The fallout from the Country Music Explosion has finally infected even you, and in – – – – – – – – you find yourself smitten with your first male, female or group country star.
(In the blank provided, please enter the name of Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus, Clint Black, Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Vince Gill, Wynonna Judd, Trisha Yearwood, Pam Tillis, Reba McEntire, Diamond Rio, Little Texas or the singer who has captured your heart.)
So now you want to know what this country music stuff is all about? Where it came from, whether it`s the same stuff that used to be hick and, if so, why it isn`t hick anymore?
Yes, current Country Music is-considerably more or considerably less-the same thing that used to be accounted hick. What it is, where it came from, and how it transcended hickdom, however, requires fuller explanation.
The rocketing stardom of Brooks, Cyrus, Black, Jackson, Tritt, et al, is founded on what began as a comparatively insular homemade music, the kind rural and smalltown Americans played on their front porches in the evenings before television decimated self-entertainment.
In those days there were two musics: the type people in more populous areas went to see played in vaudeville theaters and such, and the homelier sounds rural Americans plinked for themselves on guitars, fiddles, banjos and pianos, mostly because they couldn`t afford to go to see the first type. A lot of these rural residents became designated ”hillbillies.”
The first high-profile use of that term occurred 92 years ago in the New York Journal, which formalized the disrespect with which country people and country music would tend to be generally viewed for the next seven or eight decades. The Journal sniffingly proclaimed:
”A hill-billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”
In 1900, there were considerably more such people in the United States
(especially if you didn`t restrict their place of residence to Alabama)
than there were citydwellers. There also were a lot of people who wanted to make money from them, including the founders of record companies and radio stations.
Country music as a business (now a massive, national operation) can arguably be said to have been born in 1924 in none other than Chicago. With the establishment of the WLS Barn Dance, a live country-music radio broadcast, it jumped onto the radio airwaves of urban and northern America-18 months before its brainstorming founder, newspaperman George D. Hay, exited Chicago to establish Nashville`s even more famous Grand Ole Opry.
From then on, things moved pretty fast. In 1927 two of the field`s seminal acts, ”Father of Country Music” Jimmie Rodgers and the Original Carter Family, made their first recordings for a traveling recording engineer in Bristol, Va.
Around 1930 Gene Autry, thanks considerably to Sears & Roebuck, became country music`s first superstar, a huge merchandising vehicle for Gene Autry guitars, etc., via the Barn Dance on WLS; he then shrewdly headed for Hollywood to parlay his music success into a film fortune and spawn a posse of such singer/actors as Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Rex Allen and Jimmy Wakely.
Because of the film industry he spawned, Autry had at least as much impact on country music`s clothes as on its music. Country performers quickly donned Hollywood-style cowboy hats to try to cash in on some of the popularity of western movies. Also following in Autry`s wake were hordes of non-western groups with names such as Pee Wee King`s Golden West Cowboys and the Girls of the Golden West.
Cowboy music itself flourished, too, though, in such acts as the Sons of the Pioneers and Patsy Montana, whose ”I Want to Be a Cowboy`s Sweetheart”
was country music`s first million-seller by a female. Back in Autry`s native Texas, fiddler Bob Wills began carving out a legend of his own with a more sophisticated and harder-driving brand of cowboy music that came to be called western swing.
Nashville tended to be more traditional than Chicago and stuck to string band music for its first decade and a half, but finally achieved a solo superstar around 1940 in Tennessee mountaineer Roy Acuff. A hillbilly with a vengeance, Acuff possessed a throat so strong and clear that the first time it assaulted the microphone of the Grand Ole Opry it reportedly knocked some of the Opry network stations off the air.
The year after Acuff`s arrival at the Opry, the increasingly famous Nashville show acquired another inimitable wailer, Kentuckian Bill Monroe, who was to Acuff and Southeastern country music what Wills was to Autry and western country music: Monroe revved it up to create an intricate and stampedingly fast subcategory called bluegrass.
In the wake of Acuff and Monroe, who quickly became stars via the 50,000- watt Opry microphones of Nashville`s WSM, there developed a small galaxy of new stars who by now had adopted the cowboy hats and the brocaded and fringed western-style stage finery pioneered by Autry`s Hollywood. Notable among these were Texas-born Ernest Tubb and Canadian-born Hank Snow. Most influential of all, though, were Eddy Arnold, a Tennessee plowboy who rose from the Grand Ole Opry to become Nashville`s first huge pop record-seller, and Hank Williams, a tall singer-songwriter from Alabama who combined a passion for heart music with a weakness for pain-killers for his frail, early-malnourished body.
Combining passion and physical pain with a rural Southern dynamism no country star has achieved since, Williams wrote some of country`s most influential music in a meteorically brief career that was sliding toward oblivion when a mixture of drugs and alcohol killed him in the backseat of a show-bound car at age 29. His death resurrected and magnified the scope of his career and created a tragic mystique that appears likely to live as long as country music does.
Even more tragic, but less sensationally so, was Lefty Frizzell, a velvet-throated Texan who rode high during the early 1950s when Williams appeared to be lurching drunkenly toward nowhere. So popular with crowds that they tore his clothes off three or four years before Elvis Presley made such occurrences more commonplace,
Frizzell was a Jimmie Rodgers disciple who had a rural voice that lilted in the high ranges and was mellifluously mellow in the lower ones, and his passion for his music was so pronounced that he often put a half-dozen notes into a single syllable of lyric. The onset of rock `n` roll sank his popularity and he soon became a hard-drinking shadow of his former persona. When he died in 1975 of a stroke at age 47, he was known mostly for his great influence on some of the finest singers of later eras.
The modern country field`s archetypal gods rose soon after rock `n` roll pushed Frizzell toward the background:
– Johnny Cash, countriest of a Memphis rock `n` roll contingent that also included Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison, parlayed awesome charisma and a folkish interest in his own cottonfield roots into a series of different stardoms-teen idolhood, folksinger and country phenomenon- that vastly widened the public perception of what was country.
– George Jones, whose impassioned vocals were so rural-styled that his homely nickname-”The Possum”-fit beautifully, brought more simultaneous intensity and artistry to country singing than anybody had before, and possibly since.
– Patsy Cline departed from the ultrarural sound and cabin-hearthside image of such skilled female predecessors as Kitty Wells and Jean Shepard and, before dying prematurely in a 1963 airplane crash, pioneered a magnificently powerful and confident sound that again put country into the pop consciousness and influenced every aspiring country female who followed her.
– Merle Haggard, a California ex-convict with a huge talent for capturing in word and sound the loneliness of the soul, melded the styles of Lefty Frizzell and Jimmie Rodgers into one of his own and became the most imitated singer in modern country music.
Since the 1950s, country music has survived several threats to its existence. First, there was rock `n` roll. In the 1970s, searching for increased sales that would protect it from relegation to the status of cult music, it watered down and in many cases eliminated its traditional fiddle and steel guitar bedrock in favor of pop lyrics and instrumentation that sometimes changed it beyond recognition. The trademark cowboy hats and western outfits became noticeably less evident.
In a climate in which traditionalists seemed able to survive in the increasingly urban market only by laughing at things country, they did so via hit records by ”neo”-traditionalists such as Moe Bandy and Gene Watson with humorous titles: ”Honkytonk Amnesia,” ”It Was Always So Easy To Find An Unhappy Woman (Till I Started Looking For Mine)” and ”Her Body Couldn`t Keep You Off My Mind.”
Bandy and Watson, who rose to stardom in the mid-1970s, held the fort for more dramatic reinforcements in the `80s, as pop hybridization in Nashville reached a point where it had so diluted the music and so ignored the need for new talent that buyers of its records disappeared.
Suddenly, circa 1980, there appeared two widely differing new traditionalists-authentic Texas cowboy George Strait and virtuosic Kentucky singer/string genius Ricky Skaggs, who saw no need to temper their
traditionalism with humor. Strait, who drew his influences from both Bob Wills and George Jones, and Skaggs, a latter-day Bill Monroe, immediately became very popular, but Nashville`s pop mindset had become so strong that Strait and Skaggs were regarded as flukes until the rise of Randy Travis in 1985. Meanwhile, country music demonstrated the width of its spectrum with the simultaneous rise of Alabama, a rock-influenced but unmistakably country group from Fort Payne, Ala., who grabbed a younger audience and throughout the `80s sold unprecedented millions of records.
Randy Travis, teaming staunch traditionalism with a mellow vocal timbre and a wonderfully delicate sense of humor, was probably the pivotal figure in the rise of today`s Nashville megastardoms. When Travis appeared, the industry was raving about the promise of punkishly-country and Los Angeles-cool Dwight Yoakam, but the not-so-cool Travis proceeded to double and triple Yoakam`s million sales figures. In the process, he showed Nashville executives that Strait and Skaggs were really mainstreamers instead of flukes: there was still a huge, and even a growing, market for traditional-styled country music-even in America`s most-urban areas.
That established the atmosphere that sent Nashville executives out looking for the herd of cowboyish-looking ”hat acts” that so successfully ply the national market today. It is what brought Garth Brooks into Nashville determined to become a pop sensation by being not pop but defiantly country.
How country music transformed itself from hick to cool seems to have had to do with the gradual but steady attraction of younger fans by younger artists and an excitement-oriented stage image championed by Brooks. Contributing also, probably, was a revival of more country-style family values by the uncertainties of the Persian Gulf War and the domestic disillusionment that followed it.
The rise of Strait, Skaggs, Travis and Brooks has brought country music full circle. In the incongruously urban and technologically complicated `90s, it has returned to the most eternal of the sounds and concerns of the Southeastern and Midwestern farmers and the authentic and otherwise cowboys and cowgirls who initially established it. Strongly reflecting the odyssey of rural-rooted Americans into college degrees and urban jobs, it yet remains rooted in the individual concerns of the common man and woman-or, increasingly these days, boy and girl.
”Country music is the heart and soul, the joy and sorrow, of the working class,” once wrote Johnny Cash. ”It is the one voice that the working man has to express himself to the world.”
