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But back to Carson we go, if only for a moment. Before he began to get famous he would play wherever he could turn a buck - square dances, political gatherings, even KKK meetings - but after his performances on WSB he was suddenly in great demand, and travelled the south playing theatres and dances and anywhere they wanted him. He remarked once that his “wife thinks she’s a widow most of the time, because I stay away so much! Radio made me!”

Sure, that may have been true, as far as it went, but if radio made him, it would take another medium to break him commercially and open up doors to him that radio just could not. And one man controlled that medium in the south.


Ralph Peer (1892 - 1960)

It’s perhaps appropriate that the man who could quite easily be called, if not the father of country music then certainly the father of country music records, should be born in a town called Independence, Missouri. After working for Columbia Records in Kansas City for several years he moved to Okeh Records, who were responsible for the “race records” just mentioned. He almost immediately found, signed and recorded Mamie Smith singing “Crazy Blues”, the first blues record aimed at a black audience. He then pioneered field recording, taking recording equipment into the south, into Georgia in 1923, searching for more black music and musicians to feature on the race records series, capturing performances from artists in places as diverse as hotel rooms and bars to their own homes.

Somewhat disappointed at the number of black artists he could find in Atlanta, he was prevailed upon to visit WSB, where he was advised to record Fiddlin’ John Carson. Dubious, he wondered if there even existed a market for “old time music”; he remembered the Victor Talking Machine Company, the biggest record label in the USA, having recorded Eck Robertson a few years earlier, and how poorly those records had sold. Perhaps the appetite just was not there. Or perhaps the right artist had yet to be discovered. When Fiddlin’ John’s record, the aforementioned “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”, sold out, he realised he had been right to take the chance, and immediately began advertising for and searching for other artists who could play what he called “old time music” or “hill country music”. He now saw that there was a market for, let’s be honest here, white racist music: southern whites who wanted to remember what for them were the “good old days”, back to a simpler time, gentler folks yadda yadda you know how it goes.

This was, on the face of it, and compared to the other more high-brow music of opera and jazz and classical, simple music for simple folks. The melodies were basic, the words spoke to them of their own experiences, they identified with it. It was the music of the ordinary man, the music of the working man, and they understood it readily. It was the sort of music they sung in barn dances and pubs and in their houses, but now it was being recorded and they could buy it. Many of the old ballads brought over from the British Isles had to be rewritten for an American audience, but mostly that was just a case of changing the lyrics, and the music would remain the same. So it was familiar, but slightly altered so they could identify with it, sing along with it and enjoy it all the more.

And it was theirs.

Ignoring or setting to one side for the moment the obvious horribly racist mindset of the white Appalachians, this was music they had grown up with and to be fair, they had little. This was part of their identity, songs that had been passed down from father to son for generations, usually only by the oral tradition, because, despite the nasty supercilious tone of that newspaper article, it was correct in that most of the mountain folk could not read or write. So it was important to get this music before it was lost, and Peer set out to make field recordings of it, and money from it, of course. Add to this hymns and gospel music sung in Church on Sundays and you had a recipe for whites-only, family-friendly, good, honest, moral, American music.

Of course, in reality it was far from theirs. As described earlier, the very tunes that came out of the Appalachians were inspired by and improved on by African American musicians with their banjos, guitars and other instruments, their tribal chants and their stories, their rhythms… I mean, leave it to the white mountain folk and you’d have had nothing but fiddle accompaniment to old Irish, English and Scottish ballads, and that was hardly going to start a whole new movement. But the contribution of the black community to the burgeoning behemoth that would become country music has been mostly ignored and even denied by racist white performers, who can’t bear the thought that they are making money off the backs of former slaves and non-whites. Their denial does not make it any less true though, and in recent years several authoritative sources have tried to redress this terrible wrong.

But I digress.

Peer realised that he had an untapped goldmine here, and in 1927 he “discovered” Jimmie Rodgers and then The Carter Family, recording both. Many experts have pointed to this as the real moment of the birth of country music, but whether or not that is true, it’s certainly the case that this was the beginning of an explosion of talent coming out from almost literally the woodwork, artists found in cabins and farms and hotels and at dances, all to be recorded by Peer and his label, his payment to be a share of one cent per side of a record for each of his artists in royalties, which he would divide between himself and the artist. This had never been done before, and shows the business acumen of the young executive, who now set the pace for how artists would be paid.

G.B Grayson (1887 - 1930)

Another fiddler, and another blind man at that, Grayson would go on to be instrumental (sorry) in the creation of bluegrass and country music in general. Born in South Carolina, he moved with his family to Tennessee when he was two years old and remained there all his life. Unable to gain any sort of employment thanks to his disability, Grayson took to playing his fiddle to anyone who would listen and throw him a few coins, and travelled with banjo player Clarence Ashley to play at the West Virginian coal mines. In 1927 he met guitarist Henry Whitter and the two recorded albums which sold so well that Grayson was able to buy himself a house. Sadly, he did not have long to enjoy it as he was killed the following year in a traffic accident.

Henry Whitter (1892 - 1941)

A native of Virginia, it will at this point come as no surprise to hear he learned music at an early age, and took to the guitar as his first love, though later he moved on to fiddle, banjo, piano and harmonica. He was one of the new artists picked up by Ralph Peer in 1923 to record his music, and his “Wreck of the Old Southern ‘97” became a hit, though technically in the hands of another man, Vernon Dalhart, under whom it became the first million-selling country music record. He is said not to have been a virtuoso like Carson and others, but got steady work recording and laid down some country standards. As noted above, he met fiddler G.B Grayson in 1927 and began recording with him, but after Grayson’s untimely death in 1930 Whitter never recorded again. He died in 1941 of diabetes.


Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882 - 1973)

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone who began their life as a musician, went into law and then back into music, but this guy did. Born in North Carolina he played fiddle and banjo when young, then studied for a law degree in an attempt, partially at least it seems, to dispel and disprove the popular myth that all “hill folk” were illiterate and stupid. He succeeded, as he became famous as “The Minstrel of the Appalachians”, sticking very much to his family values ideals, avoiding coarse or objectionable songs and playing mostly spiritual and gospel music and ballads. Like Fiddlin’ John Carson, he used what were called at the time “negro spirituals” - music created by African Americans using their own native rhythms and their experiences of slavery (which you would have to think would certainly be frowned upon today as a form of cultural appropriation, but not then) not, it would seem, with any intention of calling to account the evils of slavery, but merely to sing about it and make no judgement.

He organised and played in the very first Mountain Dance Folk Festival, and continued to play in it every year up until his death, as well as setting up the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Minstrel of Appalachia Festival, which is still going. Like Carson, a celebrity of his day, he got involved with politics and was even invited to the White House by FDR in 1939 and performed for the then English king, George VI. He died in 1973, having suffered a stroke eight years previous.


The Carter Family

Without question one of the “founding parents” of country music, The Carter Family were a trio, an actual family and were another of the greats - perhaps one of the greatest - acts brought to the notice of the public through the recording sessions held by Ralph Peer in Bristol, Tennessee. 1927 seems to have been Year One for country music; it was the year most of the artists those who know and play country are familiar with came to the fore, and the birthing pangs of the genre began to kick in. An interesting aside about the Carter Family is that their bandleader, A.P. Carter, lived in one of the most desperately poor regions of Virginia, appropriately called Poor Valley, and he found his wife, Sara, in the much more affluent Rich Valley. She transitioned with him, having married him, from Rich to Poor, literally, and life was hard on their farm.

When Ralph Peer advertised in Bristol for acts to record for him, A.P. cadged a loan of his brother’s car to make the trip, promising to weed his corn field in return. After a long trip the Carters arrived in Bristol, complete with sister-in-law Maybelle, heavily pregnant. They immediately impressed Peer, and recorded four songs for him, heading back home the next day after recording another two songs, the family forgot all about the sessions, returning to their farming life. Within three years they had sold over 300,000 records, and were able to leave their poor life behind. A.P. began travelling through the region, collecting old songs he could record, and as noted above in the section concerning him, he hooked up with Lesley Riddle in this venture.

Popular all through the south during the 1930s and 1940s, the Carter Family performed on radio stations in Texas and North Carolina, and as more children were added to the family they would take part in the performances, though never on record. However the touring schedule began to wear on Sara, to say nothing of the fact that her husband was a selfish prick who would leave her alone for weeks on end looking after the farm and the children, while he sold trees, and in 1936 she divorced him and married his cousin. They moved out to California, and in 1944 the band broke up.

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Slavery: Ain’t No Big Thing - The Genesis of White Supremacy in Country Music

I mentioned earlier that the first real hit country song was one of racism, and I want to now take a closer look at it. It’s, you’ll be not at all surprised to hear, our old racist friend Fiddlin’ John Carson who made it famous, though to be fair to him, it wasn’t him who wrote it. It was though, of course, a white man. Originally penned in 1871 by a man with, I’m sorry to say, the name of one of history’s greatest writers, it’s not quite a celebration of slavery as such, but it does certainly afford it a non-committal shrug and a wry smile, as if to say “Sure, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”

William Shakespeare Hays (1837 - 1907)

I suppose his family had high hopes for him as a writer, saddling him with such a portentous name, and he realised those parental ambitions, becoming a poet and lyricist and writing over 300 songs, selling more than 20 million copies of his works. Oh right, I see the middle name was an affectation, given to him by his contemporaries due to his prolific writing and adopted by him into his name. Well. At any rate, his greatest claim to fame was his contention that he wrote the famous rebel song “Dixie”, but this could never be corroborated, and he died with the issue still under debate. For our purposes here though, he’s remembered as being the author of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”, which Carson recorded many years - almost ninety, in fact - later and made famous as the world’s first ever country hit.

Although as I say it had been around for almost a century before Carson got his bigoted hands on it, and Ralph Peer made it one of the biggest-selling records of the time, it’s pretty shocking to see how its white - and southern of course; Hays was born in Kentucky - author makes not only light of slavery but has his protagonist, the old slave, yearn for the old days and look back fondly on his enslavement. The lyric goes

Oh I'm gettin' old and feeble and I cannot work no more
The children no more gather 'round my door
And old masters and old mrs they are sleepin' side by side
Near da little old log cabin in da lane

Oh the chimney's fallen down and the roof's all caved in
Lettin' in the sunshine and the rain
And the only friend I've got now is that good old dog of mine
And the little old log cabin in the lane

Oh the trees have all growed up that lead around the hill
The fences have all gone to decay
And the creeks have all dried up where we used to go to mill
And things have changed of course in another ways

Oh I ain't got long to stay here what little time I've got
I want to rest content while I remain
'Til death shall call this dog and me to find a better home
And leave th' little old log cabin in the lane

And I guess that’s all you need to know about that song, and by extension, the soon-to-be-rigid grip of white artists on country music, as the contribution made by black artists was swept under the rug and became something we never talk about. There’s a very valid reason why there are few if any black country artists today, and why the obituary recently of Charley Pride made such a big deal of his being one of the few. White folks didn’t want black folks in their music, the music they had claimed as theirs, and as the lyrics began to take on, in many songs, harshly racist overtones, the coloured folks turned to blues and soul and jazz, and left whitey to it.

But it must, or should be a source of everlasting shame that music which was built on the backs of African Americans, both slaves and free people, would start on such a deeply racist footing, a stance from which it would never really shift. Which is, I hasten to point out before someone berates me on it, not to say that all country music was or is racist. But it certainly cannot be denied that it very quickly became, and remains to this day, as white as soul is black. And all started by a man who should have known better, or at least been better. While country definitely has a lot to be proud of, it’s one of the few music genres that also has good reason to be deeply ashamed of parts of its history, and it’s no surprise that, while it’s popular all over the world, it’s most popular with the “good ole boys” and the kind of men who remember, or whose fathers remember fondly hunting men through forests and when lampposts had a secondary use that had nothing to do with light, and everything to do with darkness.

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Clarence Ashley (1895 - 1967)

Born in the town that would later become the locus for the explosion of country music, Bristol, TN., Ashley was brought up by his mother and grandfather - his father having been forced to leave town after cheating on his wife and being caught out - and learned the banjo from age eight, being taught the local Appalachian folk ballads by his mother and aunts, and from listening to lumberjacks and railroad men who would lodge in the boarding house his grandfather ran. Like many musicians of his time he would often play in “blackface” - white men covering their faces in black boot polish to make them look as if they were negros - and took part in travelling medicine shows. As already mentioned, he and G.B. Grayson would walk to the mines in Virginia to entertain the workers there and earn a few coins.

Discovered by Ralph Peer (though he had made previous recordings for another record company) Ashley played with various bands, and then solo, up to the time of the Great Depression, when mostly recording of artists stopped as the money to buy records - and to make them - ran out, and Ashley was forced to join those miners he and Grayson had once played for, working in the West Virginia coal mines to make ends meet. Later, he founded a trucking company and then got into comedy.

He was the first musician to record the old ballad “House of the Rising Sun”, which his grandfather taught him, and which of course became a massive hit for The Animals in the 1960s. He also helped popularise the spiritual hymn “Amazing Grace”, now one of the most covered and loved songs in music. Another victim of the Big C, he died in 1967.

Dock Boggs (1898 - 1971)

In an interesting quirk of fate, Moran Lee “Dock” Boggs was born and died on the same day, February 7. Not sure I’ve heard of anyone else with that distinction. His father was, if not unique then certainly in the minority of musicians of the time who could read sheet music, and he taught his children to play banjo and sing. Boggs used a lot of African-American influences in his own playing, listening to bands and in particular following one guitarist up and down the railroad tracks, a man called Go Lightning. In 1927 he tried out for an audition for a record company (not Peer’s this time) and was so nervous that he had to have whisky to calm his nerves. He didn’t own a banjo so had to borrow one from a local music store, but he got the contract.

His fame began to spread, and he was in demand for gatherings of all kinds, dances, mining camps, parties and so on. His wife, however, was a devoutly religious woman and hated the secular music he played (though he also learned and played spiritual songs and hymns from his brother-in-law, a preacher) and in general he was looked down upon by his community as being someone who played “sinful” music. His big chance came in 1930 when he was offered a live audition on WSB by Okeh Records, but stage fright destroyed his performance and he eventually pawned his banjo, vowing never to play music again. His wife must have been delighted.

He did however play again, being sought out by Mike Seeger in 1963 and eventually recorded three albums during the folk revival of the sixties, and travelled throughout the US, at one point playing before 10,000 people at the Newport Folk Festival. Bad health, though, had dogged him and his newfound fame did not last, death claiming him in 1971. A remembrance festival was set up in his name, still going on today.


Wade Ward (1892 - 1971)

Another native of Independence - though this time in Virginia - Ward played banjo and was renowned for his style of clawhammer playing. He learned to play the banjo at eleven years of age, and the fiddle at sixteen, and with his brother David Crockett (seriously? Davy Crockett?) Ward, he played local dances and festivities until in 1919 he joined the Buck Mountain Band, with Van and Earl Edwards. He recorded twice for the Okeh label, once, solo, in 1925 and once with his band in 1929. He later hooked up again with his brother in a new band, The Ballard Branch Bogtrotters, and though they won prizes at fiddlers’ conventions and were recorded by the Lomax folklorists for the Library of Congress, Ward’s band does not seem to have had any hit records and he lived his life on his farm in Independence, music merely providing extra financial support for him.

He was another whom Mike Seeger sought out during the folk revival of the sixties, and who came to more prominent public notice thanks to recordings made by Seeger and Eric Davidson, and even made the trip to the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife in Washington D.C., at Seeger’s invitation to play. Unlike some of his contemporaries such as Fiddlin’ John Carson and A.P. Carter, he did not enjoy travel and stayed within his home county. He died, as he had lived, on his farm at the age of 79.

Tommy Jarrell (1901 - 1985)

A man who had a profound influence on old-time music, Thomas Jefferson (come on, now!) Jarrell played fiddle and banjo, having come from a musical family in the Round Peak district of Surry, North Carolina. He was famous for his innovations, such as sliding along the fingerboard in what is apparently called “ornamentation”, and the complex rhythms he created. He received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage in 1982, this considered the highest honour given by the government for folk and traditional arts. He later hosted young musicians at his home, and his first fiddle is on display at the Smithsonian. Two documentaries were made about him, and an annual festival, started in 2002, is held every year in his honour in his hometown.

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STOP THEM PRESSES, Y'HEAR?
Yes, it's technically old news, but I only found out a few days ago that one of my favourite icons of country music had passed away, and so, as I did mention at the beginning I would be exploring various artists, and as I now wish to write a lengthy tribute to the woman who first provided an open gate into country music through which I could walk and look around and explore, I will be stepping away from the history timeline in the coming weeks, to concentrate on her story.

Nanci Griffith (1953 - 2021)

I'll be reviewing her entire discography, finding out all I can about her and giving the best and most complete picture of a woman who, while perhaps not perceived as being at the same level as legends such as Dolly Parton and Crystal Gayle, nevertheless was a huge star in the scene, lived her life for music and helped, perhaps, in some small way, to nudge it back towards its folk-based roots.

This will not be something I'll be rushing, as to do so would, I believe, do a disservice to this quiet star of the country firmament, but once I have enough written I will begin posting it. When I do, they will be consecutive posts, as I don't want to break this up, so for a while the history will be placed on the back burner, but we will of course get back to it. I just feel that I need to do this right, I need to do it now, and I need to do it in a way which for me allows me to pay my proper respects to a woman who gave over thirty years to country music, and left it, I feel, better before she departed.


For now, we return you to your regular programme, already in progress.

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