29 July 2008

Country Music Updated

A more sophisticated “Nashville sound” arrived during the 1960s

Patsy Cline is said to be the most popular female country singer in recording history.

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

In the 1960s, many of the younger country artists at this time, while not directly embracing the rockabilly styles of Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly, wanted to update the sound of their honky-tonk roots. They opted for a newly sophisticated approach to the vocal presentation and instrumental arrangement of country music, a highly influential approach that came to be known as “countrypolitan,” a fusion of “country” and “cosmopolitan.” Nashville was at the center of this development, and the style was also often called the “Nashville sound.”

Patsy Cline (1932-63) began her career as a hit maker in 1957 with her recording of “Walkin’ After Midnight,” which was successful on both the country and the pop charts. Her two big hits of 1961, “I Fall to Pieces” and “Crazy,” reflected a particular kind of sensibility: they were ballads of broad appeal, in no sense “teen” records, performed by Cline in a manner that, while sophisticated in phrasing and articulation, had sufficient hints of rural and bluesy inflections to show where her roots lay. The crooning background voices gave these records a pop sheen, while the high-register piano remained evocative of the honky-tonk origins of this type of music. Cline continued to be a significant presence on both country and pop charts until her premature death in a plane crash in early 1963.

Charley Pride is one of the 20-best selling country artists of all time.

The records made by rock ’n’ roller Elvis Presley from 1960 on (after he returned from a tour of duty in the army) reflected an increasingly eclectic set of influences, but the Nashville sound is especially prominent among them. Good illustrations of this would be his 1961 hit “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and his 1965 recording of “Crying in the Chapel,” originally a country hit in 1953.

It might seem surprising that the Nashville sound’s influence extended into rhythm & blues in the early 1960s, but given the constant interchanges between white and black musicians throughout the history of American popular music, this really shouldn’t strike us as unexpected. Two hits by Solomon Burke, “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)” and “Cry to Me,” sound for all the world like country records performed by a black vocalist, and a large number of similar-sounding records were made in the wake of their success, by Burke and by other artists associated with rhythm & blues. By the later 1960s the career of Charley Pride – an African American who set out to appeal principally to the country audience – was in full swing; by 1983 Pride had racked up an astonishing 29 Number-One country hits, thus illustrating once again how colorblind music and its audiences really can be some of the time. Notable in more recent years were a 1994 album entitled Rhythm Country and Blues, which paired R&B and country audiences for duets, and Burke’s 2006 album, entitled simply Nashville – the U.S. city most associated with country music.

During the 1970s, country music became a huge business, reaching out to young and middle-class listeners while at the same time reinforcing its traditional southern and white working-class audience base. In 1974 the Grand Ole Opry moved from the run-down Nashville theater where it had been broadcasting since 1941 into a multimillion-dollar facility, complete with a 110-acre theme park called “Opryland.” The generally conservative mood of the country – reflected in Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election – reinforced country’s popularity among the American middle class.

Since that time, country music has continued to grow in popularity and influence. It remains both a significant cultural force and a large, profitable industry. The traditional approach represented by the Nashville sound continues to produce dozens of hits and artists yearly, and for many Americans the Nashville sound is country music. At the same, a range of styles that are usually lumped together, for marketing purposes, as “alt country” (alternative) provide a rich variety of sounds and approaches to music-making while maintaining their ties to the country tradition.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]