14 TRYING HARD TO RECREATE WHAT HAD YET TO BE CREATED: HILLBILLY

Image

Country music as a genre did not exist in 1923, when Fiddlin’ John Carson recorded ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’. It was not based in Nashville, it did not feature pedal steels, it was not codified in any way, and yet millions of people right across North America – in towns and rural areas, playing the fiddle and the guitar – knew country music intimately and instinctively.

None of these people were in the record industry. Ralph Peer, the thirty-one-year-old New York executive for Okeh Records who recorded ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’, thought of himself as ‘a businessman… a prophet, and a gambler’. He had recorded music for every conceivable American immigrant community: Okeh’s catalogue included records in Italian, Yiddish, German, Lithuanian and Slovakian. His biggest payday as a gambler had come in 1920 with ‘Crazy Blues’ by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds, Okeh Record No. 4169 – the first recording aimed at a black audience. It was while on a scouting trip to Atlanta in 1923 that he was introduced to local radio station WSB’s biggest celebrity, mill worker Fiddlin’ John Carson, and recorded the minstrel song ‘Little Old Log Cabin’. Back in New York, Peer declared it was ‘pluperfect awful’ and refused to release it. A local distributor in Atlanta, Polk C. Brockman, was convinced he could shift five hundred copies, and so Okeh relented. When it sold out in a few days, Brockman asked Okeh to press him a thousand more. When these sold out just as quickly, Peer and Okeh realised what they had. So did Fiddlin’ John Carson, the Atlanta mill worker who publicly reinvented himself as a bumpkin from north Georgia.

The keening, nasal voice, the threadbare instrumentation, the evocations of farms and the olden days – not to mention the double entendres – all of this confused an industry which strove for sophistication, from the mixture of hotel-lobby dance bands and conservatoire-trained singers they recorded to the gold-leaf lettering on a record label. If you came from a hick town, you did your best to hide your roots. As the cash registers were ringing, though, New York’s music industry knew there was something going on; they just couldn’t agree on what it was. Look through mid-1920s editions of Variety, Billboard and Talking Machine World and you’ll see a bunch of names for this unpolished genre: old-time, old time tunes, old familiar tunes, hearth and home, hill and range, hill country music… the industry tried the lot. In 1925 Ralph Peer settled on a shorter name which summed up the industry’s patronising attitude towards this white rural music: hillbilly.

This disparaging term was the cherry on the cake. It had been almost impossible to be a country singer and also part of the popular-music industry in 1923. For a start, there was exclusion from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), who wouldn’t accept you unless you could read and write music (they seemed to make an exception for Irving Berlin). Secondly, the American Federation of Musicians used sight-reading tests to intentionally exclude country musicians and performers; every large venue in a major city was contracted to use only union musicians, with a few exceptions in the South and South-West. Variety ran a front-page story on hillbilly on 29 December 1926, describing its advocates as ‘poor white trash… with the intelligence of morons… the “hillbilly” is a North Carolina or Tennessee mountaineer type of illiterate whose creed and allegiance are to the bible, the Chautauqua, and the phonograph’. Luckily for John Carson, the Atlanta Journal hadn’t been as proscriptive when it had launched the radio station WSB (or ‘Welcome South, Brother’) in 1922.

New York industry people sensed that the appeal of Carson and his ilk had to be that their music was steeped in tradition, something that made it feel real and relatable. Carson was in his mid-fifties when he recorded ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’, and record companies decided to seek out other men of roughly Fiddlin’ John’s age – so they didn’t quite understand why his rustic music was commercially engaging. Possibly, they thought his relatively advanced years equated to a grasp of history. In fact, the appeal of ‘Little Old Log Cabin’ lay in its romanticism, its nostalgia for a past that was half real, half imagined. This music selectively edited collective memory to serve the needs of the present day; accuracy was actually a hindrance.

If the New York-based record industry was going to laugh at country music, even as it was making money from it, then the musicians would become intentionally insular, have their own rules, build walls. Even now, ‘real country’ and ‘hard country’ are issues, and the music’s continuous tightrope walk of commercial grasping and self-proclaimed authenticity is something to marvel at, quite unique in pop. That such high country legends as the Carter Family sang songs like ‘Mid the Green Fields of Virginia’ (a weepie written by ‘After the Ball’ author Charles K. Harris) and ‘Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’ showed how the folk song and the popular song fed each other. They were simply called ‘old-time songs’; unless you were an academic, you didn’t really care about the source. Jimmie Rodgers, a foundation stone of country music, didn’t pick the country yodel up from the Appalachians, nor was it a deep-rooted, soulful outpouring; he had seen a travelling Swiss act, liked the sound, and incorporated it into his music.I

Rodgers, born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1897, had been a water boy, then a brakeman on the railroad between Meridian and New Orleans. In 1924, when he was twenty-seven, he contracted tuberculosis, which meant his days working on the trains would be limited. Luckily for him, in his new role at Victor, Ralph Peer was looking for more acts to sign and was holding auditions in nearby Bristol, Tennessee. Soon, Rodgers would be making jazz-, blues- and country-influenced records for Victor: not just his celebrated blue yodels (starting with No. 1, ‘T for Texas’) but intriguing non-country titles like ‘Mean Mama Blues’, ‘Gambling Polka Dot Blues’ and ‘In the Jailhouse Now’, songs from the wrong side of the tracks. By 1930 he had become the number-one country star at Victor Records and was wearing diamond rings on his fingers. Alabama newspaper the Mobile Register wrote a piece with the headline ‘Blues Singer, Once M. & O. Brakeman, Realizes Dream’.

Rodgers ‘could record anything’, said Peer, and he had an address book to help him back up the claim. He knew Louis Armstrong from his days at Okeh Records and was probably responsible for ‘Standin’ on the Corner’ (‘Blue Yodel No. 9’), cut in Hollywood by Satchmo and the now thirty-two-year-old Singing Brakeman in 1930. Lil Hardin Armstrong played piano on the track,II an astonishing example of pop music escaping from genre straitjackets. Rodgers would go on to record thirteen blue yodels before his TB-related death in 1933, but sadly no more with Satchmo or Lil.

As with all other popular music, the birth of radio made a huge difference to country. The microphone embraced a soft voice and repelled shouters. Even for radio barn dances, the advent of the microphone meant that old-style banjo pickers were rapidly replaced by sweeter, more nuanced singers such as Bradley Kincaid, Scott Weisman and harmony acts like the Delmore Brothers. Intriguingly, Kentucky-born Kincaid made his name in Chicago, on WLS-AM’s National Barn Dance Show, which proved the reach and appeal of country-folk songs like ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘In the Hills of Old Kentucky’ outside the South. Kincaid’s ‘A Picture from Life’s Other Side’ (1931) was a cautionary heartbreaker, a precursor to Phil Ochs’s ‘There but for Fortune’, while ‘The Little Shirt My Mother Made’ was closer to British music hall than ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’. His voice was a sweet, light tenor, quite unlike Fiddlin’ John Carson; more like a proto-John Denver.

By the early 1930s two separate forms of American music were becoming strangely entwined: the ‘western’ and the ‘country’ traditions. Cowboys (a direct translation of the Spanish vaquero – hence ‘buckaroo’) were based in the West. The country tradition, by contrast, was purely from the South (which has a slightly counter-intuitive meaning in the US, inherited from the Civil War: Arizona and New Mexico are in the West much more than they are in the South, despite the geography).

The romantic image of the cowboy dates back to 1887, when Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring circus introduced a new character called Buck Taylor.III As well as having the classic cowboy name, Taylor transformed the image of the spitting, cussing herdsman into a heroic, square-jawed loner, whistling to himself as he rode across a cartoon landscape under a starlit sky. The term ‘cowboy’ was almost unheard of before Taylor’s fame; they were frontiersmen, explorers, herdsmen, but never cowboys. Taylor’s popularity quickly led to the cowboy appearing on the vaudeville stage and in Tin Pan Alley numbers: Billy Murray’s ‘In the Land of the Buffalo’ (1907) and – cross-breeding two pop crazes – ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’ by Bob Roberts in 1912. By the late 1920s, when Jimmie Rodgers was issuing his blue yodel records, a cowboy hat, knotted scarf and chaps were de rigueur for rural singers.

Like Appalachian hillbilly, western music could be linked back to English, Irish and Scottish folk ballads, and – again, like the music of the Appalachians – string bands were common. Westward-heading pioneers also favoured the pocket-sized harmonica, a German invention of the early nineteenth century that had first been brought to America by the manufacturer Matthias Hohner during the Civil War. Songs like ‘I Ride an Old Paint’ – collected by Carl Sandberg in his 1927 American Songbag – had a mystery and language of their own and a clip-clop rhythm borrowed from the hooves of horses. The western ‘tradition’, though, wasn’t even as old as the country one, and neither was remotely old in the European sense. Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona – all prime cowboy country – had only recently become states in the union; before this they were only territories, as Guam and Western Samoa are today. This was still the frontier; it had myths more than it had traditions, and they had often been invented within the living memories of people alive in the 1920s. The myths persisted in the Depression, pulling desperate people westward: in 1933 the Southern Pacific railroad company alone reported that 683,000 transients had been found travelling west in the company’s boxcars.

The cowboy helped to broaden the appeal of both western and southern country music, from coast to coast. By the mid-1930s nearly every major city had a radio station broadcasting a show with the suffix ‘barn dance’ or ‘jamboree’. Even New York had the WHN Barn Dance, starring Tex Ritter, who later headed west to become a movie star and sing the theme for High Noon. Small-town radio stations were no different, seeking out fresh local talent so they could emulate the networks. Rural musicians found they had to adopt a new polish, poise and professionalism in front of the microphone.

The cowboy was a caricature of non-urban America, but he was also a far more flattering stereotype than the grass-chewing hillbilly. Mississippi-born Jimmie Rodgers knew that dressing in overalls – the country look of the 1920s – wasn’t going to cut it, unless you wanted to be thought of as a backwoods pauper. So the Singing Brakeman took to wearing a wide white hat, a clean scarf knotted at the neck, fringed leather chaps and boots of Spanish leather with spurs that jingle-jangled. Cowboy gear suggested skill – lassoing, riding at speed, shooting with unerring accuracy, something to separate the singer from the audience and make him heroic. Country and western may have started as equal partners, but the western look quickly became the dominant one, which also eased the music’s image away from the racially divided South and into another domain.IV

One major difference between country and western was the venues. In the southern Bible belt, dancing was a sin and drinking wasn’t allowed. Country singer Roy Acuff once complained that he played schoolhouses, churches and tent meetings, while fiddle player Bob Wills got to play dances. Wills had been born in 1905 in Texas, south of Waco, in an area settled by Germans, Bohemians and Mexicans, and the culture was all about beer-drinking and dancing. He had a peripatetic life: in 1913 he moved to the Texas Panhandle and was winning regional fiddle contests with his dad before he was ten; he heard cotton pickers playing the blues; he learned New England and Cajun fiddling; he spent time in New Mexico, incorporating Mexican American players and writing things like ‘Spanish Two-Step’; and he moved to Forth Worth just before the 1929 crash, where he absorbed the big-city jazz in the air. Wills had his own sound, and it was decidedly ‘western’. We’ll come across him again.

Country’s breakthrough act as far as popular music was concerned – nationally, then internationally – was another Texan, Gene Autry. Single-handedly, he changed the image of country music and orientated it towards the West, towards California and Hollywood. Autry had started off recording budget 78s of Jimmie Rodgers songs on New York discount labels like Conqueror. Half the price of Rodgers’s versions on RCA, this was a way to make your name when so many people were strapped for cash. After recording his own hit weepie, ‘That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine’, in 1931, Autry became a radio star, the Oklahoma Cowboy, on Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance. His own highly evocative recording ‘Home on the Range’ – which had first been published in folk collector John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads back in 1910 – led to Autry dressing in ornate, eye-catching cowboy gear: neckerchiefs, brightly studded shirts and boots of Spanish leather. Soon everyone was following Cowboy Gene’s sartorial lead and Rodgers’s yodelling style. It’s most likely that no one in nineteenth-century America had ever yodelled to their herd like Kansas City’s Tex Owens did on 1934’s ‘Cattle Call’ – later a major hit for Eddy Arnold – but who cared? Everybody loved cowboys, especially singing cowboys. Whether from West Virginia or East Texas, singers dressed as cowboys and cowgirls. They all yodelled. No one thought of the look or the sound as inauthentic. This was the beginning of the codification of country music.

It was only a matter of time before Hollywood called. At the age of twenty-seven, Autry became a movie star, beginning with an appearance in 1934’s In Old Santa Fe. Soon he was fighting not only cattle rustlers (Rootin’ Tootin’ Rhythm, 1937), but corrupt land developers (The Man from Music Mountain, 1938) and even aliens living beneath the earth’s crust (The Phantom Empire series). He almost always played himself and got to sing his own songs, leading to the hits ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds’ (1935), ‘Mexicali Rose’ (1936) and his signature tune, ‘Back in the Saddle Again’. Literally hundreds of cash-in singing-cowboy movies would be made. Dorothy Page starred as The Singing Cowgirl, while black audiences were catered for by the mixed-race jazz singer Herb Jeffries in 1939’s The Bronze Buckaroo. Demand was so high that the Sons of the Pioneers – a harmony act who would have a major hit with ‘Cool Water’ in 1941 – essentially formed to fulfil a need for more songs, as there were so many successful singing-cowboy movies. By 1941, when he became a sergeant in the air corps, Public Cowboy No. 1 Gene Autry’s annual income was $600,000.

Even after he signed up, he managed to score a 1944 number one on Billboard’s new Jukebox Folk Records chart with ‘At Mail Call Today’, about a serviceman opening a ‘Dear John’ letter from his girl back home. Every kid in America went to the cinema to see Autry’s movies, and – assuming they didn’t have anywhere to hide a horse – they ended up wanting a guitar for Christmas. During World War II, many American servicemen from the metropolitan North would be introduced to country music by their southern comrades. This pattern would be repeated abroad, with GIs on troop ships and stationed across Europe during and after the war spreading the word internationally.V

Country also began to harden into a business model. When the US entered World War II in 1941, the Grand Ole Opry, which took place in Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, had been just another local barn dance on the radio, broadcast on WSM in Nashville since 1925. It became more prominent during the war, a much bigger deal commercially than its rivals, a touchstone. Country music wished for a spiritual home, somewhere free from non-country contamination, and the easiest thing was to simply create one. The Opry became something of mystical significance.

Hillbilly music learned not only how to manage its name (the Billboard chart had been renamed Hot C&W Sides by 1958), but to maintain its myths and legends. ‘Rock music almost smothered out country music,’ Porter Wagoner would recall in the 1970s. ‘Even though I had the number one song [with “A Satisfied Mind” in 1956] about the only thing we could work was the little clubs, the skull orchards, the dives.’ The music also had to fight geographic and demographic shifts: in 1940 southerners earned roughly 60 per cent of the average American income; by 1960 that figure had risen to 75 per cent and was climbing fast. When they listened to music, these folks didn’t want to be reminded of their roots, yet they were still fiercely proud of them. Embracing this paradox, hillbilly music overcame the cowboy fad, the demise of western swing and the rock ’n’ roll explosion to become ‘country’, an infinitely adaptable genre.

  1. I. The yodel wasn’t exclusive to nascent country: Georgian minstrel singer Emmett Miller’s ‘Lovesick Blues’ (1928) incorporated yodels over a drunken Dixieland backing. It sounded southern. ‘Lovesick Blues’ would later be recorded by Hank Williams and Frank Ifield, both of whom accented Miller’s vocal jumps, cementing it as a country song.
  2. II. Some kind of brief reconciliation for the estranged couple, it turned out to be the last recording Louis and Lil would make together. Neither was credited on the label, and it was believed for decades that Earl Hines was the pianist.
  3. III. Western pulp novels had first emerged in numbers soon after the Civil War. Buffalo Bill’s own fame had actually started with a novel about his adventures, which was serialised in eastern newspapers and mostly made up.
  4. IV. This was scarcely less problematic, though – the cowboy seeing off ‘Indians’ with his rifle and claiming their territory.
  5. V. In 1950 a newborn Anglo-Indian baby in Lahore was christened Gene by his mischievous, Autry-loving older brothers, who had been entrusted by their mum to take him to the registry office and have him named Anthony.