Trent Hill, "A Distinctive Country Voice"

8/17/2019 Trent Hill, "A Distinctive Country Voice"

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W at makes country music country music? And why

does that matter? Both of these questions are posed persis-

tently and tenaciously in the critical and fan literature

of

coun-

try music. Recently, for example, both Tony Scherman ( 1994:

pp. 54-57) and Johnny Cash (Cash and Carr, 1997) suggested

that contemporary country has lost its distinctive style-and

perhaps its identity-in a process of musical and lyrical dis-

tancing from its origins in the poor white rural matrix of class

experience and musical style.

The catalyst for these anxieties, as Dan Daley pointed

out in Nashville’s

Unwritten

Rules is country‘s “absorption of

new idiomatic influences,” which “has always raised flags about

country’s musical integrity over the years” (1998: p. 3 35). For

Daley, such appropriation raises no problems, since ”the bulk

of country records [are] made in Nashville by the same hand-

ful of producers, writers, publishers, an d musicians” (1998: p.

336). Daley’s institutional, but not geographical, position was

seconded by Bill Ivey: “ [A ] country record is any record a ra-

dio station that calls itself ’country’ will play and any record

that a consumer who considers himself a ’country fan‘ will

buy no fiddles, steel guitars, high lonesome harmonies, or

rhinestone suits required” (1994, p. 281).

As R .

A

Peterson demonstrated (1997: pp. 69-80), the

basic lines of contention between Cash, Daley, and Ivey have

been present since the first days of commercial country music,

when early country radio stars displaced the old-time string

bands on “barn dance“ shows like the Grand Ole Opry. For

Peterson, the repetitive and cyclical na ture of stylistic change

in country music underwrites the possibility of its ongoing sta-

bility; ultimately, the commercial and institutional construc-

tion of “the sense of authenticity that allows something ne w

to be plausibly represented as something unchanging” (1997:

p. 233) offers country th e means to recuperate from the ten-

sions opened up by its periodic genre crises.

For all of its suggestive power, however, Peterson’s study

left off in the early 195Os, just prior to the crisis that emerged

later in the same decade, when Nashville responded to the

threat posed by the success of rock and roll with a thorough-

going reorganization of country, as both an industry and a

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genre. The outlines of this crisis have been well-narrated by a variety of au-

thors, including Malone

(1985:

pp.

245-267),

Cusic

(1994),

and Ivey

(1994).

With the out-migration of Southern whites during World War 11, the country

industry expanded greatly. In the decade following the war, the music reached

new audiences in urban areas outside its original geographical and socioeco-

nomic base in Southern working-class culture. This expansion was further

facilitated by the consolidation of country music production during the late

1940s

and early

1950s

in Nashville, which, contrary to popular opinion and

industry legend, had not previously been an important country music center

(Ivey,

1994:

pp.

291-301).

Spurred by the popularity of “honky-tonk” hard-country artists like

Webb Pierce, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams, country labels flour-

ished during country’s “boom period,” until rock and roll began to gain domi-

nance in the newly consumeristic ”youthmarket” that had emerged by

1955.

The rise of rock and roll threatened ruin for the fledgling country estab-

lishment, not so much for aesthetic or ideological reasons as for economic

ones: One of the primary sources of revenue for country artists, publishers,

songwriters, and labels then as now was performance royalties derived from

radio. And the number of radio stations playing predominantly country mu-

sic shrank from several hundred in the early 1950s to just

81

in 1961. As

radio stations switched formats from country to rock and roll, royalties dried

up, country artists lost what exposure they had and found booking concert

tours increasingly difficult, Meanwhile, labels lost money on those artists who

could not adapt to the new youth market.

Further exacerbating the tenuous economic position of country music

in the mid-

1950s

was i ts lag-far behind pop and rock and roll-in develop-

ing its potentially lucrative ”package sales” market of albums and ”extended

play” records (or EPs, which were longer than singles but shorter than ”long-

playing” albums). These package sales were made possible by the develop-

ment of the vinyl record and “microgroove” technology in the late

1940s.

But the bulk of country record sales were singles.

The response of the country industry was twofold: In 1958, the Country

Music Association ( C M A ) formed from the remnants of the old Country Music

Disk Jockeys’ Association and began working to reclaim country’s lost mar-

ket share from rock and roll. But the music the CMA used to win back listen-

ers was not the straight-up honky-tonk of Pierce or the “high lonesome har-

monies” of the Louvin Brothers. Instead, it was a synthesis of country and

pop that came to be characterized during the

1960s

as “countrypolitan” or

“the Nashville Sound.”


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The Nashville Sound represented a break from earlier country in terms of

both instrumental and vocal styles, on the one hand, an d production techniques

and values, on the other. Traditional honky-tonk was foregrounded with fiddles,

steel guitars, “twangy” guitar playing, and singers with marked Southern ac-

cents. The new Nashville Sound (as exemplified by Patsy Cline’s ”Sweet Dreams”

and Jim Reeves’ “Four Walls”) tended to flatten out singers’ accents, replace

improvisational fiddling with orchestrated string sections, mute or do away with

the steel guitar, smooth out the lead guitar’s sound, and employ background

singers (such as the Anita Kerr Singers or th e Jordanaires).

Perhaps more importantly (at least in terms of its long-term effect on coun-

try and popular music), the Nashville Sound marked a different approach to the

means of producing country records. The enhanced orchestration that is its most

obvious charactci-isticwas made feasible by the development of multi-track re-

cording technology, which let innovative producers and engineers like Chet

Atkins record the basic tracks of a song first and bring in the ”sweetening” (back-

ground singers and string sections) later.

The Nashville Sound’s production techniques also worked to de-empha-

size the importance of instrumental backing bands in the recording studio. While

Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, and (honky-tonk period) Ray Price generally re-

corded with their own touring groups, producers associated with the Nashville

Sound preferred to accompany singers with musicians drawn from Nashville’s

session players, including guitarists Hank Garland and Chet Atkins, pianist Floyd

Cramer, and saxophonist “Boots” Randolph. These musicians developed and

passed on a highly professionalized approach to recording (and career advance-

ment), along with

a

familiarity with one another’s styles and musical idiosyn-

crasies, that allowed for quick and relatively cheap recording sessions. Their use

also increased the importance of record producers in determining the “sound”

of

a record or artist, and facilitated the centralization of country music produc-

tion and marketing in Nashville (Daley, 1997).

Clarifying the stylistic parameters of the Nashville Sound

is

complicated in

part because, by the time the term became commonplace in popular literature

in the mid-l960s, it encompassed everything from Ray Charles’s country and

western albums to Flatt and Scruggs‘s “Ballad of Jed Clampett” and Ray Price‘s

“For the Good Times,” along with the paradigmatic countrypolitan stylings of

Reeves, Arnold, and Cline. The Nashville Sound is most clearly discernible in

the style of Reeves, Arnold, and Cline (along with post-”Good Times” Ray Price).

But it functions as a stylistic inflection in much of the music produced in Nash-

ville, from the arrival of Atkins and Owen Bradley as producers and A6.R men

until the rise of the “Outlaw” movement of the mid-1970s. Many artists now

regarded as ”classic” or ’’traditional’’-such as Loretta Lynn and Tammy


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Wynette-were stylistic and commercial products of th e Sound. In fact, some

artists enjoyed a great deal of success both during honky-tonk country’s boom

period and in the reign of the Nashville Sound-for example, George Jones, a

successful recording artist for more than 40 years.

The Nashville Sound reinvigorated an d expanded the country industry’s

economic base by taking advantage of the fluidity of the pop market of the

1950s and early 1960s. Even before the rise of Atkins, Bradley, and other Sound-

associated producers, pop singers like Tony Bennett, Pat Boone, Peggy Lee, and

Patti Page had scored hits with country songs (e.g., Bennett’s recording of Hank

Williams’ ”Cold, Cold Heart”). What the Nashville Sound did, particularly at its

inception, was allow country-identified singers, labels, and label divisions to

reap the profits

of

pop crossover. This crossover was characterized by Columbia

executive Don Law as a new ”beat-driven” sound and style (”Columbia Mod-

ernizes,” 1956: p. 1).The new style was exemplified, however, not by rock-and-

roll crossovers such as Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Wanda Jackson, but by

Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” and Sonny James’ ”Young Love,” which

topped the country and pop charts in 1957. This fluidity suggested to some ob-

servers (such as the author of a n unsigned article in the May 1957

Music Re

porter

that

musical demand is universal. [Tlhe categories have merged [so]

that one category today is borrowing successfully from the other;

and like so many rivers converging, they are all finding a welcoming

sea. (”New Sound Vogue Here,” p. 3

B y the mid-l960s, Chet Atkins was able to claim:

Anyway,

most

popular music

is

pretty near the same today. The only

way to tell the difference is to categorize the artist. If he’s Negro, he’s

rhythm-and-blues; if he’s white and up North, he’s rock-and-roll;

and

if

he‘s here, he’s country. (Simon, 1966: n.p.)

For its advocates, the Nashville Sound was potentially capable of tran-

scending the old generic boundaries

of

American popular music. Yet the re-

sponse of the country-music world was not univocal regarding the success of

country-pop crossovers in general or the Nashville Sound in particular. In the

1965 issue of Who‘s Who

in

Country Music, for example, Tex Ritter defended Ray

Price (who had recently gone countrypolitan with “For the Good Times”) and

Eddy Arnold from “ the people that keep crying, there’s too much in it,

too

many voices, the instruments, too many strings. Keep It Country. I don’t know

what they mean by it”

p. 3 2 .

This suggests a wellspring of discontent with the

idiomatic features

of the Nashville Sound that was being articulated in terms of

a generic betrayal. That there was such unhappiness on the part of “traditional-


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ists” was seconded by Bill C. Malone (1982; 1985) and, ironically, by Patsy

Cline, who constantly resisted her producer’s decisions to record her with

string arrangements and lush background vocals. As Joli Jensen ( 1998) point-

ed out, ”[iln spite of desperately wanting to be a star, . [Cline] was unwill-

ing to shed the ’hillbilly’ image” (p. 98), regarding

it

as

a form of ”classing

off.”

Cline’s unease and the traditionalists’ resistance suggest some of the

fault-lines in the country community of the 1950s that led to the destabiliza-

tion and contestation of the very meaning of “country,” a contestation that

took place both inside and outside of Nashville.

As

Fabbri pointed out in his

important essay, musical genres work by tying together a complex of social,

formal, and semiotic codes or rules (1982: pp. 54-58); the historical problem

posed by the Nashville Sound, then, involves understanding the dynamics of

both its break with the previous country formation and its re-articulation.

So, what is the nature of that break? In her recent work The Nashville

Sound:

Authenticity Commercialization

and

Country Music

Joli Jensen posited that the

perception of the break and the criticism directed at it are misguided because

they rest on a set of dubious assumptions about the relationship between

culture and economics:

Authenticity is connected with beliefs about spontaneous, natural

cultural production, while commercialization is connected with

assumptions about technology and the marketplace. Commercial-

ization is imagined as something “done to” a natural form, in or-

der to make money. . [This] presumes that commerce destroys

art. (Jensen, 1998: p. 39)

On Jensen’s reading, country (like rock) “did not ‘sell out’ because it

was always already ‘sold”’ (p. 49) .

While Jensen’s argument here is framed in reference to the Nashville

Sound,

it

is one whose terms are obviously applicable to contemporary de-

bates about “hot new country,” a point that Jensen herself made (pp. 3-20).

In much Contemporary writing on country music, genre contestations and

crises have been read as debates over the terms (and the possibility) of coun-

try ”authenticity.” For example, In Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authen -

ticity Richard Peterson

(

1997) seconded Jensen’s argument that ascriptions

of authenticity are predicated on “authenticity markers” that are commer-

cially constructed and mediated and therefore are no different

qua

commer-

cial constructs from any other commercial construct.

Similarly, for Aaron Fox (1992), the discourse of authenticity betrayed

a “nostalgic preference” (p. 68) for cultural and musical forms that have been


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superseded stylistically and economically.

Fox

argued that this preference, car-

ried out in the name of resisting the marketplace’s “narrative of Desire,” ironi-

cally has situated itself, materially and ideologically, in the same marketplace,

making the gesture (and perhaps the resistance) impossible, at least in part be-

cause that very ”narrative of Desire” informs country music itself.

For Peterson,

Fox,

and Jensen, the problem posed by genre transforma-

tions (and the resistance to them)

is

at some level a technical one for

A

S. R and

promotions departments: How do you link a new set of authenticity markers to

the old set, particularly w hen they seem to be in conflict with each other? How

do you address the (mis)perception hat some forms

of

music are more “real” or

“true” than others? How, that is, do you get “students and critics [and consum-

ers] of popular culture to examine their own critical practice for its ideological

assumptions about ’the true’ and ’the false,’ and to imagine a move beyond

‘authenticity”’ (Fox, 1992: p. 6 9)? Framed as an epistemological question, the

problem is simple: Any ”look,” sound, or style is

”of

course

no

more or less

authentic [and no more or less true or false] than any other” (Jensen, 1998: p.

11); he marketplace is the common denominator that cuts through and cancels

out the perceived difference.

It is not my interest to try to reclaim some version of “authenticity” for

cultural studies. It does seem to me, however, that to focus on its function as a

quasi-epistemological marker elides the complex cultural politics that are, how-

ever inarticulately, wrapped up in it. To her credit, Jensen recognized implicitly

that authenticity claims in fact have political resonance; she argued that they

are based on the imputation that some people’s lives are more “real” than oth-

ers and that, therefore,

we are implying that they are less worthy than w e are. But are the

patrons of the honky-tonk any more or less real than the patrons of

top-40 radio, dinner theaters, the opera, or trendy clothing catalogs?

(1998:p. 3 5

The debates about the Nashville Sound, hot new country, and traditional-

ism are, as Jensen’s list suggests, wrapped up in the opposition between the

purportedly working-class ”patrons of the honky-tonk” and the middle-class

consumers of top 40 radio, dinner theaters, and so on.

The problem with Jensen’s analysis, here as elsewhere in The Nashville

Sound, is that its frequent recourse to a kind of defensive middle-class moraliz-

ing works to translate the political tensions embodied in the debates about

countrypolitan into ethical problems of individual consumer choice, consump-

tion, and critical disposition. This in turn works

to

obscure the ramifications of


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the very real musical and social break the Nashville Sounds makes with earlier

country formations.

Stylistically, the most obvious difference between honky-tonk and Nash-

ville Sound country is that Nashville Sound recordings de-emphasize the fiddle

and steel guitar so prominent in honky-tonk in favor of string sections and back-

ground singers. To Jensen, the fiddle suggests rural Southern “backwoods” val-

ues (1998, p. 3 3 , while the steel guitar “sayshonky-tonk . which says real” (p.

3 4 . While the fiddle is ”down-home”and the steel guitar “uptown,” according

to Jensen both function, in the logic of the honky-tonk, as “authenticity mark-

ers,” commercially constructed and mediated, and therefore n o different as com-

mercial constructs from the violin sections and background vocals that replaced

them.

Jensen misses a crucial point about the semiotic, historical, and political

complexity of these iconic markers, which 1 will try to develop in relation to the

shift from the fiddle to the violin. There is no difference between the fiddle and

the violin as instruments: The terms refer to differences in musical styles, them-

selves understandable in terms of sound, technical emphasis, and the role of

improvisation. To play a fiddle as a violin requires, first and foremost, concen-

tration on and the development of right-arm techniques designed to ”smooth

out” and deepen the sound and to reduce the sharp attack that begins each note

if the player is not so trained.

It

requires economic and cultural capital-money,

time, and training-to acquire this formal musical pedagogy; in the words of

one Nashville Sound enthusiast, “The old fiddlers whose screeches must haunt

Stradivarius in his grave are waging a losing battle against violinists who’ve had

music lessons” (”BigNew Sound,” 1963: p.

82).

Fiddle music, on the other hand,

places greater emphasis on the role of improvisation; even in old-time Southern

mountain fiddling, it was (and is) assumed that a good fiddler will weave into

the performance of a particular song melodic variations while maintaining the

same danceable rhythmic pulse.

However, Jensen’s characterization of country fiddling (honky-tonk or

otherwise) as “backwoods” overemphasized the importance of those old-time

reels to country fiddling proper. While being a successful country fiddler re-

quires some background in old-time music, as Phillips stated in his

CompZefe

Country

Fiddler method 1992: p. 3 , the country fiddle style used in honky-tonk

has little in common with old-time or traditional hillbilly fiddle styles. The mu-

sical materials of country fiddling are drawn primarily from Cajun, “Western

Swing,” and bluegrass traditions, all of which emphasize a style of more sus-

tained and melody-driven playing not prominent in old-time mountain music.

These styles are linked closely in their development with African-American

musical idioms by their reliance on “blue” notes, pentatonic scales, and blues


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chord progressions. Country fiddling shares this connection with African-Ameri-

can tradition with the steel guitar, which is the electrified descendent of Hawai-

ian steel guitar,

on

the one hand, and traditional blues “slide” guitar, on the

other.

In supplanting the fiddle with the violin string section and the steel guitar

with the background chorale, the Nashville Sound works to articulate a double

break: from honky-tonk country, of course, but also from rock and roll, whose

musical affinities to the blues and R B traditions were all too well-known-and

troubling-to its critics in the

1950s.

This break was terrifically useful for coun-

try labels in the wake of the cultural hysteria that surrounded rock and roll: It

allowed country to occasionally lean toward some of the idiomatic gestures of

rock and roll (as in “Walking After Midnight”’s ”country music with a beat”)

without invoking their ”blackness.” And it’s interesting to note that when Nash-

ville Sound producers appropriated older blues and honky-tonk devices (as in

Loretta Lynn’s remarkable vocal performance on ”Blue Kentucky Girl”), those

devices are used to remarkably different effect; in that song, for instance, the

musical tension in the melody line is accomplished not by lingering on

nondiatonic “blue” notes (the flatted third and seventh of the scale) but by

slurring between suspended fourth tones and their accompanying diatonic ma-

jor thirds.

This strategy of containment worked equally well in both invoking and

distancing country’s poor-white links. The hillbilly image, from which country

programmers sought vigorously to distance themselves and their stations dur-

ing the 1950sand

1960s,

had both musical and socioeconomic resonance: ”[Tlhe

pro-Pop’ers feared letting the pro-C&W’ers in because doing

so

seemed to rep-

resent social degeneration,” according to a 1957 article in MusicReporter (“Music’s

Segregation,”p. 1). n response, according to another programmer, modern coun-

try stations wanted ”none of this ‘we’ll be back tomorrow be the good Lord

willin’ and the cricks don’t rise’-pfui ” (C. Peterson, p. 20).

What was at stake-for radio programmers, producers, and performers

alike-were the economic rewards of appealing to a more upscale, adult audi-

ence (one hat had been left out in the rock-and-roll boom). But also at stake, as

the preceding quotes suggest, was a form of cultural and class legitimacy articu-

lated in terms of economic upward mobility. Chet Atkins and Eddy Arnold, for

example, have both stated that they adopted a more “uptown” sound in an

attempt to distance themselves from their poor-white origins and the sense of

shame that was attached to them.

To return to Jensen’s work, what is perhaps most unsettling is that, while

she was aware of this ideological relationship between economic upward mo-


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bilitv and social legitimization, she frequently appeared to endorse it; as she said

of Patsy Cline,

[

S]

he has been detached from specific geographical and biographical

markers and thus

is

able to speak to more people. She is just country

enough to be seen as real, earthy, and honest but not country enough

to repel. She has come unmoored from class, status, and biography

and has been reconstructed as a more widely appealing celebrity fig-

ure. (1998: p. 116)

What is “country enough to repel,” according to Jensen, 1998: p. 115), are

“trailer parks and runny-nosed kids [the] class and status markers that stig-

matize country music and its fans.” The Nashville Sound’s effort to be “just

country enough” was not, then, simply a formal or stylistic strategy. Instead, it

was a social strategy of containment, one that succeeded in making country

more appealing to a n upscale, purportedly middle-class demographic by

reconfiguring the class composition of the country audience to exclude its ”un-

desirable,” poor-white elements. According to a 1965 special report in the maga-

zine

Broadcasting,

One area where country music stations say they are misunderstood

is in audience composition. They say the image country stations have

had, as playing strictly to the $1 down, $1 a week crowd, who may

or may not have steady employment, is far from the truth in 1965.

[Bletter-educated, higher-earning adults listen to this Nashville-

extracted music. (“Growing Sound,“ p. 69)

Or, as Jim Robinson (manager of a Pomona, California, radio station) said

in the same issue,

In

the minds of many of the uninformed, the country music listener

is a hillbilly, ridgerunner, Okie, or any of the not-so-complementary

identifications. (“Growing Sound,” p. 75)

What observers found (and still find) disturbing about the Nashville Sound

and subsequent shifts in country’s genre boundaries is not, strictly speaking,

that they compromise country’s purported innocence from commerce; the com-

merce only becomes obvious when the country industry’s redeployment of cul-

tural capital works to symbolically abandon portions of the country audience in

order to attract a different-but not necessarily ”larger” and certainly not a “more

universal”-audience. For their detractors, both the Nashville Sound and con-

temporary hot new country work to close off one of the discursive spaces in

which the legitimacy of working-class life and its concerns can be voiced, nego-

tiated, and validated: Indeed, the music functions, to a degree, to define who

exactly is “working class,” who is respectable, wh o is culturally legitimate.


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This suggests why the question of genre boundaries has always been

so

important in country culture:

As

they shift, individuals and groups disappear

from the radar screen of American culture. This point was borne out by a

1969

article on the Nashville Sound that appeared in the Kansas ity Star. There, the

writer attributed the success

of

Nashville Sound country to a variety of factors:

the ”music industry savy [sic]” and marketing skill of its executives; the inven-

tiveness of its musicians; the warmth of the people who take part in its produc-

tion; but above all its remarkable centralization as an industry and the sense of

consensus among its members as to who, and what, belongs and doesn’t be-

long:

B u t the Music

City

family is not easy to join. The family includes

everyone who

is

exceptional in the country-western field. But one

shouldn’t be disillusioned by the staggering numbers that are in-

cluded-for though the family is big, it’s aristocratic. (Ellingsworth,

1969: p.

1)

As the staging and structure of the article suggests, however, this consen-

sus and centralization is double-edged. While it facilitates the efficient produc-

tion and marketing of country music, it also works to exclude both deserving

talent (Glen Campbell and Roger Miller, for example, both had to leave town to

find success) and those people like Jesse Willoughby-tobacco farmer, alcoholic,

and songwriter-who‘d “like to get in on it“ but who wind up wandering out-

side the homey little offices on Music Row.

The final question, however, is this: How did Nashville Sound country

manage to suture its break from country tradition (which has always been ter-

rifically important to the music’s commercial and ideological identity)? Jensen

suggested that the CMA sought to market the new country sound in terms of

the “craftsman” ethos-a predominantly working-class ethos-and the relaxed

casualness of i ts recording sessions. Jensen’s argument certainly works to ex-

plain much of the promotional literature produced by the Nashville recording

industry and the CMA, along with much of the press country received, in the

early 1960s.

I

am not sure, however, that it is sufficient to explain how country

remained ”country”for those fans not attuned to the industry’s press or promo-

tional literature.

It seems more productive to explore how (in terms of Fabbri’s analysis of

genre), while Nashville Sound country violated the formal and social rules for

country as a genre, it continued to observe many of its semiotic rules, specifi-

cally in its lyrics. N o matter how much Nashville Sound country may have devi-

ated from the canons of traditional country instrumentation, it remained lyri-

cally faithful to country’s reliance on the formal characteristics of realist or natu-

ralist narrative-forms that, as Bourdieu argued, have distinct filiations with


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working-class culture. If Nashville Sound country left th e honky-tonk, the rural

route, and the dirt farm behind, it remained skeptical of the possibilities of flight,

mobility, and (individual) transformation for their own sakes that seemed to be

wrapped up in rock and roll and its emerging youth culture.

Further, Nashville Sound country retained honky-tonk's preoccupation

with the theaters of ethical choice characteristic of nuclear-family domesticity

and normal 1950s models of masculinity and femininity. While these choices

generally involved issues of fidelity and infidelity, guilt and betrayal, the narra-

tives (perhaps best embodied in Jim Reeves's "He'll Have to Go") are stripped of

honky-tonk's self-referentiality and its idiomatic links to Southern poor-white

culture (and automatically

of

any taint of black culture). As one writer argued

in an early

1960s Billboard

"World of Country Music" special edition,

The country lyric is often earthy, and implicit in its story is a truer,

more realistic view of life and its trials. This is in contrast to urban-

derived [Tin Pan Alley] songs, which emphasize a sugary, over-ide-

alization of love

€r

life.

.

Yet, country music is singularly free of the

charge that it contains pornographic lyrics-an allegation that occa-

sionally rankles the pop and rhythm and blues fields. ("RealisticView,"

P.

23)

The product of this complex system of aesthetic and political continuities,

fissures, and sutures was a music that was ideally positioned to deliver a new,

national target demographic to advertisers: the newly affluent, industrial work-

ing class of postwar culture. As an ad in a

1965 Broadcasting

claimed: "It's blue-

collar radio and they eat it up." "They" of course, are "the everyday people who

constitute the majority

of

the BUYING audience," the consumeristically mobile,

domestically preoccupied, white, adult listener ("Growing Sound," p. 79).

WORKS CITED

Atkins, C., and B. Neely.

1974. Country Gentlema n.

Chicago: Henry Regency.

"Big New Sound Blows Out of Nashville." 1963. Broadcasting (January 28):

67-82.

Cash, J., and P. Carr. 1997. Cash: Th e Autobiography. San Francisco: Harper

San Francisco.

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38-57.

ENDNOTES

1. According to Cash,

[Wlhen music people today, performers and fans alike, talk about being

“country,” hey don’t mean that they know or even care about the land and

the life it sustains and regulates. They’re talking about choices-a way to

look, a group

to

belong to, a kind

of

music to call their own. Which begs a

question: Is there anything behind the symbols of modern “count ry,” or are

the symbols themselves the whole story (Cash - Carr, 1997: p. 1 2) ?

2 . See Malone (1985: p. 246), R. Peterson (1990) , and Lipsitz (1990).

3. See also Jensen (1998: pp. 76-82) and Ivey (1981) .

4 In fact, as Fenster (1995) suggested, one of the effects of the Nashville Sound’s


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radio hegemony in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to drive bluegrass

artists like Flatt and Scruggs from the radio. Bluegrass artists occasionally

gained airplay on crossover hits like “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the Osborne

Brothers‘ version of ”Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (from the soundtrack to

Bonnie and Clyde ,

and Eric Weissberg’s ”Dueling Banjos” (from the soundtrack

to Deliverance . But in all three

of

these cases, the song first gained commer-

cial attention, not to mention steady airplay, as a theme song for a popular

movie or TV series. Moreover, the contexts in which the songs appeared

assumed and reinforced the association between bluegrass (and older coun-

try styles in general) and poor-white irredentism from which mainstream

country was seeking to distance itself.

5 .

Or, as Zizek said of noir as a film form, “a kind of logical operator introducing

the same anamorphic distortion in every genre [or singer] to which it is

applied

(1995:

p.

10).

6. For a fuller discussion, see Hill (1991).

7. See Atkins and Neely (1974),Cusic (1997),and Streissguth (1997). t is in-

teresting to compare Cusic’s and Streissguth’s biographies of Arnold on the

relationship between economic and cultural legitimacy. Arnold, whose fam-

ily slipped from landholding respectability into near penury w hen he was a

child, rankled when ‘he, as a country singer, was “clustered with purveyors

of the coarser brand of country” (Streissguth,

1997:

p.

12 1

. While this nar-

rative is a relatively muted subtext in Streissguth, in Cusic it is practically the

main plot, with country’s fortunes linked closely with its success or failure in

becoming a middle-class-identified musical genre.

8. At least they don’t have ringworm.

9.

One of the richer ironies

of

these managers‘ statements is that many of the

very artists whose music was commercially successful in the late

1950s

and

early 1960s-Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, and

Patsy Cline-were members, for at least part of their lives, of that same “$1

down, $1 a week” crowd.

10.By analogy, there’s never any question that your landlord is in real estate for

the money, but you only really think about it when he gentrifies your apart-

ment building and kicks you out because you can no longer afford the rent.

11. did not find this article through extensive scholarly legwork, but by con-

sulting the ”Nashville Sound” file in the Country Music Association archives.

One of the longer articles in their collection of newspaper clippings, it is

remarkable at least in part for its representation of Nashville’s centrality and

ambiguousness in the pop-music consciousness of middle America.


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1 7

12. See Bourdieu ( 1984: especially pp. 9-96).

1 3 . 1

discussed this issue at length

in

“Why Isn’t Country Music ‘Youth’ Cul-

ture?” forthcoming in

The

Ends of

Rock, Duke University Press.

Documents

Trent Hill, "A Distinctive Country Voice"