by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our main “feature” last night, which I was able to watch
after Undercover Cheerleader (see below)
because KPBS blessedly ran it twice, at 8 p.m. and again at 10 p.m., was “The
Rub,” the first episode (of eight) in Ken Burns’ latest omnibus series about
American life and culture, Country Music. I’m not a major fan of country music but I quite like a lot of it,
and the closer it hews to the roots of the form — the Anglo-Saxon and Irish
folk traditions that provided the basic foundation, the admixtures of Black blues
and spirituals, Latino and Hawai’ian guitar traditions that got overlaid on
them, and the fusion of hillbilly, bluegrass and Western music that fused into
the style we usually call “country” — the better I like it. I get very
impatient with people who flatly say, “I don’t like country music” (though that
blanket dismissal is pretty close to the way I feel about rap) since there
seems to me to be a beautiful bittersweet spirit in the best country music that
I respond to. One thing I noticed about Burns’ first episode, “The Rub” — which
he advertised as “Beginnings-1933” (1933 is the close of his story in this episode — he times it with the
death of the paradigmatic country-music pioneer, Jimmie Rodgers, who arguably
is to country what Louis Armstrong, with whom he actually recorded one song, is
to jazz — and as Dayton Duncan’s script demonstrates, the roots of country
music go so far back in American
history that the first published country song dates to 1736, 40 years before
the Declaration of Independence. One thing I find fascinating about this show
is its proclamation that African-American culture is one of the roots of
country music — a claim you could, come to think about it, make about virtually
all American popular music. You
combine Black music with the white marching-band tradition, and you get jazz.
You combine Black and Jewish music, and you get Broadway and the “Great
American Songbook.” You combine Black music with the British and Irish folk
traditions, and you get country music.
Burns’ and Duncan’s ecumenicism about
the Black influence on country music stands in sharp contrast to the “take”
Burns took on the history of jazz in his mega-documentary Jazz, in which, under the lash of the reverse-racist
theories of his two principal consultants, trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis
(who rears his head in this show as well) and critic Stanley Crouch, he went
out of his way to deny any
creative role for white musicians in shaping jazz. (About the only white
musicians Burns treated with any fairness in Jazz were Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck
— and I suspect the only reason Brubeck made the cut was that when Burns made
the film he was still alive and agreed to be interviewed extensively for it.)
PBS has told the story of “The Rub” at least twice before, in a bio-documentary
about the Carter Family and the first episode of American Epic, a show from 2017 about the Black and white folk
traditions record companies seized on in the late 1920’s to compete with radio
— they looked for musics popular where radio hadn’t penetrated yet and sought
to sell rural people, white and Black, phonographs and records by offering them
the sorts of music they already knew, liked and often played themselves. “The
Rub” shows a surprising degree of integration between white and Black musicians
despite the harsh segregation laws that were supposed to prevent the races from
mixing in public at all, including photos of Black musicians playing with
otherwise all-white bands, as well as the wince-inducing phenomenon of
blackface: white performers crudely made up to look Black and doing routines
(including the songs of Stephen Foster, cited here as an important antecedent
of country music as well as an early example of someone who was able to
popularize a folk tradition and turn it into a marketable product) that
depicted Black life in a stereotyped and bizarre fashion. Among the oddest
aspects of how white performers depicted Black people to a white audience was
their insistence that the Blacks had loved being slaves and had deep, abiding affections for their owners. (I
just ate, and it’s a struggle to type that without puking.)
The one big mistake
Burns and Duncan made is the total omission of Vernon Dalhart; Burns and Duncan
mention “Fiddling” John Carson as the first country musician to make a
commercially successful record (for the Okeh label, produced by Ralph Peer, in
1922), but they don’t mention Dalhart’s pioneering song “The Wreck of the Old
97.” Based on a real-life wreck of a mail train outside Danville, Virginia in
1903. “The Wreck of the Old 97” was first recorded by Dalhart for the Edison
label in 1922, but it didn’t really take off until he remade it for Victor
(backed by another song that became a country standard, “The Prisoner’s Song”)
in 1924. (Edison’s record sold poorly because they were recorded
“hill-and-dale” — the stylus moving up and down in the groove — instead of the
more standard “lateral cut,” the stylus moving side to side. If you had a
lateral-cut phonograph you couldn’t play hill-and-dale records on it unless you
bought an adapter, which some third-party vendors sold.) Dalhart’s Victor
record of “The Wreck of the Old 97” sold over a million copies and let everyone
in the record business know that there was gold in them thar hillbillies. Ralph
Peer was a visionary businessman who, after leaving Okeh in a salary dispute in
1925, set his sights on the biggest record company of all, Victor. When
Victor’s executives told him they weren’t willing to hire him as a producer,
Peer made them an offer they literally couldn’t refuse: he’d produce records
for Victor and not take any payment at all for his work in the studio. Instead,
he’d be compensated by being given the publishing rights for any copyrightable
songs his musicians recorded. Peer formed a music company (called Peer-Southern
and still run by members of his family) to hold the copyrights and collect
money not only for the records he and his artists produced but for sales of
sheet music and any cover versions recorded by other artists. This meant that
Peer’s artists could only record either songs they had written themselves,
public-domain folk material they had “tweaked” enough to render it
copyrightable, or other songs from the Peer-Southern publishing catalogue.
In
1927 Peer organized a field recording trip to Bristol, Tennessee to get more
records by Ernest Stoneman, who was then Victor’s top-selling country artist
but didn’t want to come to New York or the company’s headquarters in Camden,
New Jersey to record. In order to make the trip worth his and the company’s
while — at the time recording equipment was incredibly heavy, massive, fragile
and difficult to move — Peer decided to hold open auditions. At first he didn’t
attract many artists, so he got an article written about his operation in a
local newspaper bidding anyone who played “mountain music” to come out and try
for a Victor contract. Towards the end of his Bristol sojourn Peer attracted
the acts that would become the first country superstars: the Carter Family and
Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family were a trio consisting of A. P. Carter, his
wife Sara and her sister Maybelle (who’d married A. P.’s brother Eck), who had
never performed professionally before and had always regarded music as
something you made for fun on your front porch to relax after a long day of
farm work. Ralph Peer heard something in Sara’s high, thin, plaintive voice
that he thought would sound “authentic” and would sell. Jimmie Rodgers was a
30-year-old ne’er-do-well whose father was a railroad man who tried to get
Rodgers work on the railroads as well; he briefly had the difficult job of
brakeman when he wasn’t tearing off, touring with vaudeville acts and traveling
medicine shows, and burning through his money almost as soon as he made it,
much to the chagrin of his wife Carrie and their daughter Anita. Rodgers came
to Bristol prepared to record a soap-opera lament called “The Soldier’s
Sweetheart,” but he needed a song to put on the other side and he quickly
concocted a lullaby called “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” in which he yodeled between
verses. As things turned out, it was “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” that became the hit,
and Rodgers yodeled on just about every subsequent record he made. Rodgers also
suffered from tuberculosis at a time when that was an incurable death sentence,
and his own awareness of the brevity of his life span haunts all his music.
Rodgers took composer credit for most of his songs — sometimes along with Elsie
McWilliams, his sister-in-law — and he became an enormous star with a huge
following. He also made a lot of money, which he spent on fancy cars, designer
clothes, a custom guitar with gold frets and his name emblazoned down the neck
in mother-of-pearl (on the back side of the instrument he painted the word
“Thanks,” offered to the audience who had made this possible) and a lavish home
in Texas he called “Blue Yodeler’s Paradise” after the “Blue Yodel” designation
Peer slapped on 13 of Rodgers’ songs.
I remember discovering Jimmie Rodgers
through two RCA Victor reissue LP’s in the late 1960’s, playing through one of
them (including the searing, doom-ridden “Barefoot Blues,” which he recorded in
a final frantic week in New York because he knew he literally had just days to
live and if he could complete his Victor contract in the time he had left his
wife and daughter would get $2,500 in session fees they desperately needed)
before I bothered to look at the photo on the album cover, then reeling in
shock and saying, “This guy was white?” At a time when there were solemn debates in music magazines over the
question, “Can white men sing the blues?” (white musician Steve Miller’s
response was, “Why not? White people have problems, too”), here was a white man
from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s who had sung the blues with the same
passion, sincerity and soul of the great Black blues singers of the time.
What’s more, Rodgers could sing anything: blues, pop, dance, Hawai’ian (the steel guitar became a paradigmatic
country instrument because Rodgers liked Hawai’ian music and insisted on
recording with Hawai’ian bands that used it), sacred (when Peer decided to pair
Rodgers and the Carter Family together, the best song they made together was
the hymn “The Wonderful City”) and all elements of the
hillbilly-bluegrass-Western style that was coming together to form what we now
know as country music. Between them, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers laid
the groundwork for virtually all of what country music would become — Burns
underscores this by playing Rodgers’ record of “Muleskinner Blues” at the end
of the program (after depicting Rodgers’ funeral train, which drew the same
kind of turnout of people anxious to see it go by and say their farewell to him
as Lincoln’s had 68 years earlier) and then cutting, over the final credits, to
a sped-up but still within-the-tradition live cover by Dolly Parton — and
though the Great Depression would hit the market for records in general
(indeed, it virtually destroyed the U.S. recording industry, though the record
market did eventually recover as the overall economy did), country musicians
would find a home on radio and their music, rooted as it was in the lives of
people who had always lived
marginal existences, would speak powerfully to Depression audiences and keep
the flame alive.
