by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s second episode of the Country
Music documentary on KPBS, directed by Ken
Burns and narrated by Peter Coyote (Burns’ go-to guy for narration since his
previous one, David McCullough, stepped down) from a script by Dayton Duncan.
The episode was called “Hard Times” and took the story of country music from
1933 — the depths of the Great Depression and the year Jimmie Rodgers died (a
loss of overwhelming importance in the history of country music, so many of
whose parameters had been basically shaped by Rodgers) — to 1945 and the end of
World War II. These were also the years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and
Burns’ sound mix included clips from FDR’s surviving radio speeches to
counterpoint his guarded optimism with the realities on the ground. There was a
brief mention of Woody Guthrie (who isn’t generally considered a country singer
but who came from the right background — rural Oklahoma — and who ripped off
the melody of “This Land Is Your Land” from the Carter Family hit, “Little
Darling, Pal of Mine,” though the Carters themselves had probably got it from a
folk source), but the main focus was on the immense popularity of Gene Autry
(who began as a contract artist for the American Record Company — owners of the
Columbia and Brunswick labels in the 1930’s as well as a number of cheap labels
like Banner, Conqueror and Perfect — ripping off Jimmie Rodgers and covering
his songs for people who wanted Rodgers’ music but didn’t want to pay the 75¢
rack rate for Rodgers’ Victor releases) and his establishment of the “Singing
Cowboy” genre; the emergence of
the Grand Ole Opry program on Saturday nights from Nashville as the premiere radio showcase for country music (by the
early 1930’s the Depression had decimated the record industry — though it would
come back as the overall economy did — but most people still had radios, and
since radio was free once you bought the set, people did most of their
listening on it); the stardom of Roy Acuff (one of the most powerfully
emotional of all country singer-songwriters — one can hear him as the way
station between Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams — and who, like Autry, had an
excellent business ense; he was able to build on the success of his songs and,
with business partner Fred Rose, form Acuff-Rose, one of the largest and most
powerful music publishing companies in the business and a key rival of Ralph
Peer’s Peer-Southern); and the emergence of Bob Wills and the “Western Swing”
style.
Wills took the traditional country-music ensemble — violin, banjo,
guitar, bass — and added jazz instruments like trumpet, trombone, clarinet,
saxophone and piano for an infectious sound. Some of Wills’ records seem like
they’re at war with themselves, as the country and jazz instruments fight it
out for dominance, and the brief allusions to Wills’ personal life (apparently
at one point he went through five wives in six years, giving new meaning to the
name of his band, the “Texas Playboys”!) made it seem as tempestuous as his
music. Wills was known as a hard taskmaster with his musicians — like Benny
Goodman, he had an intense ray-like stare he aimed at any band member who made
a mistake — and he had quite a long career, making his very last album in 1973
(just a month or so before he died) with the country-revival group Asleep at
the Wheel. Wills was a rarity in country music in that he was a bandleader who
didn’t sing (he did sing
occasionally, but most of the time he played violin and directed the band while
professional singers of both genders did the vocals), but his records became
famous for (among other things) Wills’ cries of encouragement and enthusiasm
over the work of his musicians and addressing them by name during their
performances. The first time he tried that during a recording session his
producer stopped the take and said they couldn’t have that sort of thing on a
record — and Wills said that if he couldn’t interject with his musicians on
record the way he did on stage, he was walking out and taking the band then and
there. The producer got the message, let Wills add his “Yee-haws” to his band’s
recordings, and it became a famous trademark that added to the records’ sales
appeal. Duncan’s narration claims that Wills had such clout commercially that
he was able to bring his full band onto the Grand Ole Opry, including his drummer,
as early as 1939. (Elsewhere I’d read that the Opry didn’t allow drums on its
stage until 1959, and it’s known that when Elvis Presley did his handful of
Opry appearances in 1955 drummer D. J. Fontana was forced to wait in the wings
while Elvis and his other musicians, lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist
Bill Black, performed. Elvis bombed so completely on the Opry that the show’s
manager, Jim Denny, famously told him, “If I were you, I’d go back to driving a
truck.”) Wills also helped bring country music to a larger audience when Bing
Crosby covered his hits “San Antonio Rose” and “Mexicali Rose” (and it’s
interesting to hear the straight-ahead on-the-beat phrasing Wills’ singers
brought to these songs versus Bing’s superb laid-back style that derived from
his days as Paul Whiteman’s jazz singer).
The show also covered the emergence
of bluegrass as a sub-genre
within country and credited the Monroe Brothers, Charlie and Bill, with
inventing it (though I’d always assumed bluegrass was one of the folk precursors
of country, along with hillbilly and cowboy music). The Monroe Brothers broke
up in 1940 and the two raced to the Opry to see which one could get on the show
first as a solo artist — Bill won the race and became one of the Opry’s biggest
stars, though Charlie laconically commented to a friend, “He won’t last long,
not when they find out how hard he is to get along with.” Monroe lasted into
the 1990’s and most of what’s available by him on archive.org is live tapes
from the last decade or so; he’s known not only for his own work but for Elvis
having covered his song “Blue Moon of Kentucky” as the B-side of his first Sun
Records single, “That’s All Right, Mama” (Sun Records owner Sam Phillips
created a formula for Elvis’s releases on Sun of having a cover of a Black
blues song on one side of the record and a cover of a white country song on the
other), and there’s a marvelous performance on the Vanguard compilation CD of
the 1960’s Newport Folk Festivals of Monroe performing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,”
doing one chorus at the walking tempo of his original record and then speeding
up for the second chorus to sound more like Elvis’s cover.
But for me the real
revelation on this show was The Maddox Brothers and Rose, a group that began
with a family of seven (dad, mom and five kids) who were living in Alabama on
dad’s earnings as a factory worker in the 1930’s. They decided to go to
California in search of greener pastures — figuratively and literally — and,
with little conception of the distance involved, decided to walk there. They had got about 200 miles when some hobos
ran into them and taught them how to grab rides in the boxcars of freight
trains, and that’s how they finally got to the Golden State — only the only
jobs they could get were as farm workers. Daddy Maddox announced that he was
going to try for a career in music — he’d heard the country music radio
broadcasts and decided he could sing that well — even though none of them had
ever played before. Dad decided to become the bass player (I guess that seemed
to him like the simplest instrument to learn) and his sons took up the other
traditional country instruments, while Rose became the lead singer. Hearing her
voice on these performances was electrifying; at a time when the mold for women
country singers was Sara Carter’s and Patsy Montana’s — high, thin, pleading
and verging on the edge of self-pitying bathos — Rose Maddox was the first
woman country singer who really took charge. Her voice was bold, loud, assertive and pitched
towards the bottom of the normal female range. To put it bluntly, there
wouldn’t have been a Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton if
it hadn’t been for Rose Maddox, the foremother of ballsy female country
singing. This morning I went looking for Maddox Brothers and Rose records on
archive.org, and most of the ones I found were of sacred songs on the 4Star
label (an independent company founded in Los Angeles in the late 1940’s that
also recorded Cecil Gant and other pioneers of Black R&B), though there’s
enough there to showcase how good Rose Maddox really was.
The show also deals
with some of the politics within the music industry — at the end of 1940 the
American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP) suddenly and
abruptly doubled the rates it charged radio stations for the right to play
their members’ songs on the air. The radio companies refused to play the higher
rates; instead they formed their own music licensing organization, Broadcast
Music, Inc. (BMI), and won a major coup when Ralph Peer’s Peer-Southern
publishing company became a BMI affiliate so his songs could still be performed on the radio. With
most of the composers of the “Great American Songbook” under contract to ASCAP publishers,
the ASCAP-BMI conflict helped the causes of both country and rhythm-and-blues,
musical forms the High Lords of ASCAP had decided were beneath their dignity —
so radio stations that had turned up their noses at country and R&B artists
now found themselves playing them just to have something they could legally broadcast. And Duncan’s narration
makes the interesting claim that World War II broadened the market for country
music; country players who enlisted or were drafted brought their instruments
with them, staged jam sessions and exposed their Northern brethren to this sort
of music. The show claims that by the middle of the war Bob Wills and the other
country stars were outdrawing the big-band swing leaders like Benny Goodman and
Tommy Dorsey, and the ending set up the rise of the man Burns and Duncan call “The
Hillbilly Shakespeare,” Hank Williams (who, ironically, would sweep away
Western Swing and bring country back to its roots — his bands were
back-to-the-basics ensembles of violin, steel guitar, bass and Williams’ own
guitar), whose importance to country music is parallel to his contemporary
Charlie Parker’s in jazz.
