Back Then It Was Called Hillbilly Music (1946–1957)

Bluegrass began to emerge as a subset of hillbilly music shortly after the close of World War II. However, both the terms “country” music and “bluegrass” were not commonly used until the late 1950s. Throughout the 1950s WARL radio highlighted this music, mostly notably lead by DJ Don Owens. Mandolinist Buzz Busby was perhaps the most influential pioneering bluegrass music in the area and participated in the first local television show (1954) featuring this music. By the late 1940s DC Records became the first local label to record hillbilly music talent around Washington, DC, and the Happy Melody Boys were the first hillbilly/bluegrass band to appear on national television (1955). The chapter closes with the formation of the Country Gentlemen, arguably the most important local bluegrass band.

The Pioneer Mixed a “Batch of ‘Congrats’”

In 1949, after WJMR fired Vernon Winslow, the black paper the Louisiana Weekly hired him as an advertising agent. He also wrote a nightlife gossip column called “Boogie-beat Jive.” In 1950 WMRY was the first local radio station to revamp its programming from white-oriented to exclusively black content. In his column, Winslow critiqued the on-air presentations of the new black DJs whom WMRY hired. He chimed about the good and the bad. George "Tex" Stephens was one of them whom he criticized and later praised. In 1957 WMRY phased out and morphed into WYLD. A year later, WBOK emerged as the city's first racially mixed station playing hillbilly music along with popular black music.

Rescripting What It Means to Be Southern: Musical Performance as Border Narrative

This chapter looks at the role of music and performance in border crossings. Focusing on Southern Border Narratives in blues and country music, the chapter examines how those narratives re-defined what it means to be Southern by offering a platform that validated Southern migratory experience and a site for negotiating the borderlands. Migrants leaving the South found border narratives set within music could help them break from the places they came from, navigate transitional spaces, and identify with others making similar passage. Examining the evolutions of rural to urban blues and “hillbilly” music to country that came about because of the mass movements of Southerners, this chapter looks at a broad range of musicians from Memphis Minnie Douglas, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, to Bessie Smith and Woody Guthrie, aiming to look at ways communal voices shaped and gave meaning to the migrant experience.

Rock ’n’ Roll

This chapter discusses the romantic genealogy of rock 'n' roll and how its style resulted from the happy integration of white hillbilly music with black “race music” or, as it came to be known in the 1950s, “rhythm and blues.” Supported by recent scholarship that has delved into the files of record companies, analyses affirm that rock 'n' roll represents a blatant appropriation of black music by white entrepreneurs. A postmodern view might regard rock 'n' roll not even as music, but as simply “a marketing concept that evolved into a lifestyle.” The chapter also analyzes how Bill Haley's recording of “Rock Around the Clock” turned the tide of American popular music in late 1955.

Old Time Dancing in Northeast Tennessee

This chapter examines the impact of social and economic changes on old time dancing in Northeast Tennessee in the twentieth century, using the Beechwood Family Music Center in Fall Branch as a focal point of discussion. It begins with a background on Beechwood, one of several places in the Northeast Tennessee–Southwest Virginia valley where old time dancing took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It then considers how how rural values and industrialization converged in early-twentieth-century Northeast Tennessee, along with its effects on local dance traditions. It also explores the marketing of square dancing as part and parcel of the rural image produced by the barn dances and by recordings of “hillbilly” music; the emergence of modern western square dancing and wagon training in Northeast Tennessee; and folk revival and festivals. The chapter concludes with an overview of the evolution of dance forms and styles as well as dance music at Beechwood, along with the revival of traditional Appalachian square dancing and clogging in Northeast Tennessee.

The Corny-ness of the Folk

Country music in the late 1930s was more disconnected from the mainstream than swing. Appearing initially only in cover versions of songs by crooners, or in the recordings of “singing cowboys,” turmoil in the music industry during the war years created an opening for a few extremely successful country recordings exemplified by Al Dexter’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” “Hillbilly Music” (as country was usually called during this time) was associated with the concept of “corn,” which allied the music to rural agricultural production and lowbrow, “corny” comedy routines. The popularity of recordings like “Pistol Packin’ Mama” affected a discursive shift, and the status of the music was worked out via the use of labels such as “Folk Music,” “Hillbilly,” “Country,” and “Western.” By the late 1940s, a major hillbilly hit like “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” drew on some of the same minstrelsy tropes as had “Open the Door, Richard.”

The Newness of Old-Time Music

The early history of what would eventually be called “country music” drew on many of the same ideas about genre and audience that had been developed in the marketing of foreign music and race music. The idea that rural, white people from the South constituted a distinct audience led to a rapid formation of the category some three years after the initial interest in “race” music. The ambiguous social position of southern, rural white people led to difficulties in finding a convenient label for the category, although “Old-Time Music” came closest to achieving official status, and “Hillbilly Music” was used informally in the press. Old-Time Music increasingly pursued connections to mainstream popular music even while continuing to refer to an imagined rural past. One of the most successful recording artists of the 1920s, Vernon Dalhart, is used to exemplify the trajectory of Old-Time Music during the mid-1920s.