The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Pecknold, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822340801 ISBN 13: 9780822340805

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Few expressions of popular culture have been shaped as profoundly by the relationship between commercialism and authenticity as country music has. While its apparent realism, sincerity, and frank depictions of everyday life are country’s most obvious stylistic hallmarks, Diane Pecknold demonstrates that commercialism has been just as powerful a cultural narrative in its development. Listeners have long been deeply invested in the “business side” of country. When fans complained in the mid-1950s about elite control of the mass media, or when they expressed their gratitude that the Country Music Hall of Fame served as a physical symbol of the industry’s power, they engaged directly with the commercial apparatus surrounding country music, not with particular songs or stars. In The Selling Sound, Pecknold explores how country music’s commercialism, widely acknowledged but largely unexamined, has affected the way it is produced, the way it is received by fans and critics, and the way it is valued within the American cultural hierarchy.

Pecknold draws on sources as diverse as radio advertising journals, fan magazines, Hollywood films, and interviews with industry insiders. Her sweeping social history encompasses the genre’s early days as an adjunct of radio advertising in the 1920s, the friction between Billboard and more genre-oriented trade papers over generating the rankings that shaped radio play lists, the establishment of the Country Music Association, and the influence of rock ‘n’ roll on the trend toward single-genre radio stations. Tracing the rise of a large and influential network of country fan clubs, Pecknold highlights the significant promotional responsibilities assumed by club organizers until the early 1970s, when many of their tasks were taken over by professional publicists.

About this title

About the Author

Diane Pecknold is a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar in the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society at the University of Louisville. She is a coeditor of A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music.

From the Back Cover

"Any intelligent reader will enjoy "The Selling Sound." Tackling an element of country music that few other writers have addressed, Diane Pecknold redefines the relationship between the 'financial economy' and 'cultural economy.'"--David Sanjek, coauthor of "Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Selling Sound

THE RISE OF THE COUNTRY MUSIC INDUSTRYBy Diane Pecknold

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4080-5

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Commercialism as a Cultural Text................................................................................11 Commercialism and the Cultural Value of Country Music, 1920-1947............................................................132 Country Music Becomes Mass Culture, 1940-1958...............................................................................533 Country Audiences and the Politics of Mass Culture, 1947-1960...............................................................954 Masses to Classes: The Country Music Association and the Development of Country Format Radio, 1958-1972.....................1335 Commercialism and Tradition, 1958-1970......................................................................................1686 Silent Majorities: The Country Audience as Commodity, Constituency, and Metaphor, 1961-1975.................................200Conclusion: Money Music.......................................................................................................236Notes.........................................................................................................................245Selective Bibliography........................................................................................................273Index.........................................................................................................................287

Chapter One

Commercialism and the Cultural Value of Country Music, 1920-1947

On Saturday nights during the 1920s, thousands of listeners turned on their radio sets to be "hypnotized by the yellow eye of the dial." The technology of broadcasting seemed almost disquieting in its novelty-one fanzine later referred to "the days when hillbilly radio entertaining was just a futuristic dream." As they peered at their sets, listeners could imagine that "the delicate mechanism of the radio ... caught and brought to the ears of us earth dwellers the noises that roar in the space between the worlds." Like the airplanes she sometimes saw fly overhead as she worked the cotton fields, radio was an emissary of the wider world to Florence Ward Ausburn. The daughter of Georgia sharecroppers, Ausburn marveled at her landlord's battery-operated radio and the changes it augured, even though the music she heard every Saturday night when he tuned in the Grand Ole Opry for his tenants was reassuringly familiar. The old-time fiddlers, ancient ballads, and well-worn popular tunes she enjoyed were wrapped in a veneer of unmistakable modernity, delivered from the ether amid the advertising messages of a new consumer order that was reshaping the countryside.

Given country music's association with rusticity and nostalgia, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that its earliest audiences and critics approached the genre through a veil of modernity and commercialism. Early hillbilly traded on the emotional associations, visual imagery, and performance styles of the past, but its structural connections to new technologies and to the early-twentieth-century extension of consumer capitalism into the hinterland positioned it as an exponent of the contemporary world and complicated, maybe even necessitated, its pretensions to simplicity and timelessness. Commercial hillbilly music was embraced as a marketing vehicle by the emerging broadcast advertising industry, rejected as a cynical corruption of tradition by folklorists and preservationists, cited as an example of the deleterious potential of mass media by radio reformers, and rebuffed as a cultural irritant that symbolized the problematic nature of Southern migrants in the minds of established residents of the urban north and west. Paradoxically, in spite of being patently pastoral, hillbilly music often represented unsettling forces of technological, industrial, and class change between 1920 and 1940. Indeed, the specific forms hillbilly's invented authenticity assumed -traditional, rough-hewn, rural-constituted a mirror image of the discourses about modernity that some anxious outsiders imposed on it-a glossy, cheap confection of modern radio; a harbinger of culture's subservience to commerce in a mass media regime; and a product of the disruptions of urban migration.

Richard Peterson and others have shown that hillbilly was enmeshed in conspicuously modern commercial relationships-in new conceptions of intellectual property expressed in copyright law and in the growing cash nexus that made farmers new consumers to the life insurance industry-but fewer chroniclers of the genre's history have recognized that contemporary observers, no less than current scholars, perceived it that way. In contrast to its aesthetic, hillbilly's economic position represented the confluence of technological advances and the maturing power of commercial culture, and critics and fans responded to it as they responded to the possibilities of industrial mass consumerism itself, with a mixture of fascination, unease, and excitement. Those responses, which were often meant to guard or extend specific economic and social privileges, helped to determine hillbilly's cultural and class meaning. Listeners, critics, and entrepreneurs all made sense of the new genre and fixed its cultural significance as much through their understandings of its commercialism as through their readings of its visual and musical substance.

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE HILLBILLY BUSINESS

Hillbilly music was above all a creature of radio. Although the earliest indications of the genre's commercial potential were the recordings of artists like Vernon Dalhart, it was broadcasting rather than publishing or recording that provided the lasting foundation for the country music industry. From the mid-1920s through the end of the Depression, radio remained the cornerstone of the hillbilly economy. Few performers survived on the wages they earned from the stations, and fewer still from the royalties generated by publishing or record sales, but a radio show served as a means of advertising the products that did support artists: the live shows that were the mainstay of every hillbilly musician's livelihood, the photographs and self-published song folios that they sold by direct inquiry, and, less importantly, the recordings marketed by the music industry.

The first barn dance show, an hour-and-a-half program of square dance and fiddle music, was broadcast over WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1923. In those early days of radio, the station's signal could be heard as far away as Haiti, so there is some possibility that the WBAP square dances served as a model for the barn dance format. More likely, though, is the explanation offered by Edgar L. Bill, station manager for the Sears-Roebuck station in Chicago, which in 1924 inaugurated the most important and oft-replicated model for the hillbilly barn dance, the WLS National Barn Dance. According to Bill, the station's programmers, like most of their peers in the fledgling industry, "would try anything once," broadcasting classical music, dance bands, choral music, and whatever else could be arranged. Bill's later account attributed the decision to broadcast a fiddler and a square-dance caller one Saturday night to a spirit of reasoned experimentation. "When it came to Saturday night," he said, "it was quite natural to book old-time music, including old-time fiddling, banjo and guitar music and cowboy songs. We leaned toward the homey, old-time familiar tunes because we were a farm station."

As Bill's description of his programming aims suggest, what is now called country music was not constituted as a single recognizable genre during these years. Variously designating it as hillbilly, old-time music, folk, or in one particularly loquacious formulation, "mountain, barn and hillbilly music," programmers, audiences, and the press were likely to lump it together with other "light" music, ethnic fare, and hymns until the mid-1940s. The elasticity of the radio barn dance encouraged this conjoining of diverse styles. The typical barn dance was a stylized rendition of the tradition of old-fashioned "country 'sociables,'" consisting of a series of musical and comedy selections introduced by a master of ceremonies who was also frequently the advertisers' spokesman. Comedians and musicians alike developed theatrical stock characters that drew on a variety of rural and regional stereotypes. These personalities were usually designed to accord with the act's specialized performance style: Victorian ladies and small-town sweethearts sang old-time sentimental pop, string bands and rube comedians wore overalls and toted jugs, and clean-scrubbed mountain balladeers reaffirmed valued folkways. The characters, and frequently the personnel as well, came straight from the vaudeville stage. Even the Grand Ole Opry, the most emphatically hillbilly of the major barn dances, started out with an astonishingly diverse assortment of music that included jazz, Dixieland, string bands, military bands, and gospel and barbershop quartets along with old popular standards. Well into the 1930s, the show featured vaudeville performers passing through Nashville and pop-influenced stars like the vocal harmony trio the Vagabonds.

Once developed, the form of the barn dance remained relatively constant, though its content and imagery underwent significant change. This continuity was due in large part to the regular exchange of musical and managerial personnel from station to station. In the Midwest and South, the diffusion of staff from the WLS National Barn Dance to a number of smaller regional shows is easily traced. The most important spinoff of the National Barn Dance, the Grand Ole Opry, was created by George D. Hay, who had developed his "Solemn Old Judge" character at WLS before moving to WSM in 1926. Lowell Blanchard and Richard Westergaard, creators of Knoxville's WNOX Midday Merry Go-Round and Tennessee Barn Dance, had previously worked together in Des Moines, home of WHO'S Iowa Barn Dance Frolic, which had been founded by Joe Maland, a former WLS programmer. By the late 1930s, Cincinnati's WLW aired two major barn dance shows in addition to a host of less-well-known hillbilly offerings. John Lair, who had enjoyed many years of success as a performer on the National Barn Dance, started his own show, the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, in 1937. The following year the Boone County Jamboree, produced by the former WLS program manager George Biggar and the WLS talent bureau agent Bill McKluskey, went on the air.

Though the structure was formulaic, the barn dance allowed for a great deal of regional diversity. As the shows proliferated in the 1930s, originality within the standard format became an important commodity for sponsors. When John Lair left WLS to create the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, he and his advertising representative, Freeman Keyes, shared a concern for establishing an "individuality that will satisfy the sponsor" and strove to lend the show "a different atmosphere" that would "still keep it in the barn loft." As a result, Lair emphasized rural humor, folk traditionalism, and old-time songs to a greater degree than many contemporaries, though he still made room for more current pop numbers. WNOX in Knoxville also developed a signature style within the constraints of the barn dance formula. In addition to the standard fiddle tunes and rube comedy routines, WNOX broadcasts featured a more polished, country-jazz sound rendered by the Stringdusters and the Dixieland Swingsters, whose personnel included the comedy duo Homer and Jethro and the guitarist Chet Atkins. Regional variation, rooted in the various folk forms from which hillbilly developed and fostered under the umbrella of the barn dance format, persisted for decades and strongly shaped the listening preferences of audiences. One Southern California deejay later commented that, even into the 1950s, he could easily identify where the listeners making song requests came from by the artists and styles requested.

One of the most important features of the barn dance, and other hillbilly radio, was its close association, both institutionally and stylistically, with the advent of broadcast advertising. Indeed, in spite of several years of strong record sales in the 1920s, hillbilly can reasonably be interpreted more as an adjunct of radio broadcast advertising than as a part of the music industry until after World War II. Barn dance shows (and all other forms of hillbilly broadcasting) originated almost exclusively at independent stations or those, like WLS and WSM, which continued to produce their own programming even after affiliating with the networks. Most independents were small stations with low signal strength, but several had nearly national coverage. WNAX in Yankton, South Dakota, went on the air with a fiddle contest in 1927 and received 8,700 telegrams from all over the forty-eight states. More notorious was KFKB in Milford, Kansas, whose owner, chief sponsor, and greatest spokesman, Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, used the station to promote his line of goat-gland extracts. Between Dr. Brinkley's helpful diagnoses, the station aired a steady stream of evangelical shows, fiddle music, and cowboy singers.

The music's over-representation on independents was complemented by its under-representation on the urban network stations that set the standard for genteel broadcasting. NBC's programming statistics for the years 1927 to 1932 show that hillbilly accounted for less than 10 percent of sponsored network time, while popular and variety music accounted for nearly half of the network's sponsored time by 1932. NBC affiliates, however, were more likely to carry a network broadcast of hillbilly music than a similar show featuring pop fare. There are a number of possible explanations for this difference. Since the key stations that originated network programming were all urban, they may have been reluctant to program hillbilly for fear of alienating local audiences. Thus, when the network picked up the feed of a hillbilly show originated by a regional station, key urban broadcasters might have substituted their own pop programming. On NBC's Boston key station WBZ, for example, hillbilly accounted for just 2.5 percent of programming time. Conversely, affiliates may have not only picked up network hillbilly shows but supplemented them with additional home-grown "folk and ballad" shows-at the expense of the network's pop feed-with a more rural audience in mind. Or affiliates may simply have been more interested in the relatively fewer hillbilly shows because they could be counted on to deliver large audiences of listeners who had nowhere else to hear their favorites. Whatever the reason, hillbilly music was, literally, a break from more respectable network programming.

The independent and semi-autonomous stations where hillbilly originated were characterized by their vanguard role in promoting direct advertising and, by extension, for supporting the growth of commercial broadcasting. "Farmer" stations such as Shenandoah, Iowa's KFNF engaged in direct advertising even in the mid-1920s, when most stations still hesitated to annoy radio listeners with commercial appeals. KFNF's owner, Henry Field, insisted that his audience "want to hear prices named," preferring "frank speaking and direct methods better than any polite evasions." One listener supported this assertion and linked it to both independent broadcasters and hillbilly music when she wrote to Radio Digest that "We want direct advertising.... We don't want to hear the chain stations. If anybody wants to hear WEAF, they can tune in direct. We don't want WEAF all over the dial.... We want old-time music. We understand it and like it."

Not only was hillbilly linked more closely with advertising than other genres; it was linked with the cheapest kind of advertising. In addition to luring sponsors whose constituency was primarily rural, such as Sears, hillbilly attracted sponsors from high-risk, low-profit industries such as food staples producers and medicinal companies. For sponsors like Crazy Water Crystals, Texas Crystals, JFG Coffee, and others who paid their hillbilly musicians directly, the cost of production for a hillbilly show was a mere pittance compared to what a successful pop show might cost. And since many advertisers used hillbilly as part of a coordinated regional campaign strategy, hillbilly sponsors could attain broad regional or national coverage at local and independent rates. The advertising time slots that hillbilly was likely to fill were also less expensive than the time usually devoted to pop. While the most popular barn dance shows were broadcast on Saturday night, the majority of hillbilly was programmed in the early morning and at the noon hour; inexpensive time designed to fit the farmer's schedule.

The independent status of the majority of stations programming hillbilly and the decentralized nature of the profession opened the way to a continued, if tenuous, regional diversity within radio's mass reach, and to grassroots-level audience influence. At the same time, though, hillbilly was identified as a product of the most heavily commercialized branch of radio broadcasting, and it was widely interpreted as a successful genre whose genesis lay outside the established popular music industry. As a result, it became for many a troublesome emblem of commercialism's effects on American culture.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822340801
• ISBN 13: 9780822340805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306