29 July 2008

Early Country Music: Hillbilly Records

Radio helped popularize an early form of country and western music

A concert marks the 75th anniversary of the “Bristol Sessions,” which launched Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.

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

“Hillbilly music,” later rechristened “country and western music” or simply “country music,” developed mainly out of the folk songs, ballads, and dance music of immigrants from the British Isles. The first generation of hillbilly recording artists was also familiar with the sentimental songs of Tin Pan Alley, and this material became an important part of the country music repertoire, alongside the older Anglo-American ballads and square dance tunes.

Interestingly, it was the race record market, established in the early 1920s, that led to the first country music recordings. The first commercially successful hillbilly record, featuring a north Georgia musician named Fiddlin’ John Carson, was made by Okeh Records in 1923 during a recording expedition to Atlanta. This field trip, led by Ralph Peer and a local record store owner named Polk Brockman, was actually aimed at locating new material for the race record market.

The new medium of radio was in fact crucial to the rapid growth of the hillbilly music market. In 1920 the first commercial radio station in the United States (KDKA in Pittsburgh) began broadcasting, and by 1922 there were more than 500 stations nationwide, including 89 in the South. Many farmers and working-class people who could not afford to buy new phonograph records were able to purchase a radio on a monthly installment plan and thereby gain access to a wide range of programming.

“Texas Troubadour” Ernest Dale Tubb helped launch the honky-tonk style of country music.

Most hillbilly musicians of the 1920s and 1930s did not start out as full-time professional musicians. The country music historian Bill C. Malone has noted that the majority worked as textile mill workers, coal miners, farmers, railroad men, cowboys, carpenters, wagoners, painters, common laborers, barbers, and even an occasional lawyer, doctor, or preacher. One important exception to this rule was Vernon Dalhart (1883-1948), a Texas-born former light-opera singer who recorded the first big country music hit. Dalhart’s recording career, which had begun in 1916, had started to wane, and he talked the Victor Company into letting him record a hillbilly number, in an effort to cash in on the genre’s growing popularity. In 1924 Dalhart recorded two songs: “Wreck of the Old 97,” a ballad about a train crash in Virginia, and “The Prisoner’s Song,” a sentimental amalgam of preexisting song fragments best known for the line “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly.” This was the first big hillbilly hit, a million-seller that contributed to the success of the fledgling country music industry.

Two of the most popular acts of early country music were the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family, born in the isolated foothills of the Clinch Mountains of Virginia, are regarded as one of the most important groups in the history of country music. The leader of the trio was A. P. “Doc” Carter (1891-1960), who collected and arranged the folk songs that formed the inspiration for much of the group’s repertoire; he also sang bass. His wife, Sara (1899-1979), sang most of the lead vocal parts and played auto- harp or guitar. Sister-in-law Maybelle (1909-78) sang harmony, played steel guitar and autoharp, and developed an influential guitar style, which involved playing the melody on the bass strings while brushing the upper strings on the off-beats for rhythm.

The Carter Family were not professional musicians when their recording career started in 1927 – as Sara put it when she was asked what they did after the Bristol session, “Why, we went home and planted the corn.” The Carters’ image, borne out in radio appearances and interviews, was one of quiet conservatism; their stage shows were simple and straightforward, and they generally avoided the vaudeville circuit and promotional tours.

If the Carter Family’s public image and musical repertoire evoked the country church and the family fireside, Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) was the quintessential rambler, a footloose man who carried home in his heart but drank deeply of the changing world around him. He was the most versatile, progressive, and widely influential of all the early country recording artists. The ex- railroad brakeman from Meridian, Mississippi, celebrated the allure of the open road and chronicled the lives of men who forsook the benefits of a settled existence: ramblers, hobos, gamblers, convicts, cowboys, railway men, and feckless lovers. His influence can be seen in the public images of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and almost every contemporary male country music star.

Both race and hillbilly music represent a process of hybridization between southern folk music and Tin Pan Alley pop. The singers may stand at some distance from the rural origins evoked by their songs, yet are able to perform in a style respectful of those origins. Finally, many of the recordings are early examples of a phenomenon that will become more important as we move on through the history of American popular music: the crossover hit, that is, a record that moves from its origins in a local culture or marginal market to garner a larger and more diverse audience via the mass media.

[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.]