Songs of Tradition and Change
Country music, in all its varieties, spread rapidly after World War II

Country music has always been about the relationship between the countryside and the city, home and migration, the past and the present. This is not surprising if we consider the main audience for this music during the 1920s: rural people whose way of life was being radically transformed by the mechanization of agriculture and changes in the American economy, and migrants who left home to find jobs and establish new lives in the city.

“You wouldn’t read my letter if I wrote you
 You asked me not to call you on the phone
 But there’s something I’m wanting to tell you
 So I wrote it in the words of this song …”
      Honky-Tonk singer Hank Thompson, “The Wild Side of Life”

Early country music records provide us with a stereoscopic image of tradition in a period of rapid change: on the one hand, ballads and love songs, images of the good old days, family, hearth and home; and on the other, tales of broken love, distance from loved ones, and restless movement from town to town.

 
“King of Country Music” Roy Acuff, with the Smokey Mountain Boys in 1943 at Nashville, Tennessee’s famous Grand Ole Opry.Country and western music mushroomed in popularity after World War II. Although the South remained a lucrative area for touring performers, the wartime migration of millions of white southerners meant that huge and enthusiastic audiences for country and western music had also been established in the cities and towns of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and California. The postwar era saw the rapid spread of country music programming on radio, and by 1949 over 650 radio stations were making live broadcasts of country performers. In 1950 – when Capitol Records became the first major company to set up its country music operation in Nashville, Tennessee – it was estimated that country music accounted for fully one-third of all record sales nationwide.

In some ways, the range of country music styles during the postwar era resembles contemporaneous developments in rhythm & blues. There were country crooners, who specialized in a smooth, pop-oriented style; bluegrass musicians, who focused on the adaptation of traditional southern music in a package suitable to the times; and honky-tonk musicians, who performed in a hard-edged, electronically amplified style, and wrote songs about the trials and tribulations of migrants to the city and about gender roles and male/female relationships during a period of intense social change.

While some musicians sought to move country music onto the mainstream pop charts, others reached back into the musical traditions of the American South, refurbishing old styles to fit new circumstances.

 

Bluegrass and Honky-Tonk
Two influential musical impulses

While this “neotraditionalist” impulse took many forms, the most influential was probably the rise of bluegrass music, a style rooted in the venerable southern string band tradition. The pioneer of bluegrass music was Bill Monroe (1911-97), born in Kentucky. Monroe started playing music at a young age and was influenced by his uncle (a country fiddler) and by a black musician and railroad worker named Arnold Schulz, whose influence can be seen in the distinctive bluesy quality of Monroe’s music; the interaction between white and black styles has long been an important aspect of country music. In 1935 Bill formed a duet with his brother, Charlie. The Monroe Brothers played throughout the southeastern United States, creating a sensation with their vocal harmonies and virtuoso fiddle and guitar playing. In 1938 Bill started his own group, the Blue Grass Boys, and the following year joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry (a hugely popular country music radio program. Its regular “member” artists were widely acknowledged as the genre’s elite. Since 1974 it has been broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry House, a 4,400 seat venue outside Nashville, Tennessee).

A third major direction in postwar country and western music is represented by honky-tonk – sometimes called “hard country” – a style that conveyed the sound and ethos of the roadside bar or juke joint. During the Great Depression the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma provided a lucrative (and rare) source of steady, well-paid work, attracting thousands of men from the American Southwest and farther afield. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the formerly illegal drinking establishments frequented by these men multiplied and became a major source of employment for country and western musicians. These honky-tonks, as the people who frequented them called them, provided relief, in the form of drinking and dancing, from the daily pressures of work on the oilfields. By the postwar period thousands of these rowdy nightspots were sprinkled across the American Southwest and beyond.

Country and western music was crucial to the profitability of honky-tonks. Many of them featured colorfully glowing jukeboxes, the mechanical record players that had grown rapidly in popularity during and after World War II. In adjusting to the honky-tonk milieu, country musicians made a number of changes in their performance practice. First, many of the old-time songs about family and the church seemed out of place in the new setting. Musicians began to compose songs about aspects of life directly relevant to many of their listeners: family instability, the unpredictability of male-female relationships, the attractions and dangers of alcohol, and the importance of enjoying the present. When the rural past was referred to, it was usually through a veil of nostalgia and longing. Honky-tonk vocal styles were often directly emotional, making use of “cracks” in the voice and stylistic features from black music, such as melisma and blue notes. Country musicians adapted traditional instruments and playing techniques to the rowdy atmosphere of the juke joint. The typical instrumentation of a honky-tonk band included a fiddle, a steel guitar, a “takeoff” (lead) guitar, a string bass, and a piano. The guitars were electronically amplified, and the musicians played with a percussive, insistent beat (sometimes called “sock rhythm”) well suited to dancing.

When today’s musicians talk about playing “good old country music,” they are most often referring to the postwar honky-tonk style rather than to the rural folk music of the South. Honky-tonk stars such as Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, George Jones, and Webb Pierce dominated the country and western charts during the early and mid-1950s. Although their fortunes declined after the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, honky-tonk music remains the heart and soul of modern country music.
 

Singer, songwriter, mandolin player Bill Monroe was the founder of bluegrass country music
 

Country Music Updated
A more sophisticated “Nashville sound” arrived during the 1960s

In the 1960s, many of the younger country artists at this time, while not directly embracing the rockabilly styles of Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly, wanted to update the sound of their honky-tonk roots. They opted for a newly sophisticated approach to the vocal presentation and instrumental arrangement of country music, a highly influential approach that came to be known as “countrypolitan,” a fusion of “country” and “cosmopolitan.” Nashville was at the center of this development, and the style was also often called the “Nashville sound.”

Patsy Cline (1932-63) began her career as a hit maker in 1957 with her recording of “Walkin’ After Midnight,” which was successful on both the country and the pop charts. Her two big hits of 1961, “I Fall to Pieces” and “Crazy,” reflected a particular kind of sensibility: they were ballads of broad appeal, in no sense “teen” records, performed by Cline in a manner that, while sophisticated in phrasing and articulation, had sufficient hints of rural and bluesy inflections to show where her roots lay. The crooning background voices gave these records a pop sheen, while the high-register piano remained evocative of the honky-tonk origins of this type of music. Cline continued to be a significant presence on both country and pop charts until her premature death in a plane crash in early 1963.
 

 
Charley Pride is one of the 20-best selling country artists of all time.The records made by rock ’n’ roller Elvis Presley from 1960 on (after he returned from a tour of duty in the army) reflected an increasingly eclectic set of influences, but the Nashville sound is especially prominent among them. Good illustrations of this would be his 1961 hit “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and his 1965 recording of “Crying in the Chapel,” originally a country hit in 1953.
 

It might seem surprising that the Nashville sound’s influence extended into rhythm & blues in the early 1960s, but given the constant interchanges between white and black musicians throughout the history of American popular music, this really shouldn’t strike us as unexpected. Two hits by Solomon Burke, “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)” and “Cry to Me,” sound for all the world like country records performed by a black vocalist, and a large number of similar-sounding records were made in the wake of their success, by Burke and by other artists associated with rhythm & blues. By the later 1960s the career of Charley Pride – an African American who set out to appeal principally to the country audience – was in full swing; by 1983 Pride had racked up an astonishing 29 Number-One country hits, thus illustrating once again how colorblind music and its audiences really can be some of the time. Notable in more recent years were a 1994 album entitled Rhythm Country and Blues, which paired R&B and country audiences for duets, and Burke’s 2006 album, entitled simply Nashville – the U.S. city most associated with country music.

During the 1970s, country music became a huge business, reaching out to young and middle-class listeners while at the same time reinforcing its traditional southern and white working-class audience base. In 1974 the Grand Ole Opry moved from the run-down Nashville theater where it had been broadcasting since 1941 into a multimillion-dollar facility, complete with a 110-acre theme park called “Opryland.” The generally conservative mood of the country – reflected in Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election – reinforced country’s popularity among the American middle class.

Since that time, country music has continued to grow in popularity and influence. It remains both a significant cultural force and a large, profitable industry. The traditional approach represented by the Nashville sound continues to produce dozens of hits and artists yearly, and for many Americans the Nashville sound is country music. At the same, a range of styles that are usually lumped together, for marketing purposes, as “alt country” (alternative) provide a rich variety of sounds and approaches to music-making while maintaining their ties to the country tradition.