The following article was published by Rome's Palazzo delle Esposizioni in February, 1994, under the title: "Country Music, due secoli di musica americana dalle Appalachian Mountains a Nashville". It appeared in connection with both a "Country Music Festival" and a painting exhibition, "The American West - the art of the American frontier", sponsored by the museum.
The Italian public is remarkably
conversant with many different styles of twentieth century American
popular music: the syncopated, brittle sounds of the piano Ragtime
of the turn of the century, the smoother rhythms of the Swing
bands of the 30's, the 50's experimental free jazz and with a
variety of fusions of Jazz, Rock, the blues, etc. from the 60's
to the present. It is acquainted with the Delta blues of the 30's,
with Rhythm and Blues of the 40's and 50's, the Rock and Roll
of the mid 50's, the Soul of the 60's as well as with present
day Rap music. It is undoubtedly aware of the intricate intertwining
of African and European musical traditions which, in fact, each
these musics represented, yet this audience is rarely exposed
directly to one of the essential musical sources of these developments
- the American country music tradition.
American country music is a music with roots firmly within the
Anglo-Celtic musical tradition brought to the United States by
settlers emigrating from Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales and
England. While the first English puritan settlers of the seventeenth
century may have looked askance at music (and for that matter
at entertainment itself), later waves of immigrants (the Scotch-Irish
from the north of Ireland who emigrated in the 18th century following
repressive economic measures imposed by England, the Irish who
emigrated at the middle of the 19th century following the potato
famine, etc.) were hardly so severe. These hard working immigrants
brought all the entertainments that they could transport - and
music was by far the most important of these.
Their popular musical heritage was, in fact, rich and of long
standing, and their intense love of music well documented. (Musicologist
Herbert Hughes in the preface to his collection of Irish Songs
(1909) made this observation: we must not forget that "over
a thousand years ago Ireland was the most highly educated country
in Western Europe, and that even in her decadence she has retained
some of this old knowledge and culture; and, as a consequence,
her contemporary literature and folk-music still have qualities
that are peculiar to her, and do not quickly respond to the influence
of antipathetic forces"). It was a music which was valued
by the newly arrived settlers both for its use in praising god
(often in a micro-tonal heterophony which would have done honor
to any cult of the Mid-east) and for its undoubtable capacity
to provide the atmosphere and rhythm for dancing and celebration.
The music itself consisted of ballads (many of which were at the
time already 300 to 400 years old) which recounted remarkably
dramatic if not extremely gruesome occurrences, songs (many of
which were humorous), a vast repertoire of dancing tunes known
as reels, hornpipes, jigs, etc. as well as a large number of sacred
hymn tunes. The music was plain, simple, as portable as the human
voice, the solo fiddle or the tin whistle. It was a music learned
by rote, requiring only a glancing knowledge of the rudiments
of music, but nonetheless quite capable of hauntingly expressive
melodic power in its vocal ballads as well as of generating an
exciting rhythmic power with its fiddle and pipe tunes. Its repertoire
of reels and hornpipes accompanied community square dances (direct
descendents of the circle dances of Elizabethan times) from the
earliest colonial times while its old ballads, which recounted
the tales of centuries long past, continued to entertain listeners
grouped around Appalachian firesides far into the 20th century.
It was a music which supplied the community's chief entertainment
and at the same time gave it a sense of cultural identity. As
folk music, it provided an audible link with a distant, romanticized
past, and transmitted a sense of continuity with the values and
customs of that past.
Inevitably, of course, as the settlers were gradually distributed
throughout the United States, each geographical area developed
its particular local variant of this Anglo-Celtic musical tradition
(which in itself was quite heterogeneous). New England's version
was not particularly innovative nor dynamic, but it did treat
the tradition with the respect one should accord to a quaint old
relative. In the West, the music mingled with Spanish elements,
then in the early 1900's with Hawaiian instrumentation and later
with the blues, finally developing a typical "Western Swing"
feel which would create a distinctive country music style in the
1930's. In the Southern plantation lands, the tradition was totally
transformed by its interaction with the African musical tradition
as brought to the United States by African slaves. In the Southern
Appalachian mountains (which extend through West Virginia, Kentucky,
Tennessee and northern Alabama), however, the tradition found
a watershed - a protected environment for conservation and growth
- which was to make this area the "home" of American
country music in the 20th century.
Because of its remote isolation, settlers in the Southern Appalachian
mountains during the 18th, 19th and well into the 20th century
were to lead a relatively isolated life. They were little changed
by many of the technological and commercial developments which
were transforming the rest of the country and they had seemingly
even less interest in being a part of such a transformation of
life style. From the beginning of their log cabin settlement of
the Appalachians, they had been friends with the Indian tribe
which was indigenous to the area - the Cherokee. Like the Cherokee
Indians, they had become (if they were not already by tradition)
"environmentalists", content to live out their life
in the stunning beauty of this mountain setting without the much
vaunted advantages of modern "progress."
By nature they were independent, and proud of that independence.
They had left Scotland, England, and Ireland (and, for that matter,
the English colonial taxation in America) precisely because they
wished to be free of tyranny and injustice. As mountaineers, they
were used to a rough , rugged existence where book-learning was
less helpful to survival than was the knowledge of how to shoot
a gun well. They were fundamental protestants in their religious
beliefs. A great number of them were Baptists - a folky sect which
did not acknowledge a central church authority and which put great
emphasis on public manifestation of individual religious revelation.
(It was the Baptists who spearheaded the "Great Awakening"
religious revival that swept the American frontier at the beginning
of the nineteenth century - a movement which, among other things,
laid the foundation for the development of black and white gospel
music).
Their survival in those frontier conditions - the Spartan life
style which they had been forced to endure, had kept them a strong,
god-fearing, honest people - a people with a strong sympathy for
the "underdog", for the poor (which they, in actual
fact, were) for the oppressed and exploited (which they often
were). They were a people who having themselves been the victims
of injustice, did not wish to do injustice to others. They sided
with the Cherokee Indians, when the national government dispossessed
that tribe of their land. And, by the same token, they were strongly
opposed to any form of slavery (both West Virginia and East Tennessee,
neither of which had a large black population, were anti-slavery
in the Civil War).
Their geographical isolation and the fierce pride in their own
independent traditions, then, was to make this insular mountain
community particularly important in the preservation of many of
the most distinctive aspects of the centuries old Anglo Celtic
musical tradition - traditions which in less remote areas of the
United States were gradually shorn of many of their most unique
musical characteristics (those quavering, micro-tonal embellishments
that so enrich a simple Appalachian melody, the unusual modal
melodic lines, that peculiar high, nasal vocal color, the "open
fifth" vocal and instrumental harmonies, etc.). While preserving
these "high country" vocal mannerisms, this community
also expanded and developed their inherited musical tradition.
Respecting the traditional Celtic fondness - almost to the point
of exclusivity - for plucked and bowed string instruments, mountain
musicians gradually integrated a number of new string sounds into
their music. Over the course of the centuries, instruments such
as the guitar, banjo (an instrument of African origin), Hawaiian
steel guitar (lap and pedal versions), dobro, and string bass
were added while, of course, the primacy of the fiddle (the prima
donna and "devil" of Celtic music) and the use of other
traditional stringed instruments of equally ancient lineage such
as the mountain dulcimer, the autoharp (developed from the zither
family), the mandolin (developed from the lute family), and the
ghironda (hurdy-gurdy) was continued.
From this brief look at the distant past of American country music,
one can already deduce many of the themes which are natural to
its lyrics - a respect of community traditions, a love of family,
family values and a belief in the strength of family ties, a belief
in the dignity of the individual no matter what his or her life
conditions are, a stoic acceptance of hardship and poverty, an
appreciation of nature and its beauties, a sympathy for the poor,
the weak, the uneducated, a pragmatic Christian faith that could
be summed up by the line: "God helps them who help themselves"
and a deep sense of personal pride at belonging to such a stoic
community and of enduring under such difficult conditions. Taken
together, these themes presented an extremely democratic code
of conduct well suited to American frontier society of the 17th,
18th and 19th century, just as the music, in its simplicity and
utility, provided the ideal companion for whiling away time in
the wilderness, on the range and on the frontier.
With the closing of the national frontiers and the conclusion
of the Civil War in 1865, however, the United States began to
look towards consolidation of its national image. It was rapidly
becoming a major industrial power and, consequently, was on the
verge of assuming an international role in world events. The emerging
national consciousness, formed as it was of a wide variety of
cultural backgrounds, required a music of consensus - a music
which instantaneously communicated the excitement and newness
of the American experience to a large number and variety of Americans.
This consensus was reached, but not around the Anglo-Celtic country
music tradition of the Appalachian Mountains (the existence of
which was hardly even known nationally). Rather, it was reached
around the music which had developed beyond the mountains- in
the Southern flatlands - where, for more than one and a half centuries,
the Anglo-Celtic country music had been given an entirely new
rhythmic life at the hands of black slave musicians. These musicians,
who had - from their earliest appearance in the South - been taught
the basics of European instruments and put to work as house musicians
on plantations, had gradually created, in effect, a black version
of the Anglo-Celtic tradition - a parallel but separate, and quite
original, music. The "African jig", in fact, was already
mentioned in 1775 as a part of Southern white dancing music. Many
other documents of that epoch attest to the keen appreciation
that white settlers had of the peculiar euphoria that African
performers could bring to Anglo Celtic music.
In the 19th century, this music was institutionalized within the
American Minstrel Show where black-faced white performers joked
in a broad Southern black dialect, then picked up their banjos
to play "plantation songs" which had often been copied
directly from black slave musicians. In effect, then, by the 20th
century, there had been at least 150 years of constant give and
take between Southern white and black musicians - and between
the musical traditions they represented. Southern music was indelibly
stamped by this exotic fusion of traditions.
In the 20th century, Southern black music such as Ragtime, Dixieland,
Jazz, Swing, continued to create innovative new musical styles
using European formal models as adopted to the African polyrhythmic
and improvisational tradition. These musics were to become the
national and the international popular music vernacular of this
century. The fresh, extremely sophisticated rhythmic life of this
bright new music seemed to provide the correct "feel"
for the century.
By the same token, traditional Appalachian country music, though
quite capable of boisterous rhythms and of a bouncing, infectious
beat (inherited from the Anglo-Celtic fiddle reels), certainly
never boasted of a sophisticated rhythmic life. In comparison
to the black's polyrhythmic development of the same style, country
music at the turn of this century, with its loyalty to the nineteenth
century popular music tradition, to the waltz, the sentimental
song, the simple accompaniment patterns and straight-forward melodies
of that epoch, must have seemed rather square and anachronistic.
Beyond that, country music's backwoods themes, ancient ballads
and quaint morality certainly offered little of interest to the
growing popular music market located in the big, bustling, multiracial
cites - Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco,
and above all New York - and that was where the twentieth century's
"frontiers" were to be, in the cities. American popular
music in the first half of the 20th century would be marked indelibly
by the cultural dominance of New York City. By the end of the
19th century, New York was the uncontested center of American
economic and cultural life. It was the first port for European
immigrants and it was also, for many of them, particularly those
with professional educations, their goal. The New York Philharmonic
was conducted by European composers such as Dvorak, Tschaikovsky,
and later by Mahler; New York's Metropolitan Opera was presenting
the newest works of Puccini in the presence of the Maestro himself.
In short, New York considered itself the equal of any European
capital. What's more, within the United States, New York had become
the accepted arbiter of "good (read European) taste."
It was in New York, then, that composers, versed in European classical
music as well as in the latest styles of Southern black music,
began to forge the songs of New York's famous publisher's row
- "Tin Pan Alley". The black rhythms - sensuous and
visceral - offered that slightly wicked, "forbidden"
taste which so tantalized and excited white audiences, while the
elegant finery of advanced European harmony and refined orchestrations
seemed to hold this earthiness and sensuality delicately in control.
To a large degree, traditional white Appalachian country music
was eclipsed in the national public's imagination during the first
30 years of this century by the exciting new Southern black music
and by the sophisticated new popular music coming out of New York
- off the Broadway stage or out of Tin Pan Alley. From the New
Yorker's point of view, of course, traditional white country music,
if it was taken into any consideration at all, was seen as a colorful,
rustic remnant of the past, destined to disappear along with the
horse and buggy and with the rural community organization itself
- changing technological and economic forces would see to the
latter.
As for the Southern rural communities themselves - black and white
- the first 30 years of the century was a moment of significant
change. While urban, black and white musicians were touring throughout
the United States developing the sophisticated black music which
mixed Tin Pan Alley songs with Ragtime, and the blues to become
known generically as jazz, poor rural black "share cropping"
musicians were regrouping around their Sears and Roebuck mail-order
guitars (having abandoned the banjo which had been so dear to
black plantation musicians of the 19th century) to develop the
next generation of the Southern rural blues - the Delta blues
- which, along with the remnants of Swing, would provide the basis
for the development of "Rhythm and Blues" in the 40's.
In the Appalachians, white country musicians, such as Bill Monroe,
were beginning to create a faster, virtuoso instrumental music
style based on the old Anglo-Celtic fiddle reels which would blossom
eventually in the 40's as Bluegrass Music ("country music's
string band answer to the Dixieland combo" - as ethnomusicologist
Alan Lomax has observed).
Additionally, throughout the Southwest of the 1930's - most particularly
in Texas, musicians were developing a typically white Southwestern
"Honky Tonk" vocal style. (Honky Tonk was the name given
to rural beer joints where clients drank, danced and, often enough,
fought as well). This music, generally sung in a somewhat impassive,
plaintive and subdued manner (influenced by the Southern blues
"yodeling" vocal style of Jimmie Rodgers - the 'father'
of commercial country music), was accompanied by the "Western
Swing" beat (a straight forward, "bouncing", non-syncopated
beat with heavy backbeat accents on 2 and 4). It often used drums
- instruments which were not an important part of the traditional
Anglo-Celtic tradition - as well as electric guitars in order
to cut through the din of the dance floor. The melodies are often
typical of the 19th century Irish sentimental songs, but the beat
- though not syncopated - was contemporary and the lyrics were
as well. The "heart on the sleeve" lyrics recount stories
of deception and disillusionment in love - of "cheatin' hearts"
and "slippin' around" - exposing the hedonistic, Saturday
night side of country life. At the same time, Honky Tonk pianists,
following in the footsteps of the black boogie-woogie style which
had already been developed in the 20's, performed a repertoire
of extremely rowdy "jump-blues" numbers. Together these
musics would provide the next generation of country music.
At the same time there was also a renewed appreciation of what
country music had been in the past. By the mid 20's, there was,
in fact, a great deal of interest in "lost folk arts",
in the music, crafts and the ways of the past. Musicologists armed
with recorders were fanning out through the Appalachian mountains
discovering, much to their amazement, an authentic "time
capsule" of musical styles inherited from Elizabethan times
(and earlier) as well as from the intervening centuries of American
history. At the same time, the traditional values of this "old
time" music, its innocence, family orientation, and the "good,
clean, wholesome fun" it offered, seemed to provide an antidote
to jazz and to the "loose morals" that many observers
felt had swept the United States following the conclusion of the
First World War.
Interestingly enough, the technological advances, which had seemed
to threaten the very social foundation of country music's world,
would prove to be, rather, its salvation, not only through the
early "field" recordings of the 1920's and 30's which
preserved marvelous examples of Appalachia's authentic Anglo-Celtic
tradition, but in "regional" recordings and radio broadcasts
throughout the 20's and 30's, which were gradually to bring this
anachronistic, "hillbilly" music, once again, to the
national public's attention. These, along with Hollywood's 1934
invention of the "singing cowboy" to re-launch "Cowboy
and Indian" movies in the new epoch of sound pictures, served
to reaffirm the presence of a large audience which still felt
tightly bound to country music, and, of course, to all the cultural
values and attitudes that country music, and only country music,
represented. Not surprisingly, the center of the country music
revival and commercialization was to be located in the Appalachian
Mountain area. For a variety of reasons the choice of the central
city for country music fell to Nashville - the state capitol of
Tennessee, located in mid-state, halfway between Knoxville and
the Appalachian "Smoky" Mountains on the eastern side
and the broad lands of Memphis which border the Mississippi River
on the western side. In effect, the history of commercial country
music is the history of the growth of Nashville's epoch making
country music radio program, "The Grand Ole Opry".
Begun in 1925 as the "WSM Barndance", the program was
re-baptized "the Grand Ole Opry" in 1927. The name itself,
which lightly parodies classical taste (the program followed the
Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra)
was to indicate that this music was "down to earth",
frank, sincere and without "cultural" presumptions (i.e.
definitely not from New York).
Performances of the show were done on stage, in front of an audience,
with performers dressed in overalls and work shirts - projecting
an image of informality and family warmth. The musicians, most
of them "amateurs", laughed and joked gently with each
other and with the audience as if the program were a huge family
party - harking back to the frontier days of the past when barndances
were celebrations of community efforts, a way of helping each
other and having fun and sharing experience as well. Performers
spoke with the appropriate country dialect that still characterized
the rural Appalachian community. They danced the "buck and
wing" and did clog and square dancing. They told colorful
"tall stories", made stereotypical jokes about country
life and contrasted it's joys with the problems and complexities
of city life. Friendliness, concern, humility, sincerity, a belief
in the ancient wisdoms imparted by country life, and a pride at
being part of that tradition permeated the entire broadcast. If
the radio audience were looking for a kind and gentle, somewhat
nostalgic glimpse at America's past, this was the right program
for it.
During the early years of the Grand Ole Opry, the music was intentionally
kept in an older style - gospel music, sentimental ballads, solo
fiddle music and "old time" country string band music
(often with the addition of the harmonica). Contemporary, "blues"
influenced music and styles were initially discouraged, as was
the use of electric guitars and drums - perhaps to more clearly
distinguish the broadcast as "country", or perhaps in
order to satisfy a certain conservative strain that ran through
the country community itself. In fact, from its very beginning
as a commercial phenomenon in the 20's, country music has been
wracked by controversy between conservative and progressive points
of view. For the conservatives, traditional country music is essentially
a vital repository of the country community's core values and,
therefore, should remain as unchanged as possible. For the progressives,
new musical styles are necessary in order to address new contemporary
life experiences, for them the truly "country" part
of country music is, above all, the frank, "down to earth"
attitude which the music's lyrics express towards everyday reality,
not the automatic repetition of a repertoire inherited from the
past.
This fundamental controversy was present already in the Grand
Ole Opry's initial rejection of its Western "cousin"
- Honky Tonk music (the music which was, in fact, to become the
strongest new voice of country music in the 40's and the 50's)
and in later reactions against the Nashville recording industry's
"Country-pop" sound of the 60's (which, in the interest
of attracting a larger "cross over" audience, had sacrificed
many of the old, country music mannerisms in favor of a blander,
pop oriented, so called "Nashville sound"). Even later
this conflict can be found in the resistance to the Country-Rock
developments of the 70's. This controversy is further complicated
by the massive commercialization of Country Music and all the
suspicions and resentments that surround this undeniable fact.
Whatever the case, however, the Grand Ole Opry broadcasts and
its country music enjoyed ever increasing success. By 1939 it
was broadcast nationally on NBC. In 1943 the Opry acquired its
own permanent home, Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, from which Saturday
night radio and, in the 1950's, television broadcasts were made.
The program, which had originated as an hour long broadcast in
the 20's, was by then a four hour extravaganza featuring as many
as 30 different country music acts. In 1974 the Grand Ole Opry
moved to the gigantic "Opryland USA" auditorium and
Disneyland-like amusement park located just outside of Nashville.
The phenomenal commercial success of country music, as underscored
by the continual expansion of The Grand Ole Opry, mirrored, of
course, a major change in demographics which had occurred in the
first half of this century - the gradual urbanization of substantial
numbers of Southern rural whites. Throughout the first part of
the century, in fact, there had been a continual movement of white
and black workers out of the South in search of employment. With
the advent of the Second World War this trend was significantly
accelerated - dislocating millions of Southern whites and blacks
into the war-related industries located in the cities of the North
and West. These "uprooted" people carried their rural
music with them into the cities, just as their ancestors had brought
their music to the "new world" centuries earlier. The
resultant urbanization of the audience and the music, would inevitably
bring both the new generation of Southern rural black music, Rhythm
and Blues, and the new generation of Southern rural white music,
Country Music, to the national attention following the end of
World War 2. In the years immediately following the war, in fact,
these musics effectively displaced jazz and Tin Pan Alley as the
new popular musics. Unlike their predecessors which had been,
to some degree, conditioned by New York's European tastes, these
new musics were rawer, closer to the soil, less sophisticated
and proud of it.
In the course of this century, then, the genre which had in the
20's (for commercial reasons) been called regional or "hillbilly"
music, then re-dubbed "Country and Western" in the late
40's, then just Country Music in the 70's, has acquired an extremely
large national constituency. Along with Rhythm and Blues, it has
served as a reference point for practically all the significant
new popular musics generated in the latter half of this century
from Rock and Roll onwards. While conserving intact a repertoire
of the old hymns, ballads, and reels which had been brought to
America several hundreds of years earlier - the Anglo-Celtic folk
music core which gives country music its sense of continuity and
its claim to authenticity, country music, now in the hands of
professional, commercially successful musicians who come from
all parts of the United States, has created a new repertoire of
music which convincingly carries on that authentic, "down
home country" feel. It is represented by a plurality of musical
styles (which range from Rock and Bluegrass to Gospel and "traditional"
country ballad styles) and regional styles (including the Louisiana
based Cajun style with its curious mix of Scotch-Irish fiddle
music, German accordion music and French lyrics).
Confirming its origins, it continues to be a simple music, solidly
located on the side of the poor and the suffering, and quite capable
of righteous indignation in front of injustice. It still professes
belief in the values of home life and the importance of sincerity,
honesty and mutual respect. It most certainly is a music which
addresses an entire variety of real life experiences - from making
car payments to being an amputee soldier - which are not addressed
by any other popular American music. At its best, country music
continues to express in contemporary terms the experiences and
core values peculiar to a large segment of the American population
- "lonesome travelers", perhaps, who still look to this
Anglo-Celtic music for companionship and consolation during life's
fretful journey.
Richard Trythall, January, 1994
Rome, Italy