Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  The Depression struck the entire country, altering the record industry. A conservative pallor settled over the business of selling records, and comparatively little out-of-the-way talent was recorded. Instead the companies relied upon proven artists with a formula for selling records, such as blues man Big Bill (Broonzy), country music legends the Carter Family, and Bohemian concertina master Whoopie John Wilfahrt. Just as World War II began pulling record companies out of their prolonged slump, two things occurred. First, a shortage of shellac (the material from which 78s were then pressed) and then the Petrillo Ban (a contract dispute between the record companies and the American Federation of Musicians Union) combined to virtually shut down the entire industry for eighteen months, from the fall of 1942 into the spring of 1944.

  By war’s end a new breed of record entrepreneurs slowly infiltrated the industry, challenging the way the major companies did business. While the major companies looked more toward popular music and displayed less interest in blues, country, and gospel, new labels began taking up the slack. The Chess Brothers in Chicago, Bernie Bessman (Apollo) in New York City, and Houston’s Don Robey (Duke/Peacock) explored the grassroots of American music. Significantly, Sam Phillips’s small Memphis operation helped to launch the rock ’n’ roll revolution when Elvis Presley walked into his studio in 1954 looking for an opportunity. Within a few years many of the small labels looked toward rock ’n’ roll and its permutations for their livelihood.

  Nonetheless, traditional music continues to sell to a select audience. Since the folk boom of the early to middle 1960s the number of small labels devoted to grassroots music has increased. Arhoolie, Rounder, and Flyright (England) helped to ensure an outlet for contemporary performers of folk and folk-based music. These and other companies also devote part of their catalogue to reissuing vintage performances. Although such companies do not have the financial backing or distribution of major labels, they do offer opportunities for artists who would otherwise be overlooked and unheard.

  COUNTRY MUSIC OVER THE AIRWAVES

  The history of modern American folk music remains inseparably tied to the evolution of the radio and phonograph industries. Although the commercial recording industry began in the late 1800s, their strong, symbiotic relationship began in 1920 when the first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, initiated its regular broadcasts. Within a matter of months stations erected by entrepreneurs in other major cities began broadcasting. By 1924 scores of radio stations beamed their virtually unregulated signals throughout the United States. These early radio stations relied almost exclusively upon local talent to entertain their audiences with music, drama, comedy, recitations, and news.

  Almost as quickly as commercial radio stations sprang up, country music became part of their regularly scheduled daily broadcasts. Weekly “barn dance” shows featuring country music were established by broadcasters eager to serve their rural listeners. Barn dance radio shows were by no means a uniquely southern phenomenon. As early as 1925 the powerful 50,000-watt signal of WLS in Chicago presented hillbilly talent to its vast midwestern audience. Small-town uppermidwestern radio stations from Yankton, South Dakota, to Rice Lake, Wisconsin, featured daily radio programs spotlighting local talent performing music that ranged from polka to country. Nonetheless, the most famous of these shows, “The Grand Ole Opry,” has been a Nashville, WSM, and country music institution since its 1924 debut.

  Radio was very tentative and exploratory during its first ten years of existence—1920 through 1930—because nobody was certain what would work. By the mid-1920s there were regular country music jamboree broadcasts over WBAP in Fort Worth and WLS in Chicago. By the Depression’s onset, radio stations were found across the entire United States and they proliferated during the 1930s. What began as a big-city phenomenon spread to small cities and towns, which proudly boasted of their own radio stations. This meant that even more talent was needed to fill the demand created by the spread of local radio. Traditional music, especially country music, filled part of this void. The centralized radio networks brought national talent to local stations. Sometimes local grassroots talent came to the broadcast headquarters to go nationwide.

  Reno & Smiley EP Cover. Courtesy of Kip Lornell.

  The Roanoke Entertainers (Virginia), for example, were recommended to the CBS network by their hometown station, WDBJ. Their appearance was such a novelty that the Roanoke Times & World News sent a reporter along on their February 1931 trip to New York City, who wrote:

  It isn’t often the diners of the Memphis Special have a real old time string band to furnish “music with their meals,” but that’s what happened last week when the Roanoke Entertainers, radio performers from WDBJ, and Hayden Huddleston, the red headed announcer, left here for New York. There were six in the party, five musicians with their banjos, guitars, and fiddles, and the announcer who drawls and slurs his R’s. They had a drawing room, for this gang of Roanokers was traveling in style.

  They were on their way to the Big Town to play before the Columbia Broadcasting System audition board . . . At 2 o’clock John Mayo, Columbia announcer, introduced the band with “Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting a program of unusual entertainment, the Roanoke Entertainers under the personal direction of Hayden Huddleston . . .” With that, the Roanoke Entertainers went on the air, playing “Lights in the Valley.” The band played six numbers, including the popular tune, “Smokey Mountain Bill,” and it was not long before the telegrams began coming in. The Entertainers went over with a bang. But, like everything else, there is an end to all good things. The Entertainers remembered that Roanoke awaited them, so Saturday night they again boarded the train. The boys played for about an hour, then came sleep—welcome after two wild and hectic days in the Big City.

  The Roanoke Entertainers, first of the local musicians to play over a national network, are back home today carrying on in their everyday life. For this band is made up of men who work every day. They are not professional musicians . . . A lot of folks heard about Roanoke, Virginia, Saturday that never heard it mentioned before. Such is the power of radio.

  WWVA (Toby Stroud) program booklet. Courtesy of Kip Lornell.

  WDBJ is typical in its use of local hillbilly groups like the McCray Family, N & W Stringband, Blue Ridge Fox Chasers, and Floyd County Ramblers. By the 1930s cowboy music and western swing by groups such as the Texas Troubadours (a Roanoke-based group who came up with the moniker at least two years before Ernest Tubb gave his band the same name!) became part of its daily schedule. The biggest names on Roanoke country radio, Roy Hall and the Blue Ridge Entertainers (1939–1943) and Flatt and Scruggs (1947), comforted Roanoke Valley listeners with their own blend of humor, string band music, and informal commercials.

  For many country musicians radio became more than a performance vehicle. The radio broadcasts themselves paid rather poorly (or not at all), but they allowed the musicians to announce their live show dates and personal appearances. Thus radio became their most effective source for advertising the true financial basis for their musical careers—lucrative live appearances at which they sold autographed pictures and songbooks. An immediate, intimate link between performer and audience helped these fifteen- to thirty-minute shows develop into more than a musical event. They responded to the musical requests that came by way of the telephone, mail, and telegraph wires; talked about the weather; and poked fun at one another. Once country artists worked an area dry and the requests for show dates slowed down, they either moved on to more fertile ground or temporarily retired from music as a full-time occupation.

  The bias of country music broadcasting is clearly toward the South and the border regions of the Midwest and Middle Atlantic states. The truth is that country music, with roots tied to traditional Anglo-American styles, existed in all parts of the United States. Very little has been written about country music outside of the South, though its impact proved to be nationwide. Even the cold northern climate of upstate New York was not impervio
us to the charms of hillbilly music. This southern emphasis underscores the inescapable importance of regionalism in folk music; Americans expect hillbilly music to be from the South where it is bred in the bone.

  Consequently, we are more hard-pressed to describe the broadcasting of early country music outside of the South. The recording industry also largely ignored white country music north of the Mason-Dixon line, and the statewide collecting projects were largely initiated by scholarly types in search of ballads: British, American, and occupational. The books they published in the first half of the twentieth century focus on these aspects of the northern Anglo tradition. Comparably few commercial and field recordings of nonsouthern folk music were made prior to the advent of easily portable equipment in the 1950s. In the halcyon days before the Depression, the commercial companies themselves did not go out of their way to scout nonsouthern hillbilly talent. Most of their recordings were done at studios in New York City or Chicago. Victor used its Camden, New Jersey, facilities for recordings and made field trips to a variety of southern cities in search of vernacular music talent. With the exception of several trips to the West Coast and one brief session in Butte, Montana, their vision turned ever southward.

  But not even all southern-born “rural” talent heard over the airwaves and produced by the northern-based record companies was factually represented. Vernon Dalhart, born Marion Try Slaughter on April 6, 1883, in northeastern Texas, received conservatory vocal training in Dallas before moving to New York City early in the twentieth century. Dalhart went on to become one of the era’s most prolific recording artists whose talents knew no arbitrary musical boundaries. Some of his records were marketed as country, most notably those on the Columbia’s 15,000 Old-Time series. In reality Dalhart’s country records foreshadowed the “citybilly” sound heard in the early 1960s. His Tin Pan Alley songs also appealed to the rapidly developing country music clientele, who flocked to purchase his versions of the contemporary ballads “Wreck of the Old ’97” and “The Death of Floyd Collins.” This music was far removed from Dalhart’s rural roots; nonetheless, Dalhart literally coined the genre of pop country, a term that would not come into general currency for several decades.

  Throughout the 1940s country music radio was largely southern based. Some radio stations in rural areas outside of the South featured country music early in the morning and surrounding the daily farm reports and grain prices. Live broadcasts remained the rule of the day for most radio stations until well after the close of World War II. By the early 1950s, however, the radio industry was undergoing an evolutionary upheaval caused partially by television. Established radio stars like Arthur Godfrey and Art Linkletter jumped ship and moved into television’s more glamorized spotlight. Networks also proliferated and an even greater demand for national talent caused radio stations to move away from their local identity, resulting in an ever-diminishing number of “live” slots for local grassroots and country musicians. For all practical purposes in-studio musical performances became passe when the nation was engulfed by the rock ’n’ roll revolution. The most notable exception is the highly successful Garrison Keillor’s and American Public Media’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” a distinctive anachronism in today’s world of Arbitron ratings and inflexible playlists on commercial radio stations.

  Electronic Media Centers, 1920–1940

  Electronic media map. Courtesy of William Vaughan.

  BORDER RADIO

  Border radio stations provided another wonderfully unconventional opportunity for some of America’s early country musicians—Slim Rheinhart and Patsy Montana, Asher Sizemore and Little Jimmie, the Pickard Family, Bob Wills, and one-time Texas senator W. Lee O’Daniel and the Hillbilly Boys—to reach a wider audience. Beginning in the early 1930s, these unregulated stations located just inside the Mexican border blasted their northern neighbors with signals that ranged from 250,000 to 500,000 watts. A handful of stations blasted out an unprecedented 1,000,000 watts of sound that regularly reached listeners in southern Canada, though they could regularly be heard as far away as western Europe and the southern tip of South America.

  By way of contrast most of the radio stations based in the United States transmitted at between 1,000 to 10,000 watts of power, except for several dozen “clear-channel” stations—including WGY in Schenectady, New York; WOI in Des Moines, Iowa; WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana; WBZ in Boston, Massachusetts; and KOA in Denver, Colorado. These stations broadcast at the highest allowable power (50,000 watts) day and night and didn’t share their frequency with any other station—a common practice in the early days of radio before the creation of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC; later the Federal Communications Commission, FCC) and its expansion of the AM radio band.

  Because FRC regulations did not restrict power and content, these behemoths operated with impunity and immunity from prosecution by the U.S. Government. And these dozen or so stations were strung all along the borderland, from XEFW in Tampico, Mexico (just south of Brownsville, Texas) to XELO in Tijuana, Mexico, on the Pacific Coast. For all intents and purposes border radio stations could broadcast whatever they wanted, and for the most part they did. And the charge was led by a very engaging and bright character, John Romulus Brinkley.

  Dr. J. R. Brinkley, a North Carolina native born in 1885, became the most famous wildcat broadcaster, pitching the notorious goat gland transplant for men whose sex drive had diminished. In pursuing his dream of becoming a medical doctor, Brinkley was booted out of Johns Hopkins University and left the Bennett Eclectic Medical School in Chicago under curious circumstances before earning a degree from the Kansas City–based Eclectic Medical University . . . after less than one month of study! “Dr.” Brinkley worked in rural Kansas for several years, which is where he ran into the “goat gland cure” that was to become his road to infamy and financial success. Eager to share his cure for impotency and sexual dysfunction with the entire world, Brinkley first took to the airwaves in the United States over KFKB in Milford, Kansas, which he eventually purchased. Not only did his medical practices cost him his ability to practice medicine but the FRC also forbade him from owning a radio station.

  It was the sage observation that radio waves knew no political boundaries that brought Brinkley to the northern Mexican border. He had become wealthy enough during his decade of prosperity to build a 75,000-watt station (XER) in Villa Acuna, which opened for business in the fall of 1931. In addition to Dr. Brinkley’s own programs, the station featured a potpourri of talent as part of its daily programming: the Bluebird Trio (a female singing group), psychologist/astrologer Mel Ray, the Studio Mexican Orchestra, and Roy Faulkner (“The Singing Cowboy”). Within six months, this eclectic mixture of talent, which was peppered by Brinkley’s own pitches for all types of medical cures, ointments, and products that were not available through outlets in the United States, was bringing in between 25,000 and 30,000 pieces of mail each week.

  This healthy response rejuvenated Brinkley’s medical and communciations agenda. As his business increased dramatically, he wanted to dramatically increase the power of the station. First he suggested that 150,000 watts would be enough, but by the middle of 1932 he was so successful that half a million watts became his new target. In the meantime, however, some of the American radio stations located near his frequency were becoming increasingly nervous about his plans. Even such important stations, most notably WGN in Chicago and Atlanta’s WSB, were complaining to the FRC about the interference from XER, and the thought of 5.5 times as much power was simply too much. They began to pressure the U.S. Government, which in turn turned up the heat on their Mexican counterparts.

  A protracted series of lawsuits by Mexican officials related to Brinkley’s broadcasts from remote facilities in the United States finally shut down XER in the fall of 1933. After the Mexican Supreme Court ruled in Brinkley’s favor in the summer of 1935, he quickly bought the lower-power XEAW in nearby Reynosa, Mexico, and was back in business in a matter of months. But all of t
his was the prelude to going back on the air in Villa Acuna, where he prepared XERA to replace XER. And just before the close of 1935, his new operation went on the air with an unprecedented and astonishing 1 million watts of power. For the next six years Brinkley prospered, but a new lawsuit finally forced XERA off the air early in 1941 and Brinkley himself died on May 26, 1942, without ever facing the mail-fraud charges that ultimately caused his station to be closed by Mexican officials.

  Brinkley’s pioneering efforts opened the door to other like-minded entrepreneurs. Dozens of colorful pitchmen touted themselves as radio seers, spiritual healers of the airwaves, or medical men with astonishing cures. They hosted shows such as “The Bible Institute of the Air,” “Good Neighbor Get-Together,” “The Brother Human Hour,” and “Helping Hand.” Their product was sold on a “P.I.” (per inquiry) basis with the hosts and the radio stations sharing in the profits. Nearly all of these men and women were most certainly quacks, but they offered hope, solace, and entertainment to millions of listeners living both north and south of the rather porous border that divides Mexico from the United States.

  The border stations featured not only Anglo-American music but Mexican popular and folk music including stars such as Lydia Mendoza. Even the famous Carter Family made a move from southwestern Virginia to broadcast over border radio stations from 1938 to 1942, mostly on the “Good Neighbor Get-Together” radio program. They were joined by other prominent folk-based groups—the Pickard Family, for instance—who had also performed at the Grand Ole Opry or had been previously sponsored by Harry O’Neil and the Consolidated Royal Chemical Company. Border radio provided a forum for musicians—many of them American folk artists—to broadcast to a large and widespread audience; hundreds of thousands more than they could have reached through any other means.