ROOTS of Country Music

The Birth of Country Music

Country music is a type of music that has a unique sound and style with a blend of musical forms originally found in the Southern United States. It evolved from folk music, gospel music and old-time or hillbilly music in the 1920s. The term country music began to surface in the 1940s when the earlier term hillbilly music was considered degrading.

Country music is rooted in the folk traditions of the British Isles. In the new world, those roots became entangled with the ethnic music of other immigrants and African slaves. Many gospel hymns were also popularized in the nineteenth century south, while tent shows and blackface minstrelsy introduced folk-sounding tunes written by northern professionals. Played on fiddles or homemade banjos, all this music would one day sound as if born in the southern hills.

The official birth of country music goes back to the famous field recordings in Bristol, Virginia, in 1927, with The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The former perfectly captured the Americanization of the Scottish-Irish ballads that had immigrated to the United States. Rodgers eloquently melded the blues and folk music and early jazz into a free-wheeling form of country music that influenced modern cowboy songs as well as honky-tonk music.

1920s - 1930s: The Hillbilly Years

Beginning in the 1920s, the first country records and radio programs brought the music out of the rural heartland and into homes across America. Radio shows made national stars of many performers. The early records, covering a broad range of musical styles, told of train wrecks and ship wrecks.

By the 1930s, as America struggled with the twin horrors of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the dream of the Wild West and the freedom it symbolized provided escape. Western imagery dominated country music and as World War II approached, the singing cowboy appeared to stand for all that was fair and just.

Country musicians first performed on radio in 1922. The following year, station WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, debuted what's believed to have been the first country music radio barn dance; an ensemble variety show that had the feel of a family gathering and was aimed at rural audiences. Eager to exploit radio's advertising power, stations in Chicago, Illinois (WLS), Nashville, Tennessee (WSM) and Wheeling, West Virginia (WWVA) soon followed suit. The early radio barn dances provided a living for country entertainers throughout the nation while becoming a vital part of listeners' lives.

To widen the troubled market for records during the early 1920s, the industry began seeking talent in country, blues, ethnic and other folk-based idioms.

The Carter Family

The major companies in the North recorded southern fiddlers and string bands prolifically, though company executives couldn't always fathom the "hillbilly" music they were promoting.

One famous executive, Ralph Peer, described as "pluperfect awful" a 1923 Fiddlin' John Carson recording that turned out to be his company's first country hit. Carson and others proved that country music could sell and by 1930, two of the most influential country acts of all time, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, had become major stars.

Hillbilly is a term referring to certain people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas of the United States, primarily Appalachia but also the Ozarks. Owing to its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term is frequently considered derogatory and so is usually offensive to those Americans of Appalachian heritage.

In 1922, a radio station based in Georgia was the first to broadcast folk songs to its audience. In June 1923, 55-year old Georgia's fiddler John Carson recorded two hillbilly (i.e., southern rural) songs, an event that is often considered the official founding of country music (although Texas fiddler Eck Robertson had already recorded the year before).

Jimmie Rodgers

The recording industry started dividing popular music into two categories: race music (that was only black) and hillbilly music (that was only white).

If country history oficially began the first time the music made it onto record, the date is June 30, 1922. Thats when the Victor Talking Machine Company became the first to record a southern rural white musician, Texas fiddler Eck Robertson.

Eck Robertson was a brash thirty-five-year-old fiddler when he marched into the Victor Records office in New York in June 1922. With him was Henry Gilliland, seventy-four, a Civil War veteran who played second fiddle to Robertson. The two Texans had been performing at a Confederate Veterans Reunion in Richmond, Virginia, turning the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel into a barn dance, as a newspaper reported.

 Eck Robertson

When they presented themselves for a Victor audition, Robertson's cowboy outfit and forthright manner impressed the record executives. On September 1, 1922, Victor issued Sallie Gooden/Arkansas Traveler as Robertson's disc debut. The first Hill-Billie was officially on records.

Although Victor had taken the time to record Robertson and Gilliland, they didnt do much with the music initially; the songs weren't even released until nearly a year later.

The term hillbilly was actually introduced by Uncle Dave Macon's Hill Billie Blues (1924). That year, Chicago's radio station WLS, began broadcasting The WLS Barn Dance that could be heard throughout much of the Midwest.

The hillbilly format (led by the guitar and a bit more cosmopolitan) was more popular in the plains, while the mountain format of the Appalachians (dominated by fiddle and banjo) remained relatively sheltered from urban and African-American influences.

Many country performers bridled at the word "hillbilly," considering it loaded with negative cultural stereotypes. By contrast, cowboy implied romance, bravery and the self-sufficiency of life on the open range. By the mid-1930s, western fringe and cowboy hats had become part of many singers' wardrobes; including pop stars, especially after Gene Autry and other Hollywood singing cowboys began to tackle the world's ills in their fantasy version of the west. The term country music began to surface in the 1940s when the earlier term hillbilly music was considered degrading.

Western Swing: Western Swing music is a subgenre of country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 40s.

1940s: A New Generation 

Recording companies came up with several names before World War II trying to market it hillbilly, old-time music novelty hot dance, hot string band and even Texas swing for music coming out of Texas and Louisiana. Most of the big western dance bandleaders simply referred to themselves as western bands and their music as western dance music, many adamantly refusing the hillbilly label. Bob Wills and others believed the term western swing was used for his music while he and his band were still in Tulsa, Oklahoma between 1939 and 1942.

Bluegrass: This genre is mostly instrumental. The emotional melodies try to support the theme of loneliness - similar to cowboy singing. The name is derived from a famous band of the genre Blue Grass Boys who created this style. Bluegrass music is still very popular.

Bluegrass, as a distinct musical form, developed from elements of old-time music and traditional music of the Appalachian region of the United States. The Appalachian region was where many English, Irish, Scottish and German immigrants settled, bringing with them the musical traditions of their homelands. Hence the sounds of jigs and reels, especially as played on the fiddle, were innate to the developing style. Black musicians infused characteristics of the blues to the mix and in a development that was key to shaping the bluegrass sound, introduced the iconic banjo to the region.

The music now known as bluegrass was frequently used to accompany a rural dancing style known as buck dancing, flat footing or clogging. As the bluegrass sound spread to urban areas, listening to it for its own sake increased, especially after the advent of audio recording. In 1948, bluegrass emerged as a genre within the post-war country-music industry, a period of time characterized as the golden era or wellspring of traditional bluegrass. From its earliest days, bluegrass has been recorded and performed by professional musicians. Although amateur bluegrass musicians and trends such as parking-lot picking are too important to be ignored, it is professional musicians who have set the direction of the style.

1950s: The Honky-Tonk ERA

The first music genre to be commonly known as honky-tonk music was a style of piano playing related to ragtime, but emphasizing rhythm more than melody or harmony; the style evolved in response to an environment where the pianos were often poorly cared for, tending to be out of tune and having some nonfunctioning keys. Although the derivation of the term is unknown, honky-tonk originally referred to bawdy variety shows in the west (Oklahoma and Indian Territories and Texas) and to the theaters housing them. The earliest mention of honky-tonks in print refers to them as variety theaters and describes the entertainment as variety shows. The theaters often had an attached gambling house and always a bar.

Hank Williams was one of the first honky-tonk singers and his most famous song, Lovesick Blues popularized the style.  Though Williams had scored a few minor honky-tonk hits prior to Lovesick Blues, the song was the first of many number one hits on country radio for the singer. It also marked one of the songwriter's few cover songs. The song's monumental success led to Williams' tenure at the Grand Ole Opry and remains one of his best remembered songs.

Ray Price, Lefty Frizzell launched their careers singing honky-tonk music. From 1950 through 1954, Frizzell charted fifteen consecutive top-10 honky-tonk songs. In 1956, Ray Price charted the biggest honky-tonk song in country music that year with the single, Crazy Arms. The song turned out to be the 4^th biggest song in the history of country music as it held the No. 1 chart position for weeks twenty-one that year.

1960s-1970s, The Nashville Sound

More than anyone, Chet Atkins steered Nashville on an upward course to become the legitimate capital of the recording industry. As a recording producer, he had a sense of the possible. Those who knew and worked with him said he could hear a hit song before it was ever recorded. The Nashville sound arose during the late 1950s as a sub-genre of country music, replacing honky-tonk music. The Nashville Sound was pioneered by staff at RCA Records, including manager Steve Sholes, record producers Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley and Bob Ferguson. They invented the form by replacing elements of the popular honky-tonk style (fiddles, steel guitar) with "smooth" elements (string sections, background vocals) from the pop arena. 

Country historian Rich Kienzle says that Gone, a Ferlin Husky hit recorded in November 1956, may well have pointed the way to the Nashville sound. Writer Colin Escott proclaims Jim Reeves' Four Walls, recorded February 1957, to be the first 'Nashville sound record and Chet Atkins, the RCA-based producer and guitarist most often credited with being the sound's primary artistic brainchild, pointed to his production of Don Gibson's Oh Lonesome Me late that same year.However, in an essay published in Heartaches by the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles, David Cantwell argues that Elvis Presley's rock and roll recording of Don't Be Cruel in July 1956 was the record that sparked the beginning of the era now called the Nashville sound. The Browns. 

1980s-1990s, The Transitioning Years

Traditional artists had a distinctive sound, a sort of brand that made them easily identifiable from their peers. Hank Williams, Ray Price, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline all had distinguishable voices as did their peers. The music was presented in a heartfelt and professional manner. The industry fostered respect and it was exemplified by the method the artists presented themselves on and off stage. There were no faded or torn jeans, unmatched apparel or exposed cleavage.

The Grand Ole Opry had stringent rules that not only governed the aforementioned, but also the type of musical instruments allowed on stage. Until the mid-1950s, the Opry didn’t allow drums on stage and initially drums were placed back stage behind curtains. By the early-1990s, Opry executives loosened the rules regarding onstage presentations and today it appears they have little involvement in that aspect of the business.

Country music began to drift away from its traditional roots and transition toward a soft pop sound (commonly referred to as alternative country) in the Eighties. By the early-1990s, a flurry of new artists such as The Judds, Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus, Sawyer Brown and Clint Black were among several who helped transform country music beyond its original identity. Some of those singers as wells as many who have since broke into the business have indistinguishable voices.

Garth Brooks played a key role in reshaping country music by setting records for both sales and concert attendance throughout the decade. He also had a role in altering the untainted image of country music when he began swinging from ropes and busting up expensive guitars during his act.

Alternative country evolved from a diverse group of musicians, songwriters and singers operating outside the traditions of OCM. Today, most lyrics are sort of a cookie cutter type, often bland, dull and weak on substance. During the emergence of alternative country music, the Nashville establishment got caught between greed for generating huge revenue and exercising sound judgment and in the process, they decided to cast aside the established artists and the traditional sound and promote new artists and the outlandish sound they then and now pass as country music.

Bristol Sessions: The Stoneman Group

 Coutersy Bear Family Records 

"The Victor Company will have a recording machine in Bristol for 10 days beginning Monday to record records, inquire at our store." This was the text in a small box that appeared in the Bristol, Tennessee News-Bulletin on July 24, 1927.

Three days later, one of the paper's reporters sat in on a recording session, where Ralph Peer cut a few sides on Ernest Stoneman and his family. The Stonemans were locals, well-known in Bristol and had a successful career with Victor.

Researched and written by Richard Bell, Roots of Country Music. October 31, 2011.