the mid-1920s, bringing with him the name Tampa Red—a combination of his hometown and the color of his hair. Upon arriving in Chicago, he began to work day jobs while playing guitar on street corners and in clubs, waiting for opportunities to further his music career. He was eventually hired to accompany popular blues performer Ma Rainey and through her teamed up with pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey. In 1928 the two recorded “It’s Tight Like That,” a new, upbeat-blues, ragtime-influenced number with suggestive lyrics, which was a national hit. They recorded several more songs as the “Hokum Boys,” and consequently “hokum” style—characterized by analogies used to make sexual innuendoes—became popular briefly during the Depression. These early recordings showcase his unique sound and already-sophisticated approach to guitar technique.

Tampa Red played a National Resonator Guitar, one of the loudest, flashiest guitars available before amplification, which he bought the first year they were sold. His was a gold-plated tricone, and it earned him the nickname “The Man with the Golden Guitar.” He slid a bottleneck along the strings of this famous guitar to create a crisp, pure sound, especially evident in his single-string solos. His performances also included expressive vocals and kazoo solos. He recorded in sessions with Memphis Minnie, Sonny Boy Williamson, and other major blues artists of the day. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 Chicago developed an enthusiastic blues audience and a number of popular blues venues, and Tampa Red (often backed by his band, the Chicago Five) became one of the central players on this scene. With his wife, Frances, as his business manager and Big Bill Broonzy and producer Lester Melrose as his close friends, Tampa Red became mentor to new blues musicians, with whom he shared his home and resources upon their arrival in Chicago. He was also known for his heavy drinking and escapades, which, together with his music, earned him a reputation as an iconic blues entertainer. He played frequently in a diverse array of Chicago’s most popular and infamous venues—in the vaudeville circuit, on the streets, in down-home jukes, and behind the doors of Chicago clubs.

In the 1940s Tampa Red transitioned to the electric guitar and continued to record, creating hits that scored on R&B charts. These songs included a number of seminal records that would be covered by legendary blues artists of future generations, such as 1949’s “When Things Go Wrong with You (It Hurts Me Too).” Artists like Elmore James, Fats Domino, and B. B. King later recorded chart-topping hits with covers of the song. In 1953 the death of his wife seemed to intensify his dependency on alcohol—a problem that would plague Tampa Red for the rest of his life. Although he experienced “rediscovery” in the late 1950s during a period of blues revival, he was never able to regain the success of his career in the preceding decades. He died destitute in Chicago in 1981 and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame later that same year.

With his upbeat blues and bottleneck technique, Tampa influenced many important blues figures, such as Muddy Waters, Mose Allison, and El-more James. He has also emerged as an important cultural icon, particularly in southern African American literature. References to his music and legacy can be found in blues music, as well as in Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson before Dying. Writer Raymond Andrews discusses the cultural impact of Tampa Red on his own rural Georgia childhood, implicating Tampa Red as the archetypal bad bluesman of legendary status in southern black communities. Andrews’s uncle, a hedonistic daredevil, adopted both Tampa Red’s image and his nickname. The title character of Andrews’s first novel, Appalachee Red, evinces the influence of this same rebellious, empowered image.

FRANCES ABBOTT
Emory University

Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (1995); Lawrence Cohn, ed., Nothing but the Blues (1993).

 

Wild Magnolias

MARDI GRAS INDIAN MUSICIANS.

The Wild Magnolias are a Mardi Gras Indian group from New Orleans led by Theodore Emile “Bo” Dollis (b. 1944). Founded in 1957 as one of the city’s many Indian “tribes” or “gangs,” the Wild Magnolias gained distinction in 1970 as the first group to make studio recordings of the distinctive music of these black Carnival societies and continued to record in subsequent decades.

The Mardi Gras Indian phenomenon dates back to the late 19th century, when working-class blacks in New Orleans used a visual aesthetic inspired by Wild West shows as a means of expressing admiration for the resistance of Native Americans to white domination and of celebrating the concrete social and blood ties that existed between the two groups for centuries in the Gulf South. Composed of neighborhood-based groups, Indians spend all year meticulously preparing their outfits, which are never the same from one year to another. The physical violence that sometimes characterized meetings of groups of Indians earlier in the 20th century has been replaced with an intense culture of aesthetic competition. Groups and individuals strive to outdo one another in terms of the elaborateness or stylish qualities of their costumes and the expressive dancing and cryptic chanting performed while wearing them.

The music of the Indians, performed during rehearsals in neighborhood bars and during their appearances during Mardi Gras and on St. Joseph’s Day, features chanted lyrics in a call-and-response form, with exclusively percussive backing on tambourines, cowbells, glass bottles, and a variety of other instruments. Lyrics of Indian songs may be sung in English, or may take the form of “Indian talk,” a highly imaginative form of jargon that forms something of a secret language among these groups.

Bo Dollis began “masking Indian” while he was still in high school in the Central City area of New Orleans. He made costumes and masked with the White Eagles and the Golden Arrows before forming his own group, the Wild Magnolias, in 1957. In the 1960s, he formed a close bond with Joseph Pierre “Monk” Boudreaux (b. 1941), chief of the Golden Eagles, who would become his main collaborator in later musical endeavors. Other group members who also participated in recordings include June Johnson Jr., Crip Adams, Tobias Johnson, Bubba Scott, and James Smothers.

The group performed at the 1970 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and, at the urging of JazzFest organizer Quint Davis, went into the studio and recorded their music with the help of local keyboardist and arranger Wilson “Willie Tee” Turbinton. The resulting release, a single of the traditional Indian song “Handa Wanda,” was released on the Crescent City label in 1970. In 1974 the group released the album Wild Magnolias on Barclay/Polydor. In addition to the contributions of keyboardist and producer Willie Tee, the album featured the blind guitarist Snooks Eaglin, as well as Earl Turbinton and other talented New Orleans musicians. The song “Smoke My Peace Pipe (Smoke It Right)” scored a minor hit for the group, and they recorded a follow-up album for Polydor, They Call Us Wild, in 1975. In subsequent years the group recorded three albums for Rounder Records, and in 1999 released Life Is a Carnival on Blue Note. Monk Boudreaux left the group in 2001, but the Wild Magnolias and Bo Dollis remain some of the most acclaimed interpreters of the Mardi Gras Indian musical form.

MATT MILLER
Emory University

Michael P. Smith, Mardi Gras Indians (1994).

 

Williams, Hank

(1923–1953) COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER.

Widely acclaimed as country music’s greatest singer and composer, Hiram Hank Williams was born on 17 October 1923 at Olive Hill, near Georgiana, Ala., the son of a sawmill and railroad worker. He was introduced to music in the Baptist church where he was faithfully taken by his mother, and, according to popular legend, he learned both songs and guitar chords from a black street singer in Georgiana, Rufus Payne (“Teetot”).

Williams’s evolution as a professional performer and composer began at the age of 14 when he won a talent show in a Montgomery theater singing his own composition, “WPA Blues.” He obtained his first radio job in the same year, 1937, at WSFA in Montgomery. When World War II—a crucible that integrated country music’s disparate regional styles and ultimately nationalized it—came, Williams worked in the Mobile shipyards and sang regularly in the honky-tonks of south Alabama. By the time the war ended, Williams had compiled eight hard years of performing experience and had built a style that reflected the composite musical influences of his youth: gospel, blues, and old-time country. Professionally, he acknowledged a debt to the Texas honky-tonk singer Ernest Tubb and to the Tennessee mountain singer Roy Acuff, whose styles Williams fused in a way that reflected a similar synthesis in the larger country field during the war and immediate postwar years.

Williams’s climb to fame began shortly after the war when he became associated with Fred Rose, the famous Nashville songwriter and publisher. Rose encouraged Williams’s natural songwriting abilities and published his songs; helped him obtain recording contracts with Sterling and MGM Records; persuaded Molly O’Day, one of the greatest singers of the time, to record some of Williams’s compositions; and helped him get a position on KWKH’s Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. The Hayride, which was then second only to the Grand Ole Opry as a successful country radio show, was the vehicle that launched Williams on the road to performing fame.

Hank Williams, country music star, c. 1950 (Country Music Foundation, Library and Media Center, Nashville)

Hank Williams’s national ascendancy came in 1949 when he recorded an old pop tune, “Lovesick Blues,” which featured the yodeling he had learned from another Alabama singer, Rex Griffin. Williams soon moved to the Grand Ole Opry, where he became the most popular country singer since Jimmie Rodgers. In the brief span from 1949 to 1953, Williams dominated the country charts with songs that are still considered classics of country music: “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Cold Cold Heart,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Jambalaya,” and many others. With his band, the Drifting Cowboys, Williams played a major role in making country music a national phenomenon. With a remarkably expressive voice that moved with equal facility from the strident yodeling of “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” to the gentle lyricism of “I Just Told Mama Goodbye,” Williams communicated with his listeners in a fashion that has only rarely been equaled by other country singers. The word “sincerity” has no doubt been overused in describing the styles of country musicians, but in the case of Williams it means simply that he as a singer convincingly articulated in song a feeling that he and his listeners shared.

As a songwriter—not as a singer—Williams played a most important role in breaking down the fragile barriers between country and pop music. Williams’s singing was quintessentially rural, and his own records never “crossed over” into the lucrative pop market. His songs, though, moved into the larger sphere of American popular music and from there, perhaps, into the permanent consciousness of the American people. Like no earlier country songwriter’s works, Williams’s songs appeared with great frequency in the repertoires of such pop musicians as Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, and Mitch Miller. For good or ill, this popularization into pop music continues.

Commercial and professional success did not bring peace of mind to the Alabama country boy. A chronic back ailment, a troubled marriage, and a subsequent divorce and remarriage accentuated a penchant for alcohol that he had acquired when only a small boy. After being fired by the Grand Ole Opry for drunkenness and erratic behavior, he returned to the scene of his first triumphs—the Louisiana Hayride. He died of a heart attack on 1 January 1953, but his legacy lives on in his songs and in the scores of singers, including his immensely talented son, Hank Jr., who still carry his influence.

BILL C. MALONE
Madison, Wisconsin

Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography (1995); Chet Flippo, Your Cheatin’ Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams (1981); Paul Hemphill, Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams (2005); George William Koon and Bill Koon, Hank Williams, So Lonesome (2002); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-Year History (1968; rev. eds., 1985, 2002); Roger M. Williams, Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams (1981).

 

Williams, Hank, Jr.

(b. 1949) COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER.

Legendary for his hard-living lifestyle and beer-drinking ballads, Hank Williams Jr. is an established figure in the American country and southern rock genres. Born Randall Hank in Shreveport, La., on 26 May 1949 to country music legend Hank Williams and his wife, Audrey, this artist is most often referred to as “Hank Jr.” or “Bocephus,” a nickname given by his father after a popular country comedian’s ventriloquist dummy.

Nearly a month after his son’s birth, Hank Sr. made a monumental debut on the Grand Ole Opry, which sent his career soaring for nearly three years until his untimely death in 1952. Urged by his mother, Hank Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps, making his own Opry debut at the age of 11. Hank Jr. sang his father’s songs for years to come, making his first record of his father’s music at age 14 and garnering a hit with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” Critics and fans alike found comfort in the melancholy honesty of the son’s voice singing the father’s songs.

Hank Jr. learned piano from rocker Jerry Lee Lewis in the 1960s and teamed up with Johnny Cash at Detroit’s Cobo Hall in 1969 to perform the largest-grossing country concert to date. In 1970 he made an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and signed the biggest recording contract in MGM history. Yet the 21-year-old artist had lost the zest for living in the shadow of a father he hardly knew. He soon cut ties with the traditional country sound and began searching for a voice of his own.

The road to that voice would prove rocky but ultimately successful. The early 1970s found Hank Jr. conflicted internally, and in 1974 he attempted suicide while on a drug and alcohol binge. He later moved to Alabama to recuperate and further search for a unique sound. While in Alabama, he began playing with southern-rock pioneers Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, and Toy Caldwell. Hank Jr.’s new voice quickly emerged as a mix of blues, rock, and country with a renegade attitude. In 1975 he released the signature album Hank Williams, Jr. and Friends, which included the hit “Stoned at the Jukebox.”

In August 1975, he suffered a mountain-climbing accident in Montana that left him with severe head injuries. The artist endured a two-year recovery period in which he had to re-learn speaking and singing. He made a full recovery, though, and his comeback album The New South (produced by Waylon Jennings in 1977) helped bring him into a new group of outlaw country musicians. Two of Hank Jr.’s signature songs, “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” and “All My Rowdy Friends,” were released in late 1979, igniting a decade of Top 10 hits and an original rocking country sound.

In the 1980s he reemerged onto the music scene as a pop-culture icon and a successful crossover artist. In 1981 alone, he had three No. 1 hits, “Texas Women,” “Dixie on My Mind,” and “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down).” His boisterous stage show and blue-collar anthems proved appealing to both country and rock audiences, while his trademark dark beard and sunglasses made him one of the most recognizable figures of the 1980s. Much like on his telltale 1987 single, “Born to Boogie,” Hank Jr. fans were always rowdy and ready to party. The Country Music Association named him Entertainer of the Year in both 1987 and 1988, as did the Academy of Country Music in 1986, 1987, and 1988. In 1990 he received a Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals, for an electronic duet performed with his father of “There’s a Tear in My Beer.” Both the recording and the video garnered acclaim for the use of electronic dubbing.

Although Hank Jr.’s singles began to slide down the charts in the 1990s, he managed to pick up one very important gig, with abc’s Monday Night Football. Tweaking one of his original tunes into a Monday Night Football theme song, he won three Emmys for the “Are You Ready for Some Football?” jingle. He rerecorded the theme song alongside Little Richard, Joe Perry, Clarence Clemons, Rick Nielsen, Bootsy Collins, Charlie Daniels, Steven Van Zandt, and other entertainers for the 2006 debut of Monday Night Football on ESPN.

Hank Jr. still performs regularly today and is considered an icon of bad-boy country style. He is often seen on stage and in music videos with country rockers like Gretchen Wilson and Kid Rock, both of whom are considered to have followed in his footsteps.

MARY MARGARET MILLER
University of Mississippi

 

Williams, Lucinda

(b. 1953) SINGER AND SONGWRITER.

Lucinda Williams is one of the most respected singer-songwriters of the Americana roots-music movement, which began in the early 1980s. Her evocative lyrics and music command die-hard fan loyalty, and her perfectionist streak both on stage and in the recording studio are epic.

Born in 1953 in Lake Charles, La., to a musician mother and a poet father, Lucinda has used both parental disciplines in her music and performances. Her poet father, Miller Williams, moved the family from one southern university town to another, exposing Lucinda to various writers and intellectuals during her formative years. Additionally, diverse musical influences such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams, and Robert Johnson contributed to a style that transcends commercial musical definition.

Beyond her literary and musical influences, the physical southern landscape is infused into her songwriting, and her Grammy-winning album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is a virtual map of the Mississippi River Delta basin. The album’s songs reflect life in Mississippi (Macon, Greenville, Jackson, Vicksburg, Rosedale) and Louisiana (Lafayette, Lake Charles, Lake Pontchartrain, Slidell, Baton Rouge, Algiers, Opelousas). Sung with a gravelly voice and a southern drawl, Williams’s songs have the descriptive force and brevity of a poet.

Lucinda first recorded an album of cover songs (Smithsonian/Folkways Records) called Ramblin’ in 1979 to moderate success. She released Happy Woman Blues, her first collection of original material, the following year. Eight years later, in 1988, she released Lucinda Williams. With her second album of original music, Williams’s reputation, already well established in Nashville and Austin, found a wider market. Coproduced with her guitarist, Gurf Morlix, the record sold 100,000 copies. Williams’s skill as a songwriter and a gutsy, passionate singer won her a legion of fans and the respect of musicians. She became known as a musician with a fierce drive to perfect her songs not only on vinyl but in concert as well. Her perfection at all costs, personal and professional, is legendary.

In 1989, on the force of Lucinda Williams, RCA Records signed Williams to her first major recording contract, one that she later sued to get out of because of a disagreement over artistic control. She rerecorded the songs originally recorded for RCA, again coproducing with Morlix. Another three years passed. In 1992 she released her third original effort, Sweet Old World. The album’s single “Passionate Kisses” won the 1994 Grammy award for Best Country Song when it was covered by Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Lucinda teamed with Gurf Morlix a third time to record and produce her next album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but before the record was released Williams guest-recorded on a Steve Earle record. Impressed by Earle and by his producer Ray Kennedy’s producing ability, Lucinda shelved the original Car Wheels recordings to, again, remake the entire record, this time with Earle and Kennedy.

Throughout 1997 rumors circulated that the release of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was imminent. The September New York Times Magazine portrayed Williams as a tantrum-prone, unrealistic artist who got lost in the minutia and could not bring a project to completion.

When she released Car Wheels in 1998, though, it was instantly hailed by those same critics as a classic—powerful, ageless, a rare accomplishment. It elevated Williams to the zenith of Americana roots music and earned the 1998 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

The demands and expectations to build on the success of Car Wheels were thus ironically lessened. By 1998 Williams had released only four records of original material in 19 years. Her next four records took nine years to release.

In 2001 Williams released Essence, followed by World without Tears in 2003. Critics considered them less accessible than Car Wheels, though she was awarded her third Grammy in 2002 for Best Female Rock Performance. In 2005 she released a DVD, Lucinda Williams: Live from Austin, TX, and a concert recording, Live @ the Fillmore. Williams’s last record to date, West, arrived in 2007, again to wide praise.

WILLIAM S. BURDELL III
St. Simons Island, Georgia

Elizabeth Bukowski, www.salon.com (11 January 2000); Bill Friskics-Warren, No Depression (January/February, 2007), No Depression (July/August 1998).

 

Wills, Bob

(1905–1975) WESTERN SWING MUSICIAN.

James Robert Wills was born near the town of Kosse in the Black Belt of east Texas on 6 March 1905. From his family he learned to play fiddle music, which had been part of frontier cultural life from the East Coast to west Texas. From the blacks in the Black Belt he learned blues and jazz. At age 10, Wills played his first dance at a ranch in west Texas; by then he had begun to add blues and jazz idioms to traditional fiddle music. This combination was eventually called “western swing” and became one of the most distinctive sounds in all of American music. There is probably no better example of cultural cross-fertilization than Bob Wills’s music, which brought together two strains of culture in the American South, one white, one black.

Wills performed his music at country ranch dances in west Texas years before introducing it to the general public on radio stations in Fort Worth. In the early 1930s he organized the Light Crust Doughboys, broadcast over the Texas Quality Network, and soon revolutionized music in Texas. His greatest success was with his Texas Playboys, in Tulsa, Okla., between 1934 and 1942. During those years he added brass, reeds, and drums, developing a band that by 1940 numbered 18 members. His recordings sold in the hundreds of thousands and his “San Antonio Rose” in the millions.

After the war he gave up most of the brass and reeds in his band and used more fiddles, guitars, steel guitars, and mandolins. This emphasis on strings helped Wills maintain his popularity even after the end of the age of the big bands. Because of his use of stringed instruments, Wills influenced two musical forces in the South that have dominated American music to the present—rock and roll and country and western. Western swing left a marked impression on early rockabillies such as Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Elvis Presley. But Wills’s greatest influence was on country and western. The Country Music Association awarded him its highest honor in 1968, naming Wills to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

What was it that made Wills’s music appeal to the American people for more than 50 years? His music and style had many good qualities, but one quality stood out above all others—his music made people happy. At his dances, during his radio broadcasts, and through his recordings, Bob Wills helped find times of escape during the Depression and World War II. This was the secret to his success and one of his most direct contributions to humanity.

When Wills died in 1975, he left a rich cultural heritage. His compositions, including “Faded Love,” “Maiden’s Prayer,” and “San Antonio Rose,” are part of the repertoire of American country and pop artists. He also helped bridge the gap between the black and white musical cultures when he began combining them as a boy. Out of that cultural mix came Bob Wills’s richest legacy, the happy, swinging rhythms called “western swing.”

CHARLES R. TOWNSEND
West Texas State University

H. Ed Hurt, Bob Wills: His Life—Times—and Music (2000); Ruth Sheldon, Hubbin’ It: The Life of Bob Wills (1995); Al Stricklin, with Jon McConal, My Years with Bob Wills (1996); Charles R. Townsend, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills (1976); Rosetta Wills, The King of Western Swing: Bob Wills Remembered (1998).

 

Wilson, Cassandra

(b. 1951) BLUES AND JAZZ SINGER.

With a long and varied recording career, singer Cassandra Wilson has become one of the most popular contemporary jazz singers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She is known for her unique, multifaceted voice and her perpetual drive to explore a multitude of musical genres and styles, while infusing them with her own distinctive jazz sensibility. With 17 solo albums and a number of diverse collaborations to her name, Cassandra Wilson is a powerful and influential force in the world of jazz.

Born in Jackson, Miss., on 4 December 1951, Wilson was the third and youngest child of music teacher, guitarist, and bassist Herman Fowlkes Jr. and elementary schoolteacher Mary McDaniel. Both parents were music enthusiasts, bringing the sounds of Motown and jazz into their daughter’s life at an early age and encouraging her love of music and her desire to perform. Although she was classically trained on the piano and played clarinet in middle school bands, Wilson wanted to play the guitar and learned to play through method books from her father. She began penning her own folk-style songs and participated in a folk trio and in musical theater productions at her recently desegregated high school in Jackson. After high school she attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University, graduating with a degree in mass communications. During her college years, Wilson spent her free time rehearsing and performing with a variety of cover bands that played pop, funk, and R&B, and she performed bebop for the first time with the Black Arts Music Society. In 1981 Wilson lived briefly in New Orleans, where mentors Earl Turbinton, Alvin Batiste, and Ellis Marsalis encouraged her to pursue performance in New York City, where she moved in 1982.

Wilson’s focus then shifted toward improvisation. She honed her vocal skills while meeting and jamming with important jazz figures, including saxophonist Steve Coleman, who pushed Wilson to develop original material beyond the traditional jazz tunes. Coleman organized the M-Base collective, of which she was the lead vocalist and a founding member. Stylistically, this group married the grooves of funk and soul music with both traditional and avant-garde jazz, and Wilson worked seamlessly with the complex arrangements and heavy instrumentals. She sang on several of Coleman’s albums in the mid-1980s, while also recording and touring as a member of the avant-garde trio New Air. Wilson recorded her first solo album for JMT, Point of View, in 1986. The album included many of Wilson’s compositions, as well as collaborations and standards, and the album showcased her husky contralto voice and her unique manipulations of pitch and tone.

Wilson had established herself as a serious musician with her early albums but found critical acclaim with her first album of standards, 1988’s Blue Skies, which was bookended by albums of primarily original work. She reached a turning point in her career in 1993 when she signed with Blue Note Records and broke through to audiences beyond the world of jazz. Her first album for Blue Note, Blue Light ’til Dawn (1993), illustrated her new signature sound, best described as a fusion of pop, jazz, blues, country, and world music, and included covers of songs by Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, and Hank Williams. Wilson’s music reconnected jazz with its blues roots and drew on pop production techniques for a rich, accessible sound.

Her 1996 album, New Moon Daughter, won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, and she recorded and toured with Wynton Marsalis in 1997, performing his Pulitzer Prize–winning composition Blood on the Fields. Paying tribute to Miles Davis, one of her greatest influences, Wilson performed as his opening act in 1989 at the jvc Jazz Festival in Chicago and produced the live concert album Traveling Miles in his honor in 1999. Wilson’s 2006 album Thunderbird shows that her attention to multigenre projects still thrives. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, the album works with a live sound, including a lone slide guitar evoking the blues performers of earlier generations. Her style continues to evolve as she explores the intersections between musical traditions and pushes the boundaries of jazz.

FRANCES ABBOTT
Emory University

Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (1996); Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (2000); Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (2007).

 

WLAC

RADIO STATION.

Founded in 1926, Nashville radio station WLAC is one of the top-ranked AM stations in its home city and among the best known in the South. Clear Channel Broadcasting is its owner, having purchased it from Billboard Broadcasting Corporation, which bought the station from the Life and Casualty Insurance Company in 1978. The station serves a population of over 600,000 and is on the air 24 hours every day. A network affiliate of Fox News Radio, WLAC-AM today primarily broadcasts all-talk programming, airing popular conservative talk shows such as those of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity.

From the mid-1940s through the early 1970s, however, WLAC was known widely for its rhythm-and-blues programming. It became known as “Blues Radio,” as its nighttime disc jockeys almost exclusively played black music—blues, rhythm and blues, and soul. Although the station’s 50,000 watts of power brought listeners from most parts of the country, the majority of the audience listened from the South. Many were African Americans, and the disc jockeys catered to their preferences, at the same time influencing the musical tastes of the region, the nation, and both white and black artists, whose music—rock and roll—would eventually dominate the popular music world.

In the mid-1940s Gene Nobles began playing black music when requested by students at Tennessee State and Fisk universities. Randy Wood, who owned an appliance store in Gallatin, Tenn., then decided to try selling by radio the records he had tried unsuccessfully to sell to his store customers. On 17 February 1947 Nobles advertised records by Eddy Arnold, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mercer, and Ella Mae Morse, and Randy’s Record Mart soon became the largest mail-order record store in the world. WLAC flourished, luring advertisers as well as listeners.

The station’s most popular feature during this era was disc jockey John Richbourg and his 1:00 to 3:00 A.M. blues show. He became known as “John R.” and the “granddaddy of soul.” Because he promoted their music and often was the first to play their records or to prerelease a record to test the market, he became a favorite of black artists. If he liked a record that was not immediately popular, he played it persistently until it became a hit. Such was the case with Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine,” an example of Richbourg’s assertion that he and his WLAC colleagues did not just play hits—“we made hits.” Richbourg broadcast his last show on WLAC on 1 August 1973 and died in 1986.

Of WLAC’s blues disc jockeys, Bill “Hoss” Allen was the only one still with the station after rock and roll pushed rhythm and blues out of the programming. He broadcast a late-night, black gospel show in the mid-1980s, when the station had turned otherwise to an all-talk format.

Remembered for its music, its disc jockeys, and its advertisements for sponsors such as Red Top Baby Chicks (“50 percent guaranteed to be alive at the time of delivery”), White Rose Petroleum Jelly, and Royal Crown Hair Dressing, the blues era at WLAC entertained a generation of listeners, who probably numbered between 8 and 12 million at its peak. Although programs like Garden Gate, featuring “The Old Dirt Dobber” Tom Williams, and a talk show conducted by Nashville media personality Ruth Ann Leach have been very successful, WLAC made its biggest impact during the years when the catch phrase “This is John R. comin’ at ya from way down in Dixie” could regularly be heard.

JESSICA FOY
Cooperstown Graduate Programs Cooperstown, New York

Walter Carter, Tennessee Showcase (29 November 1981, 20 December 1981); Ron Courtney, Goldmine (February 1984); Nelson George, Billboard (19 April 1986); Gerry Wood, Billboard (18 June 1983); The Working Press of the Nation, vol. 3 (1985).

 

Wynette, Tammy

(1942–1998) COUNTRY SINGER.

Tammy Wynette was born Virginia Wynette Pugh on 5 May 1942 on a cotton farm in Itawamba County, Miss. Her father, a musician, died when she was eight months old. Tammy’s mother left her in the care of her grandparents while she worked in a defense plant in Memphis during World War II. As a young girl Tammy had music lessons, played her father’s instruments, and sang in a trio on a local gospel radio show. A month before her high school graduation, Tammy married Eurple Byrd, who proved an unreliable husband. She went to beautician school and worked as a barmaid and singer in Memphis. Tammy left Byrd when she was pregnant with her third child. She made trips to Nashville in pursuit of a country music career and hoped to get her break when she toured briefly with Porter Wagoner. Her failure to do so disappointed her but also made her more determined than ever to succeed.

In 1966 Tammy moved to Nashville with no job, no place to live, and three young daughters dependent on her. She met producer-songwriter Billy Sherrill of Epic records, who signed her and changed her name to Tammy Wynette. Her first single, “Apartment #9,” got airplay, and her next song, “Your Good Girl’s Going to Go Bad,” reached the Top 10. “I Don’t Want to Play House” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” topped the charts. In 1968, Sherrill and Wynette cowrote the signature song of her career, “Stand By Your Man,” which reached No. 1 on country charts and No. 19 on the pop chart. Her next 11 albums went to No. 1, and within four years Wynette had won two Grammy awards and three Country Music Awards as Female Vocalist of the Year.

After a failed second marriage, Wynette married George Jones and had a fourth daughter, Georgette. The extraordinarily popular couple recorded a series of duets, including “Two Story House,” “Golden Ring,” and “(We’re Not) the Jet Set.” The couple divorced in 1975. Wynette had one more short, failed marriage before she married her fifth husband, George Richey. In 1979 Wynette published her autobiography Stand By Your Man, and two years later ABC broadcast a popular movie adapted from her book.

Wynette’s troubled life seemed the stuff of her music. She experienced heartache and divorce, was abducted and beaten, had a death threat, and went through a public bankruptcy. She suffered several serious illnesses. In her successful career, she garnered a total of 20 No. 1 songs and sold over three million records. She continued to be popular throughout her career and continually recorded, earning the title “First Lady of Country Music.” In 1995 she and Jones reunited and recorded an album of duets. Wynette’s soulful ballads are powerful and raw, and her lyrics are often complex, with ambiguous meanings revealed by parallel conflicts within the verses and the chorus. She sang of the difficulties of and the inequality within marriage, of the heartache of divorce and the effect on children, of uncaring spouses, and of the struggles of motherhood. Wynette died on 6 April 1998 at age 55. Her nationally televised funeral was held in the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

MINOA UFFLEMAN
Austin Peay State University

Jackie Daly, Tammy Wynette: A Daughter Recalls Her Mother’s Tragic Life and Death (2000); Kenneth E. Morris, in Popular Music and Society (1992); Tammy Wynette, Stand by Your Man (1979).

 

Young, Lester

(1909–1959) JAZZ MUSICIAN.

Lester Willis “Pres” Young was an African American tenor saxophonist whose influential style was viewed as revolutionary when first recorded during the late 1930s. He was a primary influence in the development of modern jazz.

Born in Woodville, Miss., Young was the oldest of three children raised in the vicinity of New Orleans. His parents divorced in 1910, and his father remarried and took his children with him to Minneapolis by 1920. Willis “Billy” Handy Young, Lester’s father, was a talented musician who taught his children various instruments and later toured the South with his family in a band that played carnivals. Lester studied violin, trumpet, and drums but turned seriously to the saxophone by age 13. Young left the family band in 1927. He played in the next few years with Art Bronson’s Bostonians, Eli Rice’s Cotton Pickers, Walter Page’s Blue Devils, and Eugene Schuck’s Orchestra and with Eddie Barefield at the West Club in Minneapolis.

In the fall of 1933 Young moved to Kansas City, where he played with numerous musicians, including Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra and its star saxophonist, Coleman Hawkins. Early in 1934 Young joined William “Count” Basie, beginning an association that was to lead eventually to national recognition. During the mid- to late 1930s Young was prominently featured on recordings and broadcasts with the Basie band. Although Young gained mixed reviews from critics, younger musicians were wildly enthusiastic. Important recordings include “Lester Leans In” (1939) and many accompanying Billie Holiday.

Young left the Basie band in December 1940 to start his own group, which performed in New York in early 1941. He was involved with his own bands after that, in Los Angeles and New York, before freelancing and then rejoining Basie in late 1943. During this second period with Basie, Young garnered the attention of the general public. In 1944 he won first place in the Down Beat magazine poll for best tenor saxophonist. He won many awards thereafter and became popular with a new generation of musicians, among them John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Stan Getz. In 1956 Young was voted Greatest Tenor Saxophonist Ever in a list of prominent jazz musicians.

Young’s style changed after 1940. His tone became heavier and his vibrato wider. He was more clearly emotional, using wails, honks, and blue notes in his solos. He was inducted into the army in 1944, beginning a nightmarish experience, which included time spent at a detention barracks in Georgia. After the war he toured with his own small groups. He continued to develop and modify his style and was generally successful, except when his drinking, which was habitual by the early 1950s, weakened him physically. He died in New York in 1959.

Young is a leading example of many great jazz performers who were born and reared in the South but gained fame outside the region. His impact on jazz was profound. His melodic gift and logical phrasing influenced musicians on many instruments, and his personal formulas turned up in countless jazz compositions and improvisations.

LEWIS PORTER
Rutgers University

Frank Buchmann-Moller, You Got to Be Original, Man! The Music of Lester Young (1990); Douglas Henry Daniels, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young (2003); Luc Delannoy, Pres: The Story of Lester Young (1993); Nat Hentoff, in The Jazz Makers, ed. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (1975); J. G. Jensen, A Discography of Lester Young (1968); J. M. McDonough, Lester Young (1980); David Meltzer, No Eyes: Lester Young (2000); Lewis Porter, The Black Perspective in Music (Spring 1981), Lester Young (1985).