Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Adolph Hofner’s Czech-German heritage underscores the ethnic diversity that has long impacted the culture of south Texas. The Texas hill country (located between San Antonio and Austin) is not only geographically unique, it’s significant for the fusion of Spanish and Central European (German, Swiss, Austrian, Alsatian, and Czech) influences in food, beer, architecture, and music. In fact, the hill country forms a distinctively multicultural “Texan” culture separate from the state’s better known southern and southwestern influences.

  In terms of local music, the accordion gained popularity in Tejano music by the nineteenth century due to the German settlers, many of whom migrated to the hill country in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Eventually more of these central Europeans moved from small towns and farms to nearby cities: San Antonio to the southwest and Austin to the east. By the 1940s creative musicians like Adolph Hofner and his Hispanic counterpart, Santiago Jimenez, Sr., helped to give folk music in San Antonio its specific characteristics.

  Legendary conjunto accordionist and songwriter Santiago Jimenez, Sr., was born in 1913, in San Antonio, where he mainly lived until his death seventy-one years later. His father, Patricio Jimenez, also played the accordion and moved to San Antonio from Eagle Pass, Texas, some 150 miles southwest of the city and a suburb of Piedras Negras, Mexico. An accordion player by the age of eight, Santiago began playing music on live, local radio broadcasts as early as 1933. In 1936 Jimenez released his first record, “Dices Pescao” and “Dispensa el Arrempujon,” on Decca, which marked a long recording career that lasted into the 1980s. Jimenez soon became known for his creative use of the tololoche, a Tejano contrabass that became a staple in conjunto music beginning in the mid-1940s. Always the traditionalist, he had a lifelong association with the traditional two-row button accordion. In the late 1960, Jimenez moved to Dallas for ten years, working as a school janitor, before returning to San Antonio in 1977, where he rekindled his music career. He made some final recordings with his son, Flaco, in 1980 for Arhoolie Records.

  To this day conjunto music and the Jimenez family remain firmly linked through the work of Flaco Jimenez, Santiago Jimenez, Sr.’s son born in 1939. He began performing with his father in 1945 and recording in 1954 as a member of the norteno band Los Caporales. Flaco became a fixture in the San Antonio norteno scene into the 1960s when he began performing with Douglas Sahm in the 1960s. Sahm, perhaps best known as the founding member of the Sir Douglas Quintet, helped to broaden Flaco’s musical horizons. Over the next twenty years Flaco often traveled outside of south Texas, working with an eclectic mix of musicians from former Bill Monroe sideman Peter Rowan to Bob Dylan to grassroots music guru Ry Cooder.

  In 1986 Jimenez won a Grammy Award for “Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio,” a song he learned from his father. For many years, most notably in the 1990s Jimenez joined the supergroup Texas Tornados, with Augie Meyers, Doug Sahm, and Freddy Fender, that earned a Grammy Award in 1990. Flaco Jimenez won another Grammy in 1996 for the Best Mexican-American Performance followed by a third Grammy in 1999 for the Best Tejano Performance. Although these collaborations led to a greater awareness and appreciation of his music outside of the norteno community, Jimenez remains closely tied to both San Antonio, his extended family, and his musical roots.

  While conjunto in San Antonio never impacted popular music in the same ways that Chicago’s blues and gospel music did, it nonetheless has touched the music world outside of south Texas. The success and recognition gained by Flaco Jimenez since the 1970s perhaps illustrates this most dramatically. His Grammy Awards and his work with a pop icon like Bob Dylan mean that even casual music consumers will pay attention to him and more people outside of his San Antonio home know about Flaco Jimenez’s life and work.

  The importance of conjunto music from San Antonio was underscored on August 13, 2010, with the passing of Estaben “Steve” Jordan at the age of seventy-one. Always innovative and experimenting with traditional forms and styles, Jordan (born in rural Elsa, Texas) moved north to San Antonio as a child. Following a peripatetic path for much of his early adult life, Jordan returned to San Antonio on a permanent basis in the early 1970s. Not only an accordion player, he also played harmonica and various keyboards. Jordan’s bravado, deviance, innovation, and showmanship often drew comparisons with Jimi Hendrix. That his passing earned attention from the national digital and print press, including full-length obituaries in the Washington Post, suggests a more serious interest in Hispanic music.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Country Music

  With the advent of air conditioning, increasingly sophisticated urbanization, and a great increase in population following the close of World War II, Washington, D.C., quickly evolved from a medium-sized city straddling the North and the South, where foreign diplomats received extra compensation because the District was built upon a swamp, to a major metropolitan area. But a March 11, 1974, Washington Post headline correctly trumpeted “D.C. Is Also Nation’s Bluegrass Capital.” Country music was nothing new in a city with so many immigrants from the states immediately to the south and west. Bluegrass, however, had only emerged some twenty years previously. The rest of this chapter is devoted to country music and bluegrass in our nation’s capital, which is usually better known for its home-grown go-go music and as the birthplace of Duke Ellington, up to the early 1960s when the folk revival changed the local musical landscape.

  Country music has, in fact, been integral to the District of Columbia’s soundscape since the term emerged as a means to promote the rural, old-time music that was gradually appearing on commercial recordings. In April 1923 WRC (named in honor of its original owner—the Radio Corporation of America) signed on the air and occasionally featured country music. Several years later, low-power and short-lived WTFF broadcast a weekly radio program by pioneering artist, Jimmie Rodgers, who was quickly establishing himself as the first male start of country music.

  “The Hill Billies” appeared on WRC in 1926 and became among the first country music artists to develop a following in the District of Columbia. Led by brothers Al and Joe Hopkins, Tony Alderman, and John Rector (all of whom were originally from in or near Galax, Virginia), their ties to the city were actually deeper and longer than it might appear. As early as 1910 Al Hopkins launched his professional music career when he (and his younger brothers Joe, Elmer, and John) formed a vocal group called the Old Mohawk Quartet, which sang regularly at Washington’s Majestic Theater, a venue favored by many traveling vaudevillians.

  About 1912 the family moved to 63 Kennedy Street in a rapidly urbanized section of northwest Washington, D.C. After living in the city for many years, the Hopkins family returned to Carroll County, Virginia, to visit relatives in the spring of 1924. Joe and Al met barber and fiddler Tony Alderman at his Galax barbershop and they soon formed a trio. Within several months John Rector, who ran a local general store and played the five-string banjo, joined the group. The recordings of Henry Whittier (who lived in nearby Fries, Virginia) inspired these musicians to take the train to New York City in search of work as well as an opportunity to record.

  This quartet began working the vaudeville circuit in 1925 when they spoke with A & R man Ralph Peer about recording. After an initial 1924 trial recording session for Victor, which was listed as by the Southwestern Virginia String Orchestra, the group eventually recorded for OKeh (1925) and then for an extended period of time for Vocalion beginning in 1926. Peer suggested that they needed to find a shorter and more descriptive name for their group, and they decided upon the “Hill Billy” moniker, thus becoming the first recording artists to use this descriptor.

  Around the same time they first recorded for Vocalion in the spring of 1926, the group settled in Washington, D.C., both because WRC was such a powerful station that it reached audiences up and down the Atlantic seaboard and because the city provided a gateway to cities to the northeast as well as back home to rural southwestern Virginia. Their weekly Saturday evening broadcasts over WRC quickly beca
me popular among the relatively small number of local residents who owned radios and also reached a larger audience that stretched from Philadelphia to Richmond and from Pittsburgh to the Maryland beaches. These broadcasts brought in letters inviting the group to play at local venues within WRC’s extensive coverage area–-a healthy supplement to the ties that they had already established by way of vaudeville. A photograph in the March 1926 issue of Radio Digest was labeled “Hill Billies Capture WRC: Boys from Blue Ridge Mountains Take Washington with Guitars, Fiddles, and Banjos; Open New Line of American Airs.”

  The Hill Billies, led by the shrewd and resourceful Al Hopkins, symbolized country music for Washington, D.C. Because these young men from southwestern Virginia reminded them of themselves—their past and their own roots—this group represented an important, modern example of music and citybilly culture. In these respects the Hill Billies foreshadowed both the emergence of bluegrass and the folk revival that began in the late 1950s.

  But the Hill Billies were important for several other reasons. They were among the first country musicians to trade on their roots by exploiting the country attire (later “western”) often associated with men who work outdoors for a living. The Hill Billies were also one of the first groups to include a piano—an instrument often found in rural parlors—on their Vocalion recordings. When Calvin Coolidge asked them to play for him, they became the first country group to appear at the White House. The Hill Billies also appeared in an early talking film, “The Original Hill Billies,” with Al Hopkins, a 1929 fifteen-minute Vitaphone film meant to be shown at commercial movie theaters in conjunction with full-length features.

  Jimmie Rodgers also spent time broadcasting in Washington, D.C., beginning in December 1927, near the start of his illustrious recording career. Rodgers reached a small number of local country music lovers by way of his weekly broadcasts over WTFF, the radio station of the Fellowship Forum, which signed on the air for three evening hours, four days a week. Like so many early country music recording artists, Rodgers easily mixed folk, blues-based material, with pop songs from the past thirty years, including “There’s Going to be A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” as well as songs that worked well on the vaudeville circuit. Rodgers’s recording career proved so successful that by the summer of 1928 he moved on, leaving the District for New York City and then for life on the road before his untimely death due to TB in May 1933.

  An unexpected connection exists between Jimmie Rodgers and bluegrass in D.C. During his career, Rogers recorded with ten different steel guitar players as well as more than a score of other sidemen performing on various instruments. While broadcasting over WTFF in Washington, D.C., Rodgers meet songwriter and instrumentalist Ellsworth Thomas Cozzens, who became the first of the steel players with whom he recorded. Cozzens played locally with the Georgetown-based Blue and Gray Troubadours, who also broadcast over WMAL around the time that Rodgers came to town.

  In mid-February 1928 Ellsworth fellow Blue and Gray Troubadour guitarist Julian R. Ninde accompanied Rodgers to Camden, New Jersey, in order to record four selections for RCA Victor. This was the first session to feature more than Rodgers’ guitar accompaniment and included two selections, “Dear Old Sunny South” and “Treasures Untold.” This trio recorded only once and Ellsworth and Ninde never saw Rodgers after he left the District some four months later.

  The connection between Rodgers and local bluegrass comes in the form of Mike Auldridge, the dobro player with the seminal local bluegrass band, the Country Gentlemen and, more recently, with the Seldom Scene. Couzzens was Mike Auldridge’s maternal uncle. Moreover, Auldridge recalls Couzzens talking about his brief period working with Rodgers and playing both “Dear Old Sunny South” and “Treasures Untold” at family gatherings in the early 1950s.

  * * *

  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  Mr. Stoneman and his musical family recorded dozens of tracks for commercial record companies beginning in the mid-1920s. Folkorist and musician Mike Seeger made this field in 1957, possibly at Sunset Park, Chester County, Pennsylvania. “The Wreck of the Old 97” has been widely recorded by country artists, mostly from the southeastern states, beginning in the middle 1920s. This popular disaster song focuses on a 1902 train wreck that occurred on the tracks just north of Danville, Virginia, when engineer Steve Brodie took over a train that was running one hour late and tried to make up the time before losing control several hours into his shift.

  Title “The Wreck of the Old 97”

  Performer The Stoneman Family

  Instruments vocals and guitar, fiddle, rhythm guitar, banjo, string bass

  Length: 2:51

  Musical Characteristics

  1. The banjo played by family friend Gene Cox is finger-picked in blue-grass fashion.

  2. The lead vocal by “Pop” Stoneman is very unadorned and somewhat detached.

  3. Though not characterized as such, the instrumentation and the musicians’ approach to playing owes much to the emerging bluegrass style.

  4. The tempo is moderate, steady, and deliberate.

  5. The rhythm guitar not only underpins the song’s harmony, it also provides additional syncopation.

  Oh, They gave him his orders in Monroe, Virginia,

  Saying “Steve, You’re way behind time.”

  This is not the Thirty-Eight but the Old Ninety-Seven

  You must put her in Spencer on time.

  It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,

  In a line of a three mile grade.

  And its on this grade that he lost his average,

  And you see what a jump he’s made.

  They were going down the grade, making ninety miles an hour,

  When the whistle began to scream;

  He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, And he was scolded to death by steam.

  And a telegram came to Washington City

  and this is what it said,

  “A brave engineer that run old Ninety-Seven,

  Is a-lying in Danville, dead.”

  Oh, its come all you fair ladies, you must take warning

  From this time, now and on.

  Never speak harsh words to a true loving husband;

  He may leave you and never return.

  This selection is from Smithsonian Folkways 40192.

  * * *

  During the Depression thousands of black and white residents of West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina moved north, helping bolster the population of the District. Many of them were attracted by the prospect of steady work provided by the federal government, though relatively few found such jobs during this difficult period. Citizens with a strong interest in the music provided by the musicians with background similar to theirs continued to migrate to our nation’s capital and while no D.C.-based country music group active during the 1930s had the same impact nor was as groundbreaking as The Hill Billies, what is now called “country music” continued to increase its firm hold on local music lovers.

  Local radio stations such as WRC, WMAL, and WJSV continued expanding their diet of live country music broadcasts. These fifteen-minute or half-hour programs occasionally featured nationally recognized acts, such as the Delmore Brothers, but more often focused on locally based groups. The Capital Barn Dance (promoted via a live weekly radio broadcast) emanated from Portner’s Arena, which sat near the banks of the Potomac River just south of Georgetown and was long ago torn down and eventually replaced by the John F. Kennedy Center.

  Because Ernest Stoneman is so well known and central to the development of bluegrass in Washington, D.C., a biographical sketch illustrates how Stoneman brought country music to the city. Born on May 25, 1893, near Galax (Carroll County) in southwestern Virginia, an area steeped in folk songs, which now hosts one of country’s longest-running and best-known fiddle contests, Ernest Stoneman was the oldest of three brothers born to Elisha and Rebecca, who died during childbirth in 1896. Principally a farmer, the stern Elisha also worked as a
Baptist preacher who traveled the region giving sermons. When Ernest wasn’t attending his one-room school, he was busy hunting rabbits or fishing down at the creek.

  He was ten years old when his grandmother taught him “Molly Hare” on the autoharp. He next picked up the banjo, first learning “Cripple Creek” and eventually played a little Jew’s harp, harmonica, fiddle, and guitar. Vocal leads proved to be Stoneman’s strong suit, usually accompanied by his own guitar or autoharp. He learned many popular songs from the 1890s as well as the ballads from the Blue Ridge, and his repertoire is more fully explored in the “Anglo-American Secular Folk Music” chapter.

  When Stoneman was twenty, he met his future wife, Hattie Frost—the daughter of Bill Frost, a fine fiddler and banjo player. Hattie, only twelve at the time, was courted by Ernest until she turned eighteen, and they married in 1918. Because Hattie sang, read music, and played the organ, banjo, and fiddle, she became Ernest’s musical partner as well. Her younger sister Irma Lee Frost, primarily a church organist, participated as a mandolinist, while her banjo-playing twin brother, Bolin, also joined the Stoneman family group. Many of the hymns the Stonemans recorded came from Irma Frost’s collection of shape note hymnals.

  While working as a carpenter in Bluefield, Virginia Stoneman went into a furniture store and heard a record of local musician Henry Whitter on a phonograph. Ernest, who had played with Whitter on occasion at country dances, was inspired to try and make commercial recordings as well. He wrote two phonograph companies—Columbia and OKeh–for which Whitter had done his recordings and received an invitation to audition. Stoneman made a harmonica rack and thought strumming his autoharp would make a different accompaniment for his singing. He took a job in nearby West Virginia to earn extra money and saved $47 for his trip. Arriving in New York City, he first auditioned for Columbia on September 1, 1924, but ultimately reached a deal with OKeh. For five years he made dozens of sides for Okeh, Edison, Gennett, and RCA Victor.