University Place

The Story of Country Music

– What we’ll be doing this evening is listening to artists, 13 of them, who were instrumental, major forces in the history of country music, and what better guide for those 13 samples than the man who literally wrote the book on country music, Country Music USA in 1968 and still going strong, that book and its various editions. And is also Professor of History Emeritus from Tulane University. He has a show, as you no doubt know, a country music show on radio station WORT, and perhaps above all, he’s also a practitioner of the art of country music. And a pleasure to see you again, Bill Malone. (audience clapping)

– Thank you. Thank you.

– Well let’s start in East Texas, where you started. And country music is something that’s not just an academic kind of latter-day construct for you, it’s something that comes right out of your bones, and you were even telling me about hollering earlier.

– Yeah, I always like to tell people that I was a fan of country music long before I became a student of it. And I grew up in a household that listened to the battery radio every morning.

We heard the hillbillies coming out of Dallas and Forth Worth and Tulsa, Shreveport, and locally. And before that, my mother sang the old songs. I don’t know where she got them, because she was singing the old-time songs before she ever had a radio. So I grew up in country music culture and I just was privileged to be able to write about the subject. When it came time to do a doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas, this was back in 1960 after I’d passed the prelim. I had no idea what I would write on, but most people I knew were writing on pretty dull subjects that they hated. (all laughing) But I sang all the time, and so my supervisor knew that I loved the music and that I knew a lot of songs, so one day on a trip to Houston to see a football game, just out of the blue he said, “You love this music so much, “why don’t you write a history of Nashville publishing?” That’s the way he phrased it, but of course I was delighted, because I didn’t know that anybody could write a doctoral dissertation on something they liked. (all laughing)

– It’s the first time I’ve heard of it.

– So that’s the way it happened. I expanded it well beyond publishing and wrote the entire history of the music, and it was published in 1968, and as you said it celebrated its 50th anniversary just last year.

– That’s

– Thank you. (audience clapping)

– Worthy of acclaim. Well now as we all know, it’s a big country, and a lot of the country is in the upper Midwest or the northwest part of the country or the northeast, but when we talk about country music, we’re talking about something else.

– Well it was stamped as a southern phenomenon when it began to develop commercially, and its most influential performers over the years have been people like Roy Acuff from Tennessee, Bob Wills from Texas, Hank Williams from Alabama and on and on. And these Southerners who made the first recordings and first radio broadcasts sort of stamped their image on the music, and it’s had that image ever since. Of course, the performers come from everywhere. And the audience is certainly worldwide, even when the music was first recorded in the 1920s, records were being sold in the British Isles, in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, so the music has always had a worldwide base.

– You were mentioning a little while ago, before we went on camera, about Africa and Jimmie Rodgers.

– Yeah, Jimmie Rodgers, as we’ll mention in a few minutes, was the first great commercial performer. He’s now called the Father of Country Music, because he was so influential in creating styles and inspiring other musicians.

But his records were made in the late 1920s by what was then called the Victor Talking Machine Company, later on RCA Victor. Those records were distributed around the world, even in Africa, and there was a group in Africa, the Kipsigis tribe in eastern Africa, who embraced his music and they sort of converted Jimmie Rodgers into a deity, half man, half deity. (audience laughs) They loved his yodeling. It was unlike anything they’d ever heard.

– I’ll bet it was.

– And many years later, anthropologists came through that part of the world and collected music from them, and one song they were doing was called “Chemirocha. ” (audience laughing) So the music, for one thing, it just sort of gave a romantic picture of America, a country that was based on rural roots and still clung to those roots as it developed into a superpower.

– Now before we get into our first artist that we’ll be sampling, how would you characterize country music?

– Well nowadays it’s hard to characterize, because it’s been so swallowed up by pop styles that what you hear is virtually indistinguishable, in my humble opinion. (audience laughing) The so-called country music today is really indistinguishable from other forms of pop rock. But in its beginnings, say from the early 1920s until, at least through the ’80s, the music still carried with it what I think was a distinct working-class edge.

When you heard the music, you thought that that performer, he knows what he’s talking about. He’s lived the life that he’s singing about, and that life was based on rural people who had moved to town, away from agriculture into blue collar work and then to industrial work, and they carried their music with them, and the music changed as they changed. And you could still call it country, although it was far from the rural sound that we’re going to hear in this first record.

– Well this first record, how many of you all have heard of the Skillet Lickers? (audience members clap sporadically) (laughs) Not even as many as I thought, but they were an important force in early country music.

– The Skillet Lickers, they were sort of a humorous self-deprecation of their culture. How many of you grew up sopping your biscuit in a pan of gravy (audience laughing) or your syrup, you sopped your syrup the same way? That’s where the Skillet Lickers got their name. But they were a group of country boys from North Georgia, and they played a brand of music that had existed in that part of the world since it was settled by people from Europe, and the music borrowed heavily from the African sources that lay around it. And they played for house parties. One thing I need to say to maybe set a context for this first record, because it kind of, we hear the music making a transition from its rural roots into something a little bit more sophisticated, something more urban. Country music is more recent than one might think.

As far as human history is concerned it only dates back to the 1920s, and even then it took a long time to really evolve into the big business entity that we know today. But it was, and ever since the word, it was a folk phenomenon made by rural people, working class people, who just made music for their own consumption, for their own enjoyment. They played at home, they played in church, they played in community places and had local audiences. I’m sure very few of them, up into the early 1920s, ever had any idea that this music could have a larger audience, that anybody anywhere else might listen to it. So, listen closely when we hear this record. This is a Skillet Lickers from around 1928, playing an old British song called “Soldier’s Joy” that dates from the mid-18th century. And at the very beginning, Clayton McMichen, one of the fiddlers, he says, he had a spoken introduction and he gives you this flavor of what it was like to make music for your neighbors, just in your own home, just by clearing out a space for dancers. So why don’t we take a listen to that now.

– “Soldier’s Joy.

“- [Clayton] Well folks, here we are again, the Skillet Lickers, red hot and raring to go.

Going to play you another little tune this morning. Want you to grab that gal and shake a foot and moan. Don’t you let ’em dance on your new carpet, you make ’em roll it up. (“Soldier’s Joy” by the Skillet Lickers) Chicken in a bread tray scratchin’ out dough Granny will your dog bite, no child no Ladies in the center and gents catch air Hold her Newt, don’t let her rare (audience clapping)

– I think we’re going to see some toe tapping tonight, Bill.

– Music like that was made all over North America, but particularly in southern communities, from the Atlantic coast all the way through East Texas.

– [Norman] And sometimes these were family acts.

– Yeah.

– Like with the

– like The Carter Family, The Monroe Brothers, just tradition that’s endured. The Ken Burns people play the song, which we’ll hear at the end of this segment, called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and they play that repeatedly to show that’s because the music is a family music. Not only that it unites the musicians with their audience, who have similar values, but the music created a tradition that was handed down from generation to generation, like Johnny Cash, for example, married June Carter, who was the daughter of Maybelle Carter, the trio that we’re going to hear in the next segment.

– What can you tell us about this song?

– As I said, these people who made this music were just local people, farmers, coal miners, textile workers, just regular folks. But the music they made came from everywhere. A good fiddler wasn’t concerned with where a song came from. He didn’t care, it could come from a operatic aria, or it could come from a minstrel show or a vaudeville show or a medicine show. It didn’t make any difference. Or from New York City’s Tin Pan Alley. If they liked the song, they would do it. They would make it their own. The Carter Family was made up of A. P.

Carter and his wife Sarah and their sister-in-law Maybelle, who lived in the little community of Maces Spring in southwestern Virginia. And they played just for the home folks, until one day in August 1927, a New York talent scout named Ralph Peer came to Bristol, Tennessee after having advertised that he was coming. So people came from all over the southern mountains to audition for Mr. Peer, hoping that they could record for the Victor Talking Machine Company. So in August 1927, the Carter Family made their first records. The one we’re going to hear was not in that very first session, that came a little bit later, but it was an old pop song, a pop song I think probably first introduced in New York City and then somehow it made its way out into the hinterlands and was taken over by rural people. It originally was known as “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets,” but the Carter Family called it the “Wildwood Flower. ” (“Wildwood Flower” by The Carter Family) Oh I’ll twine with my mingles and waving black hair With the roses so red and the lilies so fair And the myrtles so bright with the emerald dew The pail and the leader and eyes look like blue

– That song was composed by a fella from Wisconsin who died in Elkton, is it Elkhorn?

– Elkhorn.

– J. P. Webster, who wrote “In the Sweet By and By,” one of the most popular gospel songs. But that’s that style, that instrumental style we heard, was made by the guitar played by Maybelle. She played the melody with her thumb and then provided the rhythm with her fingers, and there was an autoharp played by Sarah in the background. But that Carter Family lick, as it was called, is still endures today, there’s still people who try to emulate it.

– Well of course a guitar, and to some extent, I guess, the autoharp too, mainstays of country music. But where’s the yodel come in? (audience laughing)

– Well there’s been all kinds of speculation. Just about every occupational group in America has some kind of yodel that distinguished them. We know about the Mexican grito, for example, the Cajun ah-ee, the cowboy yell, and my daddy as, I told you before the program started today, used to go out on the porch every morning when we lived in the country and just holler at the top of his voice.

– [Norman] Some nights are like that. (audience laughing)

– Yeah, just letting off steam, letting the world know that he was ready to go, you know.

And there are hollering contests in the South. There’s all kinds of them. But we like to think that the yodel may have come from some folk source like that, but I think it’s generally accepted that the yodel came from the Swiss. Professional Swiss entertainers came to the United States in the mid 19th century and toured throughout the nation and popularized the yodel, and young men began trying to emulate what they’d heard. Jimmie Rodgers, of course, is the person who really put it across.

– [Norman] The yodeling brakeman?

– That very same recording session in Bristol, Tennessee, August 1927, a young tubercular ex-railroad worker from Mississippi, he came down from Asheville, North Carolina, where he’d been living for a while, he auditioned for Ralph Peer, and he did a couple of songs. And Peer took the music back up to New York and began selling a few records, and then he brought Jimmie up to Camden, New Jersey, which was the headquarters of the Talking Machine Company, and then Jimmie began recording the songs that have endured. The one we’re going to hear gives you a good example of the influence that Jimmie Rodgers exerted. We’re going to hear a little bit of Dixieland jazz, we’re going to hear a Hawaiian guitar, we’re going to hear Jimmie’s Swiss-inspired yodel, and we’re going to the blues, which was very popular at that time and which influenced all white country musicians. And above all, we’re going to get a little glimpse of how important the railroad was to country musicians and to their fans.

The railroad just symbolized so many great things. It symbolized escape, for one thing, escape from farm drudgery and isolation of rural life.

– Yeah, just that freedom of travel around the country, free if you could get away with it.

– One reason why railroad songs have continued to be popular to this day. So why don’t we listen to “Waiting for a Train?”

– Jimmie Rodgers.

– 1928. (Jimmie imitates train whistle)

– Imitation train whistle. (slow jazz music) Here comes the jazz band. The Hawaiian guitar. All around the water tanks waiting for a train A thousand miles away from home Sleeping in the rain I walked up to a brakeman To give him a line of talk He says if you’ve got money I’ll see that you don’t walk I haven’t got a nickel Not a penny can I show Get off, get off, you railroad bum He slammed the boxcar door Yodel aiee, aiee, oh lay ee (slow jazz music) He brought all kinds of styles into the music, and he inspired his listeners.

And as late as the 1970s, with Merle Haggard, people were still imitating what Jimmie Rodgers had done many years before. I think he richly deserves that title of the Father of Country Music.

– Well, when we get to somebody like Bob Wills, now we start seeing cowboy hats come out instead of people just dressing up in their Sunday best.

– Yeah, these musicians, they didn’t know exactly what to call themselves or how to dress or how to behave. They were just, as I said, local working-class people who were trying to make it in show business, and eventually they hit up on the cowboy as the most respectable image they could utilize. Because everybody loves cowboys. And, you know, we’ve overcome the blemishes of the cowboy personality and emphasized only the freedom, the independence and the courage.

– And the working man.

– Yeah. So Bob Wills, as you mentioned, was a fiddler from central Texas.

He grew up in a family that had fiddlers on both sides of the family for many generations back. But in addition to the rural music, the rural hoedowns that he grew up with, he loved pop music. He particularly loved Bessie Smith. He loved any kind of jazz, any kind of blues he could hear, and so he created, along with some other folks, of course, not by himself, but with some other musicians, he created a music that was really right for dancing and he was popular all over the dance halls of Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma, particularly the oil areas of those states. And eventually, well after World War II, music began to refer to the this style of music that he had created as Western swing, because it grew up in the westernmost part of the South, and it eventually became even more popular in California with all the Okies who moved there right before and during World War II.

– Well you had, I guess by 1935 and these records were going to be broadcast nationwide by then. By 1935, you had the swing era starting with Benny Goodman and the big bands, but I gather Western swing actually gave the big bands a run for their money in the ’30s.

– They did. Yeah, during the Depression, that was one of the few places where a musician could find a job. Bob Wills was very popular working out of Tulsa, Oklahoma for the most part.

He played dances every night of the week. He made Columbia Records. He played over radio station KVOO in Tulsa. So a young man who loved jazz who wanted a job. He was happy to get a job with Bob Wills. And the one thing that made it possible, too, for these, not only the radio that exhibited their music everywhere, it was the fact that electricity was making an impact. Guitarists were beginning to experiment with electrification.

– Yeah, the Les Paul phenomenon.

– And so on this next record, we’re going to hear the recording that probably did more than any other to popularize the electric steel guitar, and of course that’s become central to country music, to its sound and to its whole image.

– [Norman] The “Steel Guitar Rag?”

– “Steel Guitar Rag.

“- [Bob] Look out, friends, here’s Leon, take it away, boys, take it away. (upbeat guitar music) Ah, everybody dance now. (upbeat guitar music) Ah, swinging, Mr. Leon, swinging. (upbeat guitar music) Ya! (upbeat guitar music) Ya! We got Al Strickland now (upbeat piano music)

– That’s very eclectic, isn’t it? (chuckles) There’s a lot of things going on there. That, I don’t know what to call it, exactly, that exuberant commentary from Bob Wills is kind of unique to him, isn’t it?

– Yeah, I think he may have gotten that from black music, you hear some of that in the earlier bands but he was the first country musician, as far as I know, who would shout out at his musicians, you know. Everything was improvised. When he wanted the trumpet player to take a break, he would point at him, and he better be ready. You better play something a little bit different than what you played before.

– Now, before these recordings were made for all this country music, it wasn’t quite so important to have a great voice or even necessarily to sing on key in some cases.

– I’m offended. (all laughing)

– But I gather occasionally there were performers who, without being really strong vocalists artistically speaking, still were very successful.

– You’re leading into Ernest Tubb, aren’t you?

– I kind of am, yeah. Rumor has it he was inclined to sing flat.

– Well Ernest Tubb himself, he was also from Texas, he often said that the reason that he was so popular is because when people heard him sing, they said, “I can do that. ” (all laughing) Right, ’cause I personally think if he was better than that self-deprecation, but he did have a distinctive voice, and I think that one reason why people like these voices, whether they sang on key or not, is because they just seemed to be real. They really reflected the working-class lives and people who were really singing about what they knew, what they believed in. Ernest Tubb is representative today of the honky-tonk tradition. In the 1930s, after the repeal of Prohibition, this music began to move into dance halls and barrooms all over America, and of course, obviously, the music had to change as it moved into this environment. A lot of the themes would change, you wouldn’t hear as many songs about mama and the church as you had in the past.

Not as many of the old sentimental love songs, but you’d hear songs about drinking and about dancing and about the experiences that real people had. And so, when we hear this record, we’ll hear sort of an embryonic version of the honky-tonk style as it, of course it became much more full-blown over the years, as all of the instruments became electrified, as drums were introduced and bass and all that sort of thing, but this is a nice little introduction to the incipient honky-tonk style.

– This be “Walking the Floor Over You?”

– “Walking the Floor Over You. ” (soft country music) You left me and you went away You said that you’d be back in just a day You’ve broken your promise and you’ve left me here alone I don’t why you did, dear, but I do know that you’re gone I’m walking the floor over you I can’t sleep a wink, that is true I’m hoping and I’m praying as my heart breaks right in two Walking the floor over you Ah, pick it out, Smitty (lively steel guitar) That was his ticket to the Grand Ole Opry.

– Ah, the Grand Ole Opry, and we haven’t talked about the Grand Ole Opry, but that was one of the real linchpins, wasn’t it? Of establishing a reputation for a country performer.

– Beginning about 1924, first in Chicago at WLS, and then in Nashville at WSM, 1925, and Atlanta, other places, radio stations began to have Saturday night variety shows which attempted to evoke the spirit of rural America back in the days when people met in community gatherings. And they called them barn dances or jamborees or shindigs, but by 1942, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville was already beginning to be the premier radio country show in America.

– There are also a fair number of brother acts when you get through the history of country music. The Louvin Brothers being some that added some instrumental sounds that I think were not so often heard before, if at all.

– I’ve always been partial to what’s called the brother duet sound.

I know that some, I guess growing up as brothers in the same family, pronouncing words the same way, maybe having similar vocal timbers, knowing each other so well, lent them a particular vocal blend that very few acts had. There are people like the Bolick brothers, known as The Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe brothers, Bill and Charlie, The Callahan Brothers, the Shelton Brothers, on and on and on. And we’re going to play two of the great brother acts of all time tonight. And some people think the Louvin Brothers, the real name for Loudermilk. They grew up in northern Alabama, and they began making their records right after World War II, and they had the great high tenor type of vocal sound, which is very appealing to many people. But one thing I also liked about them was their penchant for old-time songs at a time when the music was moving closer and closer to pop music, beginning to lose its rural distinctiveness, they clung to that sound and I loved it. We’re going to hear a song called “In the Pines,” which really shows what they could do.

– And this brings in the mandolin, too, right?

– Ira Louvin played the mandolin. Charlie Louvin played the guitar, and sometimes they would join the other instruments, but that was their basic instrumental sound. And this is an old song, been recorded many, many times.

And it’s been recorded long before the Louvin Brothers ever did it, but I think it really shows their sound very well, and I really, I love the lonesome sound of it. Back in the pines, where the sun never shines. And shiver when the cold wind blows. (“In the Pines”) In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines And you shiver when the cold wind blows Little girl, little girl, what have I done That’s made you treat me so You caused me to weep, you’ve caused me to moan You’ve caused me to leave my home In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines And you shiver when the cold wind blows Ooh hoo, ooh hoo, hoo, woo hoo Ooh hoo, woo ooh, ooh hoo (steel guitar and mandolin music)

– Fairly well-pronounced waltz rhythm to that one. You pretty much know what kind of dance you’re expected to dance to that if it’s on the jukebox someplace. And that was the Louvin Brothers. That act, like I suppose all brother acts, sooner or later, did break up, though.

– Well most of these brother groups made beautiful harmony when they sang, but they often fought like cats and dogs, you know. (Norman and audience laughing) Very few of them ever managed to go through an entire career without breaking up violently. That was true of the Louvins and true of the Monroes and a lot of other groups.

– Well speaking of the Monroes, that’s that other Bill whose name I’ve been avoiding saying all night, (laughs) lest we get confused. It would be tempting to think of bluegrass as something, again, that has this long history, unknown origins and all this, but in fact, Bill Monroe’s credited as inventing bluegrass.

– Yeah, there are not many musicians that you can point to and say they created particular style, but in his case, it was true. Didn’t do it by himself, again, but he made the most important ingredients to it.

– And still very much with us in a very distinctive style that of course requires a high level of musicianship, too.

– Yeah bluegrass is sometimes thought of as being a very sort of ancient style of music. Born in the Appalachians, which it wasn’t. It was born in many different places. But it didn’t really take a shape until a few years right after World War II. Bill Monroe had a band in his native state of Kentucky which he called The Blue Grass Boys.

It was named after his native state. And it was two words, blue and grass. But then over the years, as his records circulated and as he became well-known through the Grand Ole Opry performances, people began imitating what he did. They loved his sky-high tenor, the hard-driving sound of his band, the bluesy fiddling provided by Chubby Wise and that first band. So between say 1945 and 1947, enough people began to imitate that style and create bands of their own that people began to refer to the bluegrass style, but that was just one word. But the fella who did most to popularize it around the world was a young man from western North Carolina named Earl Scruggs.

– Earl Scruggs, yeah.

– He played the five-string banjo with three fingers, very syncopated style, and although other people had done it before, nobody’d ever introduced it to the public like he did. So I don’t think there’s any question, but in my opinion it was Bill Monroe with his overall band and Scruggs with the five-string banjo which made the bluegrass sound distinctive.

– And we’ll see the image of Bill Monroe on the left and his brother Charlie on the right, and of course they, as you said, were part of a brother act, but it got a lot bigger than that, and what would we like to hear from Bill Monroe and company?

– This song is called “It’s Mighty Dark to Travel.

” It has just about every ingredient that one finds in classic bluegrass music. But one thing, it’s done in a hard-driving style. The instruments take on their own solo passages, and that way it’s sort of like Dixieland jazz. You’ll hear the fiddle, Bill Monroe’s mandolin, and Earl Scruggs’ five-string banjo, and you’ll hear this high duet harmony that you heard with the Louvin Brothers and other brother acts, so they brought a lot of ingredients together. And there’s the lonesome imagery in the lyrics, too. “It’s Mighty Dark to Travel,” Bill Monroe. (upbeat bluegrass music) It’s mighty dark for me to travel For my sweetheart, she is gone The road is rough and filled with gravel But I must journey on and on Ah, it’s mighty dark to travel (upbeat bluegrass music) To me she was a little angel Sent down to me from God above ‘Cause on the day that I first met her Then I told her of my love It’s mighty dark for me to travel For my sweetheart, she is gone The road is rough and filled with gravel But I must journey on and on

– The thing about bluegrass is it’s a wonder none of the instruments catch fire. (all laughing)

– That’s one reason why it attracted a lot of young musicians, not only in this country but around the world. They loved the virtuosity of these musicians. ‘Cause some people loved the sort of old-timey mountain imagery you hear in the music, so I think it was those two things together.

But bluegrass really became a national phenomenon in the late 1950s when young musicians in places like Wisconsin and New York and New Jersey and California began trying their hand at the music, and now it’s all over the world.

– So there is one man who is, well, maybe a total of three, depending upon how you would count, credited with being the King of Country Music.

– Yeah, Roy Acuff was called the king for a long time. I think Dizzy Dean gave him that title.

– [Norman] Dizzy Dean of all people, okay.

– Dizzy was a baseball commentator for several years, and sometimes he’d burst out into the “Wabash Cannonball,” and he’d just, he’d always mention Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music. But other people, they of course would say Elvis Presley, all kinds of kings.

– [Norman] There’s lots of kings.

– But the one you’re referring to, I think, is Hank Williams

. – [Norman] I would think, yeah, mm-hmm.

– Hank came along right after World War II. He was a country boy from Alabama, worked in the shipyards for a while during the war, and then after the war was over, started singing in honky-tonks, blood buckets, they called them, all over southern Alabama. And one of the first independent songwriters, too, that had emerged. One of the first to write his own songs. And he had a very astute manager named Fred Rose who was a great songwriter on his own in Nashville. And Mr. Rose created a close relationship with Mitch Miller. You all remember Mitch, I imagine, on television?

– Mitch Miller gets a lot less credit than he should. He was actually an important figure in classical music before he followed the bouncing ball on television.

– Well Fred Rose would take some Hank Williams songs and songs from other country musicians, he would give them to Mitch Miller and Mitch would turn them over to Doris Day and Joanie Bennett and Guy Mitchell, and, Tony Bennett, that’s what I’m trying to think of.

– Tony Bennett, sure.

– And Tony recorded two or three Hank Williams songs, so what you see in Hank Williams, not only a man who could sing traditional country music probably better than anybody who’d ever sung it, but he created songs which appealed to pop singers, as well. So you begin to see what’s called the crossover phenomenon.

– Yeah, that’s something that I find fascinating, is the number of songs associated with a certain singer that were written by another singer that you wouldn’t associate with that song, and it seems to happen a lot. And I would never have put Tony Bennett and Hank Williams in the same universe, actually.

– Hank never, I don’t know that Hank would ever have made it as a pop singer. He’s just such a deep-dyed rural Alabama singer.

– [Norman] He had the twang, yeah.

– But he came up with lyrics that were widely appealing, and so country music really made a big jump forward commercially with his songs and songs that were imitated. And the one we’re going to hear came out right after he died.

He was found dead on January 1st, 1953. He had written this song at the end of 1952, but it didn’t really begin hitting the jukeboxes and the radio stations until shortly after he died.

– At the age of 29.

– 29 years old, the hillbilly Shakespeare. Here he is doing “Your Cheating Heart. ” (melancholy music) Your cheating heart will make you weep You’ll cry and cry and try to sleep But sleep won’t come the whole night through Your cheating heart will tell on you When tears come down like falling rain You’ll toss around and call my name You’ll walk the floor the way I do Your cheating heart will tell on you

– Far as I’m concerned, music could’ve stayed that way forever. (all laughing) (audience clapping)

– Now we come to another one of those brother acts that you mentioned, and well this will take us all the way up to about 1957 or so, I suppose. But these brothers, fantastic with the harmonies and I suspect, as you said earlier, Bill, that had something to do with the fact, of course, that they worked very closely together so they were in a musical family and raised performing music.

– Yeah, Phil and Don Everly. They grew up in a country music family.

Their daddy Ike Everly was a highly-respected finger style guitar player. He played a little bit like Maybelle Carter with his thumb and fingers. But the Everly Brothers themselves never played that style. They were attracted by African-American music, like so many country musicians were. They particularly were impressed by Bo Diddley. – [Norman] Bo Diddley!

– And you’ll hear a little Bo Diddley lick in the song that we’re going to hear. But in 1957, they had a chance for a recording contract with Cadence Records, owned by Archie Bleyer, and so they went to Nashville, they tried out several songs, and they took a song written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who were becoming the top songwriters in Nashville at the time, and nobody had any idea the import of that recording, because it introduced them to the world at large. It was “Bye Bye Love,” and they came, course at the right time, they came right in the beginning of the great youth revolution of American music that had been introduced by Elvis just a few years before. So there was an audience out there waiting for it. So you hear the country sound of the Everly Brothers.

It was a duet sound that they learned from older duet performers, but they added a sort of a uptempoed sparkling sound.

– And they crossed over beautifully, right. I mean pop and country both.

– Very much so, their first songs landed at the top of all the major charts of that time, country, rhythm and blues, and pop.

– [Norman] “Bye Bye Love. ” (uptempo country music) Bye bye love Bye bye happiness Hello loneliness I think I’m going to cry Bye bye love Bye bye sweet caress Hello emptiness I feel like I could die Bye bye my love, goodbye There goes my baby with someone new She sure looks happy, I sure am blue She was my baby ’til he stepped in Goodbye to romance that might have been Bye bye love Bye bye happiness Hello loneliness I think I’m going to (audience clapping)

– Now there was a British quartet that referred to themselves as the English Everly Brothers.

– [Bill] The Four Everlys, yeah.

– That’s right, the Four Everlys, and that song that we just heard, “Bye Bye Love” influenced “Please Please Me,” The Beatles.

– And people like Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and of course they tell the story too about Paul Simon. He heard “Bye Bye Love,” he was just about 14 years old, I think, in Queens, and he drove, not drove, but he took two or three buses, subways, all across the city to his favorite record store and found “Bye Bye Love,” took it back home, sat down, played it over and over and over again, and broke it.

(audience laughing) Got back on the bus, went back. (all laughing) Got another copy. So that’s really where it all began with him, so this was a worldwide phenomenon, too.

– We talked a little bit about image, and these performers kind of deciding whether they were going to be cowboys or something else, and you could have tremendous talent, I guess, and still not be quite sure what niche you were going to be in, and therefore what image you would project to

– You don’t know what the audience wants. You can never predict that.

– All of that. But you’d take a singer who had, for one thing, these phenomenal low notes. They just kind of make you shiver. Could have been a torch singer. Was a torch singer, as it turned out, eventually, but started out having her mother make her cowgirl skirts for her performances, and there was nobody like Patsy Cline.

– Yeah, born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia, and as a young aspiring country singer, she dressed like a cowgirl, and her managers had to fight pretty hard to get her to abandon that style. She didn’t really realize exactly what she had, as far as vocal talents were concerned. But she came along when there was beginning to be an urge for singers how could sing both country and pop. That was a reaction against rock and roll and against rockabilly. The Nashville music industry felt that, we’re not going to survive this, that young people are going to go in droves to other musicians, they’re not going to listen to these old fiddles and steel guitars and that traditional country sound. So people like Chet Atkins, a producer for RCA Victor, began trying to create a sound that would preserve the ambience of country music, but nevertheless have a sound that would appeal to a broad middle class audience. And of course that meant, in the beginning, doing away with the steel guitar and the fiddle, and bringing in background voices and vibes and just muted guitars, that sort of thing. And so he and some other producers created what we now call a country pop sound. It was incredibly commercial, but of course traditionalists like me were a little bit skeptical of what was happening. But Patsy Cline, I think, is the best example of that sound.

Maybe Jim Reeves, as a male singer, but Patsy, from the distaff side, she created a sound, you know, you can hear Patsy Cline’s records everywhere in America now. Go into a restaurant someplace, you’ll hear Patsy Cline in the background. And I guess most people don’t think of her as being country, but of course that’s what she thought she was.

– And popular with the Generation Xers and Yers, too.

– And she hit the big time with a lot of songs, but particularly with the one we’re going to hear, written by a out-of-work Texas singer named Willie Nelson.

– Hearing this, this

– This is “Crazy. ” (slow country music) Crazy I’m crazy for feeling so lonely I’m crazy Crazy for feeling so blue I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted And then someday You’d leave me for somebody new (audience clapping)

– Yeah.

– And another of those careers tragically short. She lived to be just 30 years old. You know, airplane crash in 1963.

Well on the other hand, there is a star still very much with us, with considerable longevity and a phenomenal number of songs written to her credit and performed, also very stable home life and a very shrewd businesswoman, too, apparently. Tell us about Dolly. (all laughing)

– Patsy Cline made it possible for singers like Dolly Parton to thrive. There’d been women performers from the very beginning of country music history, but Patsy was the first superstar who was able to make it on her own. She didn’t necessarily arrange her own music, but she was out there, her voice alone was enough for her to make it. But people like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton I think now saw that it was possible for women not only to compete but to actually excel in this music. Many things about Dolly Parton that I’ve always loved, but one thing is her songwriting ability. I think that’s often overlooked. She’s one of the best songwriters in any genre, I think.

– Started out writing songs for other performers and then decided to start singing them herself.

– And she’s funny, highly intelligent, and just a great singer. And the song we’re going to hear is a very nostalgic song about growing up very poor in the mountains of east Tennessee, in a large family that had to make do with what they had. And of course it’s about the same time as Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and Merle Haggard’s “Mama’s Hungry Eyes” and songs like that. So that’s always been a very important slice of country music history, the nostalgic songs about growing up poor and working class. But the song I’m referring to is “Coat of Many Colors. ” (slow country music) Back through the years I go wandering once again Back to the seasons of my youth I recall a box of rags that someone gave us And how my mama put the rags to use There were rags of many colors But every piece was small And I didn’t have coat And it was way down in the fall Mama sewed the rags together Sewing every piece with love She made my coat of many colors That I was so proud of As she sewed, she told a story From the Bible she had read About a coat of many colors Joseph wore and then she said Perhaps this coat will bring you Good luck and happiness And I just couldn’t wait to wear it And mama blessed it with a kiss My coat of many colors that my mama made for me Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be In my coat of many (audience clapping)

– It seems that the superstar age is upon us, and that we see these superstars sometimes then combining and doing some great duet work, and you’ve selected one that features a couple of those superstars.

– And I’m glad that we have people like them who are able to take the materials of the past, take the music of people that they had idolized growing up, like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, but do something new with it, something different. The music they performed is not a carbon copy of the past. It’s their own unique creations, their own adaptation, while using traditional themes. You’re referring to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.

– [Norman] “Don’t Let Your Babies. ”

– Yeah, and I chose this song because it shows the continuing appeal of the cowboy. Although cowboy this guys is not quite as respectful as the old one.

– [Norman] This is a warning.

– Yeah, the cowboy that’s just a little bit apart from conventional society.

– Little bit of the outlaw, yeah.

– Good advice, your mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. (slow country music) Cowboys ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold They’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levi’s And each night begins a new day If you don’t understand him and he don’t die young He’ll probably just ride away Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys Don’t let ’em pick guitars or drive them old trucks Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys ‘Cause they never stay home and they’re always alone Even with someone they love

– Well we mentioned early on this great song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and it’s appeared in many guises over the course of time. It was actually I think quite an old English hymn from turn of the 20th century.

– It was based on an American hymn from around the 1890s.

There’s a song called “Will the Circle be Unbroken” has the same chorus but with verses, lyrics that are very different from the one we’re going to hear tonight.

– And we have chosen a group that’s not right away, I think by most people, thought of as a country group, but certainly, again, crossed over.

– Yeah I thought this would be an appropriate song to end with, one thing because it’s a gospel song, which we haven’t had yet. And the gospel tradition has run through this music from the very beginning. It’s always been a very symbiotic relationship between gospel music and secular country music. And the Ken Burns people used this song repeatedly. I’m not supposed to say what all happens in the film, but that is one thing that you can look for. You’ll hear “Will the Circle Be Unbroken. ” And that’s to illustrate their theme that this music has spun relationships that have endured over the generations. But between musicians and their fans and between musicians and later generations of musicians, have carried on the tradition.

And the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were one of the first outside groups, I guess you could call ’em a rock group, who seized upon country music and performed it and introduced it to another generation. So one reason why country music has survived and it’s endured, it’s got a bigger audience because of people like Graham Parsons and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. So they did this, I think about 1976, they brought into the studio people like Merle Travis and Roy Acuff and Earl Scruggs, and all the old-timers they could find, and they performed this song called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken. ” (upbeat country music) I was standing by my window On one cold and cloudy day When I saw the hearse come rolling For to carry my mother away Will the circle be unbroken By and by Lord, by and by There’s a better home a-waiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky

– Well Bill, it’s been a great pleasure.

– Thank you, as always. (audience clapping)

– Thank you all.

– I thank everybody for spending an evening with us. Thank you.