by Kip Lornell
Old Jack could tell a story, if he was only here,
Of the trouble and the hardships of the Western pioneer.
He would tell you how your fathers and mothers lost their lives.
And how our aged parents were scalped before our eyes.
I am a roving cowboy, I’ve worked upon the trail,
I’ve shot the shaggy buffalo and heard the coyote’s wail;
I have slept upon my saddle, all covered by the moon;
I expect to keep it up, dear friends, until I meet my doom.
I am a roving cowboy, my saddle is my home,
And I’ll always be a cowboy, no difference where I roam;
And like our noble heroes my help I’ll volunteer,
And try to be of service to the Western pioneer.
Cowboy songs were among the first folk songs to be recorded in the 1920s. Carl T. Sprague, the “Original Singing Cowboy,” was born near Houston in 1895 and grew up working on the family ranch. Sprague learned his music firsthand, although he later supplemented his repertoire through songs learned from Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. At the age of thirty, after graduating from Texas A & M University, Sprague traveled to Camden, New Jersey, where he had arranged an audition with the Victor Company. These northern record executives were so impressed by Sprague that they immediately released “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” which sold well over 100,000 copies in 1925/26. Sprague went on to record other popular cowboy songs for Victor, including “Utah Carroll,” “The Last Great Round-up,” “The Dying Cowboy,” and “The Mormon Cowboy.” Before long other “real” (i.e., working) cowboy singers such as the Cartwright Brothers, Goebel Reeves, Jules Verne Allen, J. D. Farley, and Billie Maxwell were also recording for Victor and Columbia.
There are still cowboy songs in the early twenty-first century. For some of today’s fans, country music is cowboy music, but the older traditions can still be heard. Younger cowboys still learn some of their songs from older musicians and records, though the impact of Nashville songwriters must be given its due. A generation of western songsters born in the 1930s and 1940s, notably Michael Martin Murphy, Guy Clark, and Mike Williams, have helped to keep western themes in commercial country music.
There are even a small number of performers, such as ex-rodeo champion Chris Le Doux and Canadian Ian Tyson, who really worked as full-time cowboys in addition to their careers as singers. The legacy of the cowboy image in country music can also be seen in the almost ubiquitous use of western attire still worn by many country singers, few of whom have ever wrestled a calf to the ground or even been on a horse in their entire life. This public image, however, remains paramount to the reality of commercial country music in postmodern America.
TIN PAN ALLEY AND COUNTRY MUSIC TEXTS
The songs written by a group of late-nineteenth-century American composers touched the repertoires of many Americans, including those rural musicians who pioneered the country music industry. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century popular music had become a big business fueled by a new and aggressive cadre of publishers. Some of the songwriters also published their own material; others hired performers to plug their songs to a mass market. In this age just before the dawn of the commercial record industry, sheet-music sales not only affected the dissemination of new popular songs but were also the measure of a song’s success. Sheet music was the main product of the music industry and its goal was sales. These songwriters become known as Tin Pan Alley craftsmen, named after a mythical New York City back alley where these songs were cranked out.
The songs of the Tin Pan Alley composers deeply affected the first generation of commercial country artists, born near the close of the nineteenth century and recorded before the Depression. These included Ernest V. Stoneman, the Carter Family, and Vernon Dalhart. The Tin Pan Alley songs of writers like Bob Miller, who composed new pseudo-country disaster ballads like “The Crime of Harry Powers,” “1930 Drought,” and “Wreck of the N & W Cannon Ball,” became part of their everyday repertoire. Such singers emerged from the first generation to grow up with Tin Pan Alley songs. These sentimental, innocent, often heart-touching stories flowed from the pens of professional songwriters and touched Americans from all classes and regional lines.
“Wednesday Night Waltz.” Courtesy of Kip Lornell.
Paul Dresser, brother of the highly regarded novelist Theodore Dreiser, qualifies as an important early member of this songwriting fraternity. A failure in the music publishing business, Dresser began his show business career with a minstrel show stint during Reconstruction. He settled in New York City, eventually writing such successes as “The Letter that Never Came,” “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” and “My Gal Sal.” The words and music for dozens of patriotic, funny, and topical ditties flowed from his pen before his death in 1906 at the age of forty-nine.
Charles K. Harris (1867–1930) remains one of the most prolific and well-respected members of the early Tin Pan Alley writers. In 1885 he plunged into the songwriting profession in Milwaukee after boldly hanging out the shingle “Songs Written to Order.” His first major success, “After the Ball,” arrived after the song was included in the hit musical revue, “A Trip to Chinatown.” “After the Ball” eventually brought thousands of dollars into the coffers of Harris’s publishing firm, which went on to open New York and Chicago offices. Harris’s prolific pen produced “’Mid the Green Fields of Virginia,” “Hello Central, Give Me Heaven,” “Break the News to Mother,” and scores of others.
These songs, along with the work of Harry von Tilzer, who wrote “Goodbye Liza Jane” and “I Want a Girl Just Like the One that Married Dear Old Dad,” later turned up in the repertoires of hillbilly groups—the Carter Family, the Delmore Brothers, Walter “Kid” Smith, and countless others. This early generation of recording artists venerated the innocence, pastoral vision, and maudlin simplicity of “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” “Nobody’s Darling on Earth,” “I’ll Remember You, Love, in My Prayers,” “The Little Rosewood Casket,” “In the Baggage Coach Ahead,” and “The Letter Edged in Black.” Their importance to white audiences is underscored by the frequency with which these songs appeared in the early record catalogs of the hillbilly artists. It is no accident, I suspect, that the first acknowledged country music recording, “Little Log Cabin in the Lane” by Fiddlin’ John Carson in 1923, fits into this category. The song itself was published by William Shakespeare Hays in 1871, only three years after Carson’s birth.
ERNEST STONEMAN’S REPERTOIRE
Ernest V. Stoneman, one of the pioneering commercial country music artists, was born in Carroll County, Virginia, in 1888. A musician such as Stoneman certainly enjoyed these songs, which had been circulated by way of sheet music and cylinders for better than twenty-five years before his own recording debut in 1924. Not surprisingly he chose a topical disaster ballad, “The Titanic,” for his debut. A retelling of the famous sinking of the world-class ocean liner that occurred one dozen years before, it is deliciously ironic that this famous “folk artist” learned his version from a published source. In later years Stoneman recalls that he obtained the words for “The Titanic” from a poem published in a newspaper. But he then told American music expert Dick Spottswood that the lyrics came from a contemporaneous folk song collection, Folk-Songs of the South, published by West Virginia folklorist John Cox. The truth remains unclear.
The fact remains that this early country music artist from the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains was clearly moved by the sentimental songs that he heard all around him. Stoneman truly enjoyed these songs, and his early recorded repertoire is peppered with nostalgic, gently ironic songs. During the first few months of his recording career he waxed versions of “Give My Love to Nell” (William Gray, 1894), “The Lightning Express” (Helf and Moran, 1898), and “The Dying Girl’s Farewell” (J. D. Patton, 1894). He also recorded another topical ballad, “Wreck on the C & O”; it too came from the pages of Professor Cox’s bo
ok.
Stoneman’s 1920s repertoire is filled with these older songs from written and oral tradition. His second Asheville, North Carolina, session (April 1926) illustrates these influences. He included a cowboy ballad, “The Texas Ranger,” learned from two neighbors, Bertha and Myrtle Hawks, who may have ultimately picked it up from John Lomax’s cowboy song collection (Lomax, 1910). “The Religious Critic,” a gently sardonic song about religious hypocrisy, later became better known as “S-A-V-E-D,” while the comic Tin Pan Alley ditty “When Will My Wife Return to Me” came from the pen of Charles D. Vann in 1889. Two pieces of sentimental American Victoriana, “Sweet Kitty Wells” (1860) and “In the Shadow of the Pine” (1895), were sandwiched between a turn-of-the-century lament “The Orphan Girl” and a railroad song “Asleep at the Switch.” Evidence of the impact of the rapidly growing record industry is illustrated by Stoneman’s “covering” of popular disks by other artists. He waxed his version of Charlie Poole’s commercially and artistically successful “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down,” several month’s after Columbia released the original. This trend portended the future, for in his next session Stoneman reworked two of Texas artist Carl T. Sprague’s popular Victor recordings, “Bad Companions” and “When the Work’s All Done This Fall.”
Despite this varied repertoire, Stoneman’s performance style was fairly conservative. His family was steeped in a tradition of playing stringed instruments for themselves and at local parties. The importance of string band music in this social fabric is underscored by Burton Stoneman’s (born 1881) comments during a 1941 Library of Congress interview:
We’d go to places, gatherin’s, have a good time, all play music; people’d all go home, everybody’d be satisfied, friendly . . . I recollect you’d go to a party and they’d bring it [whiskey] in a bucket with a dipper in it, set it on a table. People’d come in with their music—banjo and fiddle—that was mostly all they had in that day and time.
I never seen a guitar till I was about twelve years old, I reckon. Just a fiddle and banjo was all we had . . . They’d dance, they’d fiddle, they’d dance, every-body’d go peaceable . . . never have no disturbances at all in them days when I was a small boy. (Tribe 1993, 28)
THE FATHER OF BLUEGRASS
But by far the most influential brothers group, Bill Monroe (born September 13, 1911) and his older brothers Charlie and Birch, began playing together as children in western Kentucky. They heard the traditional fiddle tunes, learned shape note hymns, came under the sway of local old-time musicians, and purchased the latest hillbilly records by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. One of Bill’s earliest direct mentors, Arnold Schultz, an African American fiddle and guitar player, left a deep impression on the fledgling mandolin player. Monroe’s father died when Bill was young so he went to live with his uncle Pen Vandiver, who profoundly affected Bill as a role model for life and secondarily for his fiddle playing. The well-known “Uncle Pen” is named for Vandiver, who himself passed away in 1933.
By the late 1920s all three brothers had migrated to Detroit in search of more lucrative employment. Their love of music moved north, too. Birch, Charlie, and Bill slid into a semiprofessional musical career in the early 1930s as an adjunct to jobs in the ailing industrial plants. Unlike Stoneman, the Monroes found and thrived on radio work. Between 1932 and 1934 they played a string of radio jobs and show dates in metropolitan Chicago. The trio’s music reached large audiences during this tenure; their 1932 WLS (the Sears-owned, Worlds Largest Station) broadcasts reached much of the United States at night because of its 50,000-watt signal.
By 1934 they had left Chicago and turned to full-time music making on radio and the vaudeville stage. This grim time of unemployment, migration to the land of “milk and honey” (California), and its resulting social upheaval proved relatively easy for the Monroes because of their steady work on radio stations in Shennandoah, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska. The sponsorship of a cathartic formula, Texas Crystals, underwrote most of their midwestern radio air time. By this time the brothers were reduced by one when Birch decided to stay at a newly found refinery job that brought in steady income to help support the rest of the family.
The year 1935 found them closer to home, wandering among radio stations in North and South Carolina. Bill and Charlie worked as a brother duet, with a sound akin to the Blue Sky Boys (Bill and Earl Bolick). The Bolicks, too, played guitar and mandolin, emphasized empathetic harmony singing, and favored sentimental and sacred songs. But the Monroes were innovators—they played at faster tempos, while Bill’s exciting mandolin style demonstrated that it could handle the chores as a lead instrument. Their tight harmonies featuring Charlie’s high, piercing lead and Bill’s tenor voice supported by a highly integrated mandolin/guitar backup didn’t sound quite like anyone else. Their repertoire was not nearly as creative—a durable mixture of religious tunes or already established favorites. Nonetheless, they imbued “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” “He Will Set Your Fields on Fire,” “Weeping Willow Tree,” “The Saints Go Marching In,” and “Darling Corey” with a unique fervor and tenderness.
Some of these Carolina Piedmont and Appalachian mountain bands also included a three-finger picked banjo, an element critical to the development of bluegrass. This basic regional style was first documented in the middle to late 1920s on country music records by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers and Jack Reedy and his Walker Mountain Stringband. During the middle 1930s “Snuffy” Jenkins was the acknowledged king of the modern Carolina banjo pickers, due in large part to his appearances on the “Crazy Water Crystals Barn Dance” radio shows broadcast over Charlotte’s WBT. Jenkin’s forward-looking banjo work was often paired with the fiddle of Homer “Pappy” Sherrill during broadcasts and on show dates. These musicians, along with other modernists like J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers (Asheville) and the Washboard Wonders (Charlotte), influenced musicians throughout the Carolinas. They helped to reshape the older string band tradition into a new form that slowly inched its way toward bluegrass. Bill and Charlie Monroe soon integrated themselves into this same circuit; their music quickly became assimilated by local musicians and fans.
Their first encounter with the twentieth century’s other important electronic medium occurred on February 17, 1936, when veteran A & R man Eli Oberstein interrupted a Charlotte, North Carolina, recording session by Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and the Delmore Brothers to fit in Bill and Charlie. Busy with radio work and unexcited by the prospect of lackluster record sales, the Monroe Brothers first turned Oberstein down. A telephone call finally convinced the duo to try, and every five or six months thereafter Victor brought them into the studio for a Bluebird session that came out like clockwork. These highly successful records concertized the Monroe Brothers sound, enabling fans and musicians to study their musical vision.
Only a breakup of the duet in 1938 stopped their successful recording string. Both men were proud, creative, and stubborn. Possessed by mercurial tempers, they clashed once too often and Bill went off on his own in search of an expanded musical vision that he could not achieve with Charlie. Bill’s peripatetic search lead him across the South: Little Rock, Atlanta, and back to the Carolinas. In 1939 Bill found himself in Greenville, South Carolina, with Cleo Davis (guitar) and Art Wooden (fiddle), carefully remolding his sound. Bill calculatingly and unceasingly instructed both musicians. For many weeks they worked to perfect their instrumental roles to coincide with Monroe’s vision of a small string music ensemble.
With the addition of Amos Garen as a lead singer for sacred quartet singing, Monroe covered the religious field as well. This part of his repertoire was inspired by popular black Carolina-based gospel quartets such as the Heavenly Gospel Singers and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet as well as their white counterparts like the numerous groups sponsored by the Stamps-Baxter Publishing Company. The bluegrass gospel that developed also owes an obvious debt to revival hymns and the shape note tradition. It is a unique synthesis that exploits the unconvent
ional (for common-practice western art music theory) harmonies found in shape note books and utilizes the syncopation, ornamented slides, and tonal possibilities suggested by black singers to create a tense, high-pitched vocal quartet. In the middle 1980s bluegrass gospel quartets underwent a moderate renaissance due in part to the renewed interest in black gospel quartets. Inspired by a cappella black quartets such as the Harps of Melody and the Gospel Writers and their own reverence for the early Monroe recordings, contemporary groups like Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver and the Nashville Bluegrass Band included even more quartet selections as part of their everyday repertoire.
Just as the leaves turned golden and red in 1939 Bill felt his new band was ready. Armed with the new Blue Grass Boys moniker they traveled west, headed for Nashville and a Grand Ole Opry audition. The Blue Grass Boys caused an instant sensation in Nashville, winning immediate acclaim. Their WSM broadcasts brought in a veritable flood of show date requests; soon they were performing across the entire South. Based in Nashville, the band went through several personnel changes prior to its first recording session in October 1940. Georgia native Tommy Magness joined as the fiddler, Clyde Moody replaced Davis, and comedian Cousin Wilbur (Willie Westbrooks) joined the Blue Grass Boys as its bass player. Such personnel alterations became standard for the Blue Grass Boys, for its grueling travel schedule and Monroe’s often temperamental leadership resulted in frequent changes.
Despite Bill Monroe’s prominence and innovation in the field, several other bands were also on the cutting edge in the earliest days of bluegrass. Significantly, all of these groups had strong roots or ties to western North Carolina. Roy Hall and the Blue Ridge Entertainers and J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers had each worked on WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina, before moving on to new territory. Their sound on 1940 recordings was not too far removed from Monroe’s, though it was clearly not bluegrass in the classic sense.