But settle there the business has, and it now brings in some $60 million a year to the town. From the Opry it has grown into a complex of 10 recording studios, 26 record companies, and a colony of 700 cleffers, 265 music publishers, and 1,000 union musicians, about half of whom can read music with some facility. Nashville has replaced Chicago as the country’s third-busiest recording center, after New York and Hollywood, and is probably ahead of Hollywood, says RCA Victor vice president Steve Sholes, “in the production of successful single records.” The main reason is that it has developed its own style, what outsiders call “The Nashville Sound.” Nobody wants to define it, but it amounts to country music with a dash of Tin Pan Alley, in the form of noncountry instruments like drums and trombones.
The music, in its present form, is not really very old. It is a blend of British balladry, American folk songs, 19th-century Protestant hymns, Negro blues and gospel songs, southern-white themes and, now, a touch of northern pop. There were important pioneers in the early 1920’s such as Vernon Dalhart (“If I had the wings of an angel…”) but for most practical purposes the music dates from 1927 when Jimmie Rodgers made his first record (Victor) for a goldback $20 bill.
Rodgers was The Blue Yodeler, The Singing Brakeman. He was a consumptive drifter from Meridian, Miss., who, in a span of six years, established commercial country music as a distinct new form. He was not quite 36 years old when he coughed himself to death in a New York hotel room in 1933. At the end he was so wasted and weakened with tuberculosis that he had to lie on a cot while recording at Victor’s 24th Street studio in New York. He left a legacy of 112 songs, many of them classics like My Carolina Sunshine Gal, I’m in the Jailhouse Now, and
I’m goin’ to town, honey,
What you want me to bring you back?
Bring me a pint of booze
And a John B. Stetson hat.…
With a strong assist from The Carter Family (Wildwood Flower, Wabash Cannon Ball) Rodgers set the pattern for the music, and the Grand Ole Opry formalized it and gave it a home. The Opry is the mother church. Actually this show predates Rodgers’s recording career by two years, but in the beginning it was only a fiddler’s show, and it wasn’t until later that it took on its present form as a singin’ and pickin’ jamboree.
* * *
In the 1930’s the music remained pretty well localized in the South and Midwest, except for the hemispheric exposure it was given by the Mexican-border radio stations, beaming it out at 200,000 tube-shattering watts, the hillbilly songs sandwiched in between harangues from jackleg preachers and pitches for towels and chickens. (“Send your card or letter to Baby Chicks! That’s Baby Chicks! Sorry, no guarantee of sex, breed or color.”)
But it didn’t get off the ground nationally until World War II, when the northern boys and city boys got strong doses of it in barracks and on decks and in southern camp towns. For those in uniform there was no escape from Smoke on the Water and Pistol Packin’ Mama and Detour and There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Wavin’ Somewhere. Some of the city boys developed a tolerance for it, a few even came to like it. In 1944 the USO polled GI’s in Europe to determine the most popular singer and, lo, Roy Acuff’s name led all the rest. It was much the same in Korea. There were few rifle companies in that war without a wind-up record player and a well-worn 78 rpm record of Hank Williams’s Lovesick Blues. The Chinese even used the music in an attempt to make the American troops home-sick, or maybe it was their idea of torture. For whatever reason, they set up giant speakers and boomed ditties like You Are My Sunshine across the valleys in the long watches of the night.
The music soon went into eclipse again, as it had done after World War II, and it wasn’t until the late 1950’s that it began making its present come back—this time with The Nashville Sound.
A White Sport Coat and Pink Carnation
I’m all dressed up for the dance.…
The boom started just a few years after country music was laid low by rock ’n’ roll. “Elvis made Heartbreak Hotel in whenever it was, ‘Fifty-some thing [January, 1956], and all those rock songs came along and country music took a nose dive like nobody’s business,” says Buddy Killen, executive vice president of a Nashville publishing house called Tree Music. “Things began to look up when Ferlin Husky made one called Gone. I think that was the first big one with the new sound. It had the beat and the piano and Jourdanaires. That’s the thing now, the beat. It used to be the song.”
Others cite Marty Robbins’s A White Sport Coat or Sonny James’s Young Love as the breakthrough tunes. All three records had a country flavor, but they weren’t too country; they were country-pop hybrids that sold well in both markets. They had The Nashville Sound.
They don’t call it that in Nashville, of course. They call it “uptown country,” as opposed to “hard country,” which is the traditional hillbilly music that is still big on the Opry and on five a.m. snuff shows. Hillbilly is characterized by a squonking fiddle introduction, a funereal steel guitar and an overall whiney, draggy sound that has never set well with urban ears.
The masterminds of The Nashville Sound have abandoned all that. They have smoothed out many of the rough edges likely to offend. They use so phisticated new chord progressions and, while the guitar remains the primary accompaniment—lead, rhythm, steel, 12-string—they have added piano, drums and choral voices, and anything that strikes their fancy—vibes, tenor sax, harpsichord, trom bone. The prejudice against non-string instruments has largely gone by the way. Even the Opry now permits drums on the stage, though it is still holding the line against brass and woodwinds.
So popular is the new sound that the number of country-music radio stations has increased from 81 to 200-plus in the past four years, and that includes several 50,000-watt heavyweights in places like Los Angeles (KGBS) and Chicago (WJJD). Even New York City—where there are restaurants for Polynesians, northern and southern Italians, northern and southern Chinese, Moors, Scandi-navians, Lithuanians and Romanians, but where you can’t buy a decent plate of turnip greens, purple-hull peas and fried okra—even that market has been opened up. Since last September, WJRZ in Newark, a former pop station, has been beaming Lefty Frizzell and Ferlin Husky across the Hudson all day and all night, and it has increased its audience 1,000 percent.
“This music has a new acceptance and a new dignity,” says Harry Reith, the general manager of WJRZ. “It’s not, you know, the old hillbilly stuff, the nasal voices, those guitars thumping and all. Our mail response has been fantastic.”
Few people can agree on precisely what The Nashville Sound is, but there is pretty general agreement as to who the masterminds are—namely, Chet Atkins, Victor’s Artist and Repertoire man in Nashville; Owen Bradley, A-and-R man there for Decca; and Don Law, A-and-R man for Columbia. The A-and-R man is the guiding hand in record production. He matches the song with the singer and directs recording sessions—so far as anyone can be said to “direct” a session in Nashville. He picks the recordings to be released and the ones to be shelved. He puts albums together.
Chet Atkins, who may be the best guitarist in the country, is a quiet, introspective man who sits tieless in a plush executive office on Nashville’s Music Row and reflects on such things as posture as a key to character. “Look at me,” he says, as though trying to puzzle out how he got the job. “All I really am is a hunched-over guitar player.”
Questions about The Nashville Sound seem to bore him. He shrugs and says it is not much more than a gimmicky tag. “You can get the same sound with country records made in Hollywood,” he says. “You can get it anywhere with these same musicians, boys from this part of the country. They’re country boys, poor boys from the farm. The music they play has honesty. It has the same quality as Ray Charles. Soul. If you have it, it comes out in your music. That’s all it is.”
A few years back Atkins was playing in an after-hours club in Nashville called the Carousel, and some say this was the origin of the sound. The band was made up of Atkins, Grady Martin
and Hank Garland on guitars, Floyd Cramer on piano, Buddy Harman on drums and Bob Moore on up right bass. These are the musicians seen over and over again at the recording sessions.
The tinkly, gospel-rock piano work of Cramer is one of the most distinctive things about the new sound, that and the smooth choral backing of the Anita Kerr Singers and the Jourdanaires. Nashville A-and-R men are not as much inclined to electronic trickery (echo chambers, etc.) as their rocker counterparts in Detroit and Hollywood, but in the current spirit of anything goes, they are moving in that direction. Already they do quite a bit of overdubbing, and if a sideman gets carried away and hits a crazy lick or makes a weird noise, it’s usually left in. A lot of the unidentifiable noises are produced by Pete Drake on his steel guitar. He can make it gronk like a tuba if gronks are called for, and he can make it sound like someone talking underwater if this need arises.
Atkins, of course, is a soloist, but he occasionally does some personal overdubbing. That is, he will take a taped song and superimpose his own guitar runs on it to beef up the thin spots. Cramer and Drake are soloists too, but they are also among the busiest sidemen in town. The money is good, $61 for a three-hour session, double that for the leader, and they have no objection to playing nameless on someone else’s record. There are about 100 sidemen in Nashville who work with some regularity at the studios, says Musicians’ Local 257, and about 35 of them make from $20,000 to $80,000 a year.
Decca’s Owen Bradley, another guitarist-executive, also flounders a bit in trying to define the Sound. “I’ve been asked what it is a thousand times and I’ve given a thousand different answers. And I think I’ve been right every time.” He peers over his glasses at a clock that tells him what time it is in Hollywood and New York and smokes a cigarette in a holder and carries on a long-distance phone conversation and a personal chat, all at once. “A few years ago we were forced to take a second look at some of these songs. They were better than we thought. This Sound business, all it boils down to is an approach. It’s the spontaneity of certain musicians here getting together and making up an arrangement on the spot. The A-and-R men are just some kind of referees.”
Music Row, where the business is concentrated, runs for three or four parallel blocks on 16th and 17th avenues in a going-to-seed residential section about five minutes from downtown Nashville. A Nashville recording session is a very casual affair. There are no arrangers, no producers and no writ ten music, except once in a while a lead sheet, and the singer has probably brought that along for the words, not the music. Usually no one has rehearsed except the singer. At the start of the session he goes through the song once, or just plays a demo (demonstration record) for the sidemen. If the A-and-R man is an accomplished musician like Atkins, he may have some definite ideas about how it should be done. If not, he, the singer and the sidemen simply work it out as they go along, and stop when everybody is more or less pleased. They know one another well and they anticipate one another’s moves. Everybody is free to offer suggestions and there is a lot of fast infield chatter.
“Hey, Pig, why don’t you do that twice?”
“Brighten it just a hair, Jerry.”
“And right there, more ching-ching-ching.”
“We’re all lollygagging, come on, punch it up.”
“You got any squirrels out at your place?”
“I ain’t seen a squirrel this year. Plenty of hicker nuts but no squirrels.”
“Bear with me, chillun, I’m ‘on sing this lover if it takes all night.”
There is not much written music to be seen in Nashville, except for what is embroidered on clothes, but pianists and bass players are frequently seen reading from scraps of paper on which series of numbers have been scribbled. The numbers are code—each of them represents the bass note of the chord in one bar of music. Some musicians are so deft at it that they can jot the note numbers down after listening to a demo once.
“If we gave even the most mediocre written musical test, I doubt very much if half our members could pass it,” says George W. Cooper, president of Local 257. “But that’s not to say they aren’t good musicians. We’ve got some of the best.” “Oh, they read music all right,” Atkins says. “But they read it with their ears instead of their eyes.”
Atkins is an artist and he naturally takes his own guitar work seriously. The same goes for Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass picking, and his protégés, Flatt and Scruggs. For the most part though, to ask serious questions about country music—apart from what it’s doing in the charts—is to draw blank looks. The songs have been scorned and ridiculed so long by outsiders that the performers themselves have come to place little value on them. A good many of the singers, one gathers, would turn to pop music tomorrow morning if they could change their accents and get booked in Las Vegas. They yearn to see their records in the pop charts, where the money is. At the same time they must not seem to be wanting this; they must be careful not to alienate their country fans, who are a jealous lot.
The situation makes for curious ideas of loyalty.
* * *
Wesley Rose, who runs the town’s largest pub lishing house, Acuff-Rose, is known as a passionate advocate of pure country music. “I’ve been fighting this battle for years,” he says. “I tell my boys to keep their eyes off the pop market and concentrate on making good country songs. If they’re good enough they’ll make their way any where.” A few days later one finds Rose directing Roy Orbison, a rock-pop singer, in a recording session. Orbison was one of the rockers with Sun Records in Memphis in the 1950’s who dealt country music such a terrible blow.
Or take Audrey Williams, who is the handsome platinum-blonde widow of Hank Williams, probably the most legendary figure country music has produced. Audrey Williams is something of a celebrity herself, having been the provocation for so many of Hank’s famous laments. She now directs an operation called Audrey Williams Enterprises, which involves a small movie company, a record label and the management of her singer-son, Hank Jr. She is not without sentiment. She keeps in her garage the 1952 blue Cadillac convertible that Hank died in on New Year’s Day, 1953. But when Sam Katzman made a movie based on Hank’s life (Your Cheatin’ Heart), she agreed with the boys from the Coast that Hank’s twangy, countrified singing should not be used on the sound track. The much blander voice of Hank Jr., then 15, was used instead, along with new arrangements and instrumentation. Of course it was Hank, not Hank Jr., who sold all those records, but Mrs. Williams does not see the point of the objection. “We thought it would reach more people this way,” she says. “A lot of people don’t like that old fiddle-and-steel-guitar sound. I believe in progress.”
Then there’s Buck Owens (I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail) who has the Buck Owens Pledge to Country Music. It’s in scroll form, and free copies are available, suitable for framing. “I shall sing no song that is not a country song,” it goes, and “I shall make no record that is not a country record,” and so on. Fair enough, except that one of Buck’s latest releases, a big seller, is an instrumental called Buckaroo that you can do the Watusi to.
It is probably foolish to pursue this sort of thing, and it is certainly unrewarding—like trying to get a triangulation fix on Roger Miller, the biggest thing out of Nashville since Hank Williams. “Oh yeah, we still think of Roger as a country singer,” says Buddy Killen, Miller’s publisher in Nashville. “No, no, Roger’s not a country singer, not anymore,” says Don Williams, Miller’s agent. “I don’t know just what I am,” says Miller, re hearsing for a television show in New York. “I like to entertain everybody. Scooby doo.”
I see you going down the street in your big Cadillac,
You got girls in the front and got girls in the back,
Yeah, and way in the back you got money in a sack,
Both hands on the wheel and your shoulders rared back,
… I wish I had your good luck charm and you had a do-wacka-do wacka-do.
To many people the most interesting thing, the only interestin
g thing about the business is the money—the idea of all them old country boys being in the chips, driving Cadillacs with six-shooter door handles and wearing outrageous, glittering Western suits, designed by Nudie of Hollywood. Country singers are growing weary of this image, if not weary enough to stop making money.
“I guess you’re going to write another one of those articles about how we’re all a bunch of rich idiots,” said Faron Young, the Singing Sheriff. “Rhinestones on our clothes and all that.” “Well, a lot of you are idiots, Faron, remember that,” said Jan Crutchfield, an irreverent cleffer. The former movie lawman was not amused. “Not all of us, neighbor. Not by a long shot.”
The big money is in personal performances—state fairs, coliseum shows, one-night stands in tank towns. Young Johnny Cash grosses around $500,000 a year on personals alone. He, Roger Miller and Buck Owens are the superstars, and they get $2,500 and up for a single show, against a percentage of the gate, usually half. Porter Wagoner, The Thin Man from West Plains, gets $1,400 and up for a show, and Ernest Tubb (I’m Walking the Floor Over You) gets upwards of $1,000. Tubb and his Texas Troubadours are on the road some 200 days a year, traveling as much as 500 miles a day. Tubb has been at this grind since 1933, and you can see it in his seamed, exhausted face. “Just to look at him you wouldn’t think Ernie was only twenty-eight years old, would you?” says Miller, with a straight face. “That’s what the road’ll do for you.” But Tubb’s schedule is not unusually rigorous. Some of them are on the road 300 days a year.