Folk traditions shape influential regional musics

The terms race and hillbilly were used by the American music industry from the early 1920s until the late 1940s to classify and advertise southern music. “Race records” were recordings of performances by African-American musicians produced mainly for sale to African-American listeners. “Hillbilly” or “old-time” music, on the other hand, was performed by, and mainly intended for sale to, southern whites. Although there were some exceptions, the music industry in general reflected patterns of segregation more widespread in American society. Paradoxically, these records were also one of the main means by which music flowed across the boundaries of race.

Although a clear distinction was drawn between race music and hillbilly music – each of which comprised dozens of specific styles – the two had a number of important features in common. Both bodies of music originated mainly in the American South and were rooted in long-standing folk music traditions. As they entered the mass marketplace, both blended these older rural musical styles with aspects of national popular culture, including the minstrel show, vaudeville, and the musical forms, poetic themes, and performance styles of Tin Pan Alley pop. Race music and hillbilly music both grew out of the music industry’s efforts to develop alternative markets during a national decline in record sales and were disseminated across the country by new media – including electric recording, radio, and sound film – and by the process of urban migration, which affected the lives of millions of rural Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. And both bodies of music provided the basis for forms of popular music that emerged after World War II (rhythm & blues, country and western, and rock ’n’ roll), extending their appeal across regional and, in the end, international boundaries.
 

Blues singer Stavin’ Chain, at rear, 1934. Deep south “chain gang” prisoners were often bound with stavin’ chains.
 

Race Records
Recordings of African-American styles grew in reach and influence

The music industry’s discovery of black music (and southern music in general) can be traced to a set of recordings made in 1920, featuring the black vaudeville performer Mamie Smith (1883-1946). Perry Bradford, a successful black songwriter and music store owner, brought Smith to the attention of the Okeh Record Company. A record that featured Smith performing two of Bradford’s songs was released in July 1920, and although Okeh made no special effort to promote it, sales were unexpectedly high. Smith reentered the studio two months later and recorded “Crazy Blues,” backed with the song “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It … ‘Tain’t No Fault of Mine).” Okeh advertised “Crazy Blues” in black communities and sold an astounding 75,000 copies within one month (at that time, 5,000 sales of a given recording allowed a record company to recoup its production costs, meaning that any further record sales were almost all profit). Mamie Smith’s records were soon available at music stores, drugstores, furniture stores, and other outlets in northern and midwestern cities, and throughout the Deep South.

The promotional catchphrase “race music” was first applied by Ralph Peer (1892-1960), a Missouri-born talent scout for Okeh Records who had worked as an assistant on Mamie Smith’s first recording sessions. Although it might sound derogatory today, the term “race” was used in a positive sense in urban African-American communities during the 1920s and was an early example of black nationalism; an individual who wanted to express pride in his heritage might refer to himself as “a race man.” The term was soon picked up by other companies and was also widely used by the black press. The performances released on race records included a variety of musical styles – blues, jazz, gospel choirs, vocal quartets, string bands, and jug-and-washboard bands – as well as oral performances such as sermons, stories, and comic routines. Not all recordings featuring African-American artists were automatically classified as race records. For example, recordings by black dance orchestras or jazz bands with a substantial white audience were listed in the mainstream pop record catalogs. A few records by African-American artists even found their way into the hillbilly catalogs.

The emergence of race records set a pattern that has been repeated many times in the history of American popular music, in which talented entrepreneurs, often connected with small, independent record labels, take the lead in exploring and promoting music outside the commercial mainstream.

The 1920s also saw the emergence of African-American-owned record companies. The first of these was Black Swan, founded in 1921 in New York by Harry Pace. In announcing the new company, Pace stated that it intended to meet “a legitimate and growing demand” among the 12 million people of African descent in the United States.

By 1927 a total of some 500 race records were being issued every year. Throughout the 1920s African Americans bought as many as 10 million blues and gospel recordings a year, almost one per person, an astonishingly high figure when compared with the mainstream record market, especially considering that many black people lived in poverty. Many young people in these communities thus grew up with the sound of a phonograph as part of their everyday experience. Migrants from rural communities who had relocated to urban centers returned periodically, bringing with them the latest hit records and creating a continual flow of musical styles and tastes between city and country.

It is clear that the music business did not create race music or its intended audience out of thin air. It would be more accurate to say that the basis for an African-American audience already existed and the companies, hungry for new markets, moved to exploit (and in some cases to shape) this sense of a distinctive black identity. This process in turn helped to create a truly national African-American musical culture – for the first time, people living in New York City, Gary (Indiana), Jackson (Mississippi), and Los Angeles could hear the same phonograph records at around the same time. It was during this period that the first generation of national black music stars emerged, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Robert Johnson.
 

A popular blues 1920s and –30s blues vocalist, Bessie Smith influenced profoundly subsequent generations of jazz singers.
 

Early Country Music: Hillbilly Records
Radio helped popularize an early form of country and western music

“Hillbilly music,” later rechristened “country and western music” or simply “country music,” developed mainly out of the folk songs, ballads, and dance music of immigrants from the British Isles. The first generation of hillbilly recording artists was also familiar with the sentimental songs of Tin Pan Alley, and this material became an important part of the country music repertoire, alongside the older Anglo-American ballads and square dance tunes.

Interestingly, it was the race record market, established in the early 1920s, that led to the first country music recordings. The first commercially successful hillbilly record, featuring a north Georgia musician named Fiddlin’ John Carson, was made by Okeh Records in 1923 during a recording expedition to Atlanta. This field trip, led by Ralph Peer and a local record store owner named Polk Brockman, was actually aimed at locating new material for the race record market.

The new medium of radio was in fact crucial to the rapid growth of the hillbilly music market. In 1920 the first commercial radio station in the United States (KDKA in Pittsburgh) began broadcasting, and by 1922 there were more than 500 stations nationwide, including 89 in the South. Many farmers and working-class people who could not afford to buy new phonograph records were able to purchase a radio on a monthly installment plan and thereby gain access to a wide range of programming.

 
“Texas Troubadour” Ernest Dale Tubb helped launch the honky-tonk style of country music.Most hillbilly musicians of the 1920s and 1930s did not start out as full-time professional musicians. The country music historian Bill C. Malone has noted that the majority worked as textile mill workers, coal miners, farmers, railroad men, cowboys, carpenters, wagoners, painters, common laborers, barbers, and even an occasional lawyer, doctor, or preacher. One important exception to this rule was Vernon Dalhart (1883-1948), a Texas-born former light-opera singer who recorded the first big country music hit. Dalhart’s recording career, which had begun in 1916, had started to wane, and he talked the Victor Company into letting him record a hillbilly number, in an effort to cash in on the genre’s growing popularity. In 1924 Dalhart recorded two songs: “Wreck of the Old 97,” a ballad about a train crash in Virginia, and “The Prisoner’s Song,” a sentimental amalgam of preexisting song fragments best known for the line “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly.” This was the first big hillbilly hit, a million-seller that contributed to the success of the fledgling country music industry.

Two of the most popular acts of early country music were the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family, born in the isolated foothills of the Clinch Mountains of Virginia, are regarded as one of the most important groups in the history of country music. The leader of the trio was A. P. “Doc” Carter (1891-1960), who collected and arranged the folk songs that formed the inspiration for much of the group’s repertoire; he also sang bass. His wife, Sara (1899-1979), sang most of the lead vocal parts and played auto- harp or guitar. Sister-in-law Maybelle (1909-78) sang harmony, played steel guitar and autoharp, and developed an influential guitar style, which involved playing the melody on the bass strings while brushing the upper strings on the off-beats for rhythm.

The Carter Family were not professional musicians when their recording career started in 1927 – as Sara put it when she was asked what they did after the Bristol session, “Why, we went home and planted the corn.” The Carters’ image, borne out in radio appearances and interviews, was one of quiet conservatism; their stage shows were simple and straightforward, and they generally avoided the vaudeville circuit and promotional tours.

If the Carter Family’s public image and musical repertoire evoked the country church and the family fireside, Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) was the quintessential rambler, a footloose man who carried home in his heart but drank deeply of the changing world around him. He was the most versatile, progressive, and widely influential of all the early country recording artists. The ex- railroad brakeman from Meridian, Mississippi, celebrated the allure of the open road and chronicled the lives of men who forsook the benefits of a settled existence: ramblers, hobos, gamblers, convicts, cowboys, railway men, and feckless lovers. His influence can be seen in the public images of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and almost every contemporary male country music star.

Both race and hillbilly music represent a process of hybridization between southern folk music and Tin Pan Alley pop. The singers may stand at some distance from the rural origins evoked by their songs, yet are able to perform in a style respectful of those origins. Finally, many of the recordings are early examples of a phenomenon that will become more important as we move on through the history of American popular music: the crossover hit, that is, a record that moves from its origins in a local culture or marginal market to garner a larger and more diverse audience via the mass media.
 

concert marks the 75th anniversary of the “Bristol Sessions,” which launched Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.
 

“Texas Troubadour” Ernest Dale Tubb helped launch the honky-tonk style of country music.