Blue Moon Rock Evolution – Country & Folk
Introduction
One problem with the whole rock evolution idea is where to start, and this is particularly true in the country and folk category. Every artist that you can think of has been influenced by artists from earlier generations, and folk music has been passed down through the generations for centuries. Country music is definitively a 20th century phenomenon but as it has its roots in songs about working-class and blue-collar American life, it sits nicely within the folk genre.
With all of this in mind, I decided to base my starting point on two key concepts that shaped the country and folk genres in the first half of the 20th century.
Electrical Recording
The first is the concept of electrical recording. Whilst it had been possible to record sound for decades, the acoustic recording techniques used led to variable results. Singers had to all but put their face into the recording horn and in order to record multiple instruments properly, the louder instruments such as the trumpet and drums had to be positioned further away from the recording horn.
When engineers at Western Electric developed the technology necessary for capturing sound with a microphone and amplifying it with valves, a new age of music recording was born. These electrically powered microphones were able to send a far cleaner signal to the cutting stylus resulting in a clearer recording. Record companies Victor and Columbia licensed the new electrical system from Western Electric and recorded the first electrical discs during the spring of 1925.
The Bristol Sessions and the Birth of Country Music
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This brief technological overview is a lead up to what happened over 12 days in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927. Bristol was one of the stops on a two-month tour taken by Ralph Peer, a producer for the Victor Talking Machine Company, and his trip yielded important recordings for many genres including country. The Bristol sessions, as they became known, marked the commercial debuts of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, and as such, Bristol has been called the birthplace of country music.
Jimmie Rodgers was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 27, an event that caused him to leave his job as a railway brakeman and led to him becoming a full-time musician. Working in various resorts in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Rodgers became aware of the recording sessions that were about to happen in Bristol. He was supposed to record with his band but after a disagreement over the band name, he recorded solo. The session produced "The Soldier's Sweetheart", an adaptation of an old vaudeville tune with new lyrics by Rodgers, and a version of the showtune, "Sleep, Baby, Sleep". When these records started to sell well, it led to a short but lucrative recording career for Rodgers and at the height of this career, in 1929, he made approximately $75,000.
Jimmie Rodgers health worsened due to his tuberculosis, and he died in 1933, but the music he produced in those few years was such that he is widely regarded as the "Father of Country Music".
The Segregation of Blues and Country
The "Father of Country Music" he may have been but back in the day, Jimmie Rodgers saw himself as a blues singer. Listening to the early songs on our blues playlist from a couple of weeks ago, it’s not too much of a stretch to hear the same kind of guitar-based lament in his twangs to that of Robert Johnson.
In the early 20th century, it was common for black and white musicians to play together, but whilst electrical recording provided a giant leap forward in terms of sound quality, it was also the catalyst for the segregation of blues and country music. Before the 1920s, record labels didn’t give the idea of categorising music much thought, but now the idea of targeting different markets with different styles became appealing.
“Hillbilly music” was the term under which Jimmie Rodgers’ music was first sold. With this label, country music had been officially racialised and the split between the blues and country music soon became socially recognised. Music made by black artists and marketed for a black audience was now sold under the “race music” moniker. Just a couple of months after he'd recorded Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family in Bristol, Ralph Peer produced the “Statesboro Blues” sessions featuring Blind Willie McTell.
For blues the biggest change was during the Great Migration when many African Americans moved out of the rural south for big northern cities like Chicago. As we can hear from the blues playlist, artists such as Muddy Waters revolutionised the genre by electrifying the blues and country music also began to branch out into different sub-genres, giving the record companies different markets to target.
The Advent of the Protest Song
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Woody Guthrie was born in Oklahoma, but left the state in the dust bowl era, leaving his wife and children behind as he travelled west to California looking for work. Working at Los Angeles radio station KFVD (where he met John Steinbeck), he achieved some fame playing hillbilly music. However, his lifelong association with American communist groups didn’t sit well with the station’s owners and Guthrie eventually ended up in New York, where he wrote and recorded his 1940 album
Dust Bowl Ballads, based on his experiences during the 1930s. In February 1940, he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land". He said it was a response to what he felt was the overplaying of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on the radio. With his lyrics, Guthrie just about invented the modern protest song, and his guitar carried a label that read, “this machine kills fascists”.
By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and in 1952, he was diagnosed with Huntington's disease. Increasingly unable to control his muscles, Guthrie was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, New Jersey, from 1956 to 1961. One of Guthrie's visitors at Greystone Park was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie. Woody Guthrie died in 1967, but his influence on later generations, would be seen from the late 50s and beyond.
The Template for Country Music
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Early deaths are becoming a recurring theme in this article. Alcoholism and drug abuse meant that Hank Williams only made it to the age of 29, but it was long enough for him to have 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, five of which were released posthumously, and 12 of which reached No.1. He was a significant influence on a number of artists that were to follow him in the 1950s and into the 60s. In fact, his lyrical woe-is-me approach set the template for country songs for many years to come.
The Instrumentalists
Just when you may be thinking that country and folk is all slow tempos and mournful stories, it’s worth talking about Bill Monroe.
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Monroe first formed a band in 1929, when he moved to Indiana to work at an oil refinery with his brothers Birch and Charlie. After working his way through a few bands over the following years, he formed the first edition of his band, the Blue Grass Boys, in the late 1930s. In 1939, Monroe successfully auditioned for a regular spot at the Grand Ole Opry, impressing the owner with his energetic performance of Jimmie Rodgers's "Mule Skinner Blues", followed by his first recording session for RCA Victor in 1940.
While the fast tempos and instrumental virtuosity characteristic of bluegrass music are apparent even on these early tracks, Monroe was still experimenting with the sound of his group. The key change came with the addition of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to the Blue Grass Boys in December 1945. Flatt’s rhythm guitar style would help to set the course for bluegrass timing, whilst Scruggs played the banjo with a distinctive three-finger picking style that immediately caused a sensation among Opry audiences. Monroe’s line-up has been dubbed the "Original Bluegrass Band", as the music finally included all the elements that characterize bluegrass music, including breakneck tempos, sophisticated vocal harmony arrangements, and impressive instrumental proficiency demonstrated in solos or "breaks" on the mandolin, banjo, and fiddle.
When taken in combination with the blues, this was a significant development in the playing of stringed instruments that would form the basis for the experimental soloing that was to become so prevalent in the coming decades.
Collection of Folk
Now to the second key concept: collection of music.
When I started my research for this article, specifically British folk music, I was initially confused by the term “collectors”. Accepting that British folk music is far older than this article has the time to address, I was drawn to the discovery that there were two folk revivals in the 20th century, either side of the Second World War.
Apparently, the first revival involved “collectors”, the most important figure being Cecil Sharp. What did he write? what instrument did he play? Why was he described as a collector? I had this image of shadowy figures haunting the libraries of large country estates. It wasn’t until I read about the post-war revival that things finally clicked. This second British folk revival followed on from the American revival that Woody Guthrie had been a key part of, and one of the key figures here was our very own Ewan MacColl, born in Salford and writer of ditties such as “Dirty Old Town”.
But the key song for me here is one that we are probably all familiar with. In 1947, MacColl visited Mark Anderson, a retired lead-miner from Middleton-in-Teesdale, who performed to him a song called "Scarborough Fair". MacColl recorded the lyrics and melody and in a book of Teesdale folk songs.
I have seen this exchange written as:
“The famous melody was collected from Mark Anderson by Ewan MacColl” and it is this melody that was later used by Simon & Garfunkel in "Scarborough Fair/Canticle".
Now the term “collection” made sense. We are so used to having the entire history of popular music at our fingertips, or in previous years, mostly available from the nearest record shop, that it is easy to forget that passing music down through the generations didn’t rely on anything but a good memory, an ability to perform and an ear for music. Although many artists have recorded versions of this song, MacColl’s version didn’t appear until 1957, ten years after he'd originally collected it.
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Another significant figure in the English folk revival was Shirley Collins. At a party hosted by MacColl, she met and fell in love with American folk collector, Alan Lomax. In late 1959, the two of them embarked on a folk collection in the southern United States, but not before Collins had recorded her first two albums,
Sweet England and
False True Lovers, released in 1959 and 1960 respectively. The albums featured sparse arrangements with Collins accompanying herself on the banjo.
Country Goes Pop
As the end of the 1950s approached, a new sub-genre of county music was pioneered by managers, producers and recording engineers who replaced the fiddles, steel guitar and rough-and-ready vocals with smoother elements heard in the pop music of the time.
The Nashville Sound, as it became known, featured slick production involving string sections, backing vocals and crooners taking the lead. The main proponent of this new sound was Jim Reeves, whose song “Four Walls” hit number one on the country chart in 1957 whilst also making number 11 on the main pop chart.
The growing popularity of country music and its increasing acceptable in the mainstream is also illustrated by the example of Patsy Cline. She is considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to cross over into pop music. Cline had several major hits during her eight-year recording career, including “Walking After Midnight”.
Summary
The artists and genres mentioned so far represent just a small example of a much bigger genre. There’s Appalachian music, heavily influenced by folk music from the British Isles and Continental Europe, which used a fabulous array of stringed instruments including guitar, mandolin, autoharp, banjo and fiddle.
Cajun and Zydeco, both upbeat forms of music originating in Louisiana, straddle blues, country and Creole, and are led by accordion and washboard. Western Swing is another upbeat form that originated in the dance halls of America’s Great Plains in the late 1920s. And in the 1950s, rockabilly developed as a blend of country and rhythm and blues.
All of these styles provided a rich musical backdrop and, combined with tales of blue-collar life and songs and stories passed down through the generations, sowed the seeds for what was to come in the 1960s and beyond. Artists such as Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline were enjoying hit records alongside the new Rock ‘n’ Rollers, and it wouldn’t be long before one of the most famous songwriters in history picked up the baton and took the music to a whole new audience.
