Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

In this segment we briefly turn our focus on some of the individuals featured on this mix and the 1950/51 compilation. Pictured on the cover is the 1952 Cadillac in which Hank Williams died of heart failure on New Year’s Day 1953, aged 30 (though he always looked much older than that). His was the first of a series of young celebrity deaths that created legends for all times.

Among the more unexpected names in country must be that of Ole Rasmussen, a western swing bandleader who with his Nebraska Cornhuskers enjoyed success in the early ’50s. Rasmussen had a Bob Wills obsession; he was widely regarded as an imitator. Indeed, he would interject ad-libs into songs much like Wills (though not quite in a falsetto). Still, the quality of the music was fine, driven by Tex Atchison’s fierce fiddle. Atchison had previously been a member of the Prairie Ramblers, who featured in Vol. 4 of this series. It seems curious that a Danish-named country musician and businessman (more the latter than the former) would lead his band named after the state of Nebraska in sunny California.

Of course, California had a vibrant country scene, due largely to the Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s. Spade Cooley, whom we met in Vol. 5, was based in LA. But California’s country capital was Bakersfield, whence the likes of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Gram Parsons would emerge. Another Bakersfielder, though by choice, was Ferlin Husky, a man of annoying accent and often sentimental lyrics (his maudlin The Drunken Driver is a stone-cold candidate for worst ever record). These shortcomings did not stop the D-Day veteran from having a string of country chart-toppers, and even a couple of top 10 pop hits.

His Korean war-themed duet with fellow Bakersfielder Jean Shepard was one of these country #1s and pop Top 10 hits. With it, 19-year-old Shepard set a record as youngest female country chart-topper until 14-year-old Tanya Tucker eclipsed her almost two decades later. Shepard, at one point one of only two female singers at the Grand Ole Opry (the other was Kitty Wells), went on to marry country singer Hawkshaw Hawkins, who died in the 1963 plane crash that also killed Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas.

Another California-based country legend was Johnny Bond, who had a long career as a performer of cowboy songs (Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers being particular influences), and with Jimmy Wakeley appeared in b-movies and on Autry’s radio show in the 1930s. Both went on to have successful careers in the ’40s; each has a song on the History of Country Vol. 4 compilation. Bond was also a productive songwriter, the oft-covered Cimarron probably being his best known song. By 1957, the 42-year-old was dropped from the Columbia Records roster. Soon he made a comeback with the rock & roll hit Hot Rod Lincoln, on Autry’s Republic label. In his later years, before his death in 1978, Bond wrote a biography of fellow singing cowboy Tex Ritter (father of the late actor John Ritter) as well as an autobiography. Incidentally, the Bond song featured in the 1950/51 mix – Sick, Sober And Sorry – was co-written by Tex Atchison, the fiddler in Ole Rasmussen’s band.

We met Cowboy Copas in The Originals Vol. 37 as the first to record Tennessee Waltz. He enjoyed success in the late ’40 and early ’50s, but then his recording career began to stutter. He made a comeback (in the charts; he had been a member of the Opry and a regular on the Ozark Jubilee TV show) in 1960, with the hit song Alabam. Things were looking up when he agreed to perform at a benefit on 3 March 1963 in Kansas City for a radio disc jockey who had died in a car crash a few months before. Copas and the other performers boarded the Piper Comanche aeroplane piloted by his son-in-law Randy Hughes, who was also Patsy Cline’s manager. Nobody on the plane survived the crash in a forest near Camden, Tennessee.

Half a year earlier and much less prominently, Leon Chappel died, also in tragic circumstances. Chappel was one of the shapers of western swing in the 1930s as a member of the Lone Star Cowboys. After a serious car crash in 1935 left him with long-term injuries, his career gradually fizzled out. During World War 2 he served as a policeman, but that career was cut short when he apparently was caught accepting bribes. He was jobbing as a pipe fitter and truck driver when Jimmy Davis, singing star and former governor of Louisiana, briefly revived Chappel’s career, this time in the honky tonk medium (though the great True Blue Papa shows traces of his western swing background). The resurgence didn’t last very long. Chappel disappeared from the scene. His music career gone, his injuries forcing him into retirement and marriage broken down, Chappel on 23 October 1963 put a revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

The man with the greatest influence on country music was Hank Williams, but Lefty Frizzell’s contribution was nearly as significant as his erstwhile touring partner’s (even if Eddy Arnold was outselling both). Like Williams, Frizzell was a prolific songwriter; at one point in 1951, he had four songs in the country top 10. It was this artistic independence, his charisma, laid-back honky tonk stylings and soulful vocals that directly influenced future country giants as diverse as George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison (whose Traveling Wilbury name, Lefty, was a tribute to Frizzell), Merle Haggard, George Strait, Randy Travis and so on. Frizzell was also a hard drinker, and his abuse of alcohol contributed to his death at 47 in 1975.

Drinking can kill, and so does smoking. It’s a myth that until the 1960s people had no idea how poisonous cigarettes are. Tex Williams in the brilliant Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette), which he co-wrote with Merle Travis in 1947 and re-recorded in 1953 and 1960, admonishes: “Puff, puff, puff until you smoke yourself to death.”  In the same song he jokes: “I don’t reckon that it’ll hinder your health. I smoked ‘em all my life and I ain’t dead yet.” Tex frequently sang about smoking and advertised cigarettes, so after he died, the persistent story arose that he had died of lung cancer. It was in fact pancreatic cancer that did him in 1985 at the age of 68. While battling the cancer, he reportedly managed to cut down from two packets a day to one. He probably had disagreeable breath.

One might think that the title bestowed on Carl Smith, “Mr Country”, was a slice of hyperbole in an industry not known for its bashfulness. Smith, who died last year at 82, did have a string of quality hits which continued into the 1970s, including 30 country hits in the 1950s alone. But he is also a suitable Mr Country for his connections: he was married to June Carter before his good friend Johnny Cash, then married Goldie Hill, and from his first marriage was the father of Carlene Carter. Smith rarely bothered the pop charts, but there is no doubt that songs like Hey Joe (written by Boudleaux Bryant) helped influence the many country singers who would soon cross over into rock & roll.

Smith remained married to Goldie Hill until her death in 2005. Hill was in that first great wave of female country singers that came through in the 1950s, paving the way for future stars such as Loretta Lynn, Skeeter Davis, Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette. I Let The Stars Get In My Eyes, an answer record to Perry Como’s Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes (featured here in Skeets McDonald’s hit version), topped the country charts, not long after Kitty Wells’s own million-selling answer record, It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, eclipsed Hank Thompson’s The Wild Side Of Life. Suddenly the record company bosses saw commercial prospects in letting the gals sing. Unlike Wells, Hill’s career was relatively short-lived. When Goldie married Carl Smith in 1957, she retired from the music business, other than a brief and unsuccessful comeback attempt in the ’60s, to breed horses on the couples’ Tennessee farm.

Kitty Wells occupies a pivotal position in the history of country music. Already in her 30s and a mother of three when she became a star, she was the first female ever to top the country charts – though she was not the first female million-seller; that honour belongs to Patsy Montana. And in that first hit she made a statement that a woman need not be submissive (even if it was written by a man, JD Miller), and knocked off Hank Thompson’s slightly misogynist anthem off the #1 spot. Many women in country would peddle the submissiveness of their gender in song (Tammy Wynette, a victim of domestic abuse, sang the anthem), but Wells introduced feminist themes long before that was regarded as ordinary and articulated a female self-confidence that would become characteristic of many women who succeeded her – especially Loretta Lynn. Wells, who took her stage name from a 19^th century song, was country’s leading female singer every year from 1952-65.

We first encountered Stuart Hamblen in The Originals Vol. 22 as the writer and first performer of This Ole House, later hits for Rosemary Clooney and Shakin’ Stevens. Hamblen, who was born in 1908, started his career in the late 1920s as a cowboy song singer, before that sub-genre crossed over into Hollywood, taking Hamblen along as a sidekick to the great cowboy singers such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.  In Hollywood the Texan also became a close friend of John Wayne. The story goes that Hamblen was hunting with Wayne when they happened upon an abandoned cabin with the skeleton of a man inside, giving rise to This Ole House. Soon after that, the son of a Methodist preacher had a religious conversion. Billy Graham has credited Hamblen’s pulling power with getting his ministry off the ground. The conversion had consequences: he was fired as a radio DJ because he refused to have alcohol ads on his show. Hamblen also tried his hand in politics. In 1938 he stood, unsuccessfully, as a Democrat candidate for Congress; in 1952 he was the presidential candidate for the Prohibition Party. History records that Dwight Eisenhower was elected that year.

Where Hamblen represented an old age, Sonny James in some ways anticipated the advent of a new youth-driven musical form, if not in sound (he crooned mostly ) then in his look and public image. The fiddle-playing farm boy from Alabama had fought in Korea, but looked like he had been scrubbed up straight from college in a New York salon, not to look like a rock & roller but like one of those nice boys who, we often forget, were hugely popular too. He looked, one might say, like the 1950s, and it was his 1957 hit Young Love that introduced country to the teenage mainstream. It might be a coincidence, but the character Sonny in the film Grease looks not unlike Sonny James. James enjoyed a long and very successful career in country, hitting his peak in the early 1970s.

The title of George Morgan’s song in this mix is obviously appropriate for this blog. Morgan was best known for his 1947 hit Candy Kisses, which featured in A History Of Country Vol. 5. He worked the roses theme hard with songs such as Room Full of Roses, Red Roses For A Blue Lady and Red Roses From the Blue Side of Town. Morgan is also a great (and correct) trivia answer to the questions: Who is country singer Lorrie Morgan’s father? Who was the last singer to sing at the Grand Ole Opry’s legendary Ryman Theatre in 1974? Who was the first singer to sing at the new Grand Ole Opry House? Morgan died in 1975 at the age of 51.

As a bonus, I include a comedy bit by Archie Campbell from 1952. Campbell was a writer and star of the TV show Hee Haw. The bit here is one of his famous That’s Good/That’s Bad routines wherein Campbell would tell of an event, countering the straightman’s reactions of relief or alarm with a subsequent event that proves the opposite of that response.

The next instalment will look at country’s often underestimated influence on rock & roll. Some of the songs on this mix anticipate the new sound. Listen to Roy Hogsed’s She’s A Mean Mean Woman, Jaye Morgan & Hank Penny’s Fan It, Merrill Moore’s House Of Blue Lights (hear the influence on Jerry Lee Lewis) or Moon Mullican’s Rocket To The Moon.

TRACKLISTING
1. Tex Williams – Smoke, Smoke, Smoke
2. Eddy Arnold – I Wanna Play House With You
3. Roy Hogsed – She’s A Mean Mean Woman
4. Lefty Frizzell - Always Late (With Your Kisses)
5. Hank Thompson – The Wild Side Of Life
6. Kitty Wells – It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels
7. Hank Snow – (Now And Then) There’s A Fool Such As I
8. Cowboy Copas – Don’t Leave My Poor Heart Breaking
9. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys – I Want To Be Wanted
10. Little Jimmy Dickens – No Tears In Heaven
11. Slim Whitman - Indian Love Call
12. Hank Williams – Kaw-Liga
13. Skeets McDonald – Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes
14. Goldie Hill – I Let The Stars Get In My Eyes
15. Kitty Wells – I Heard The Juke Box Playing
16. Webb Pierce - Back Street Affair
17. Jean Shepard & Ferlin Husky – A Dear John Letter
18. Hank Locklin – Let Me Be The One
19. Ernest Tubb – Counterfeit Kisses
20. Jaye P. Morgan with Hank Penny – Fan It
21. Jenks Tex Carman – Hillbilly Hula
22. Sonny James – I Need You
23. T. Texas Tyler – Bumming Around
24. Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant – Bryant’s Bounce
25. Carl Smith – Hey Joe
26. Hank Locklin – Empty Bottles, Empty Heart
27. Merrill Moore – House Of Blue Lights
28. Moon Mullican – Rocket To The Moon
29. Hank Williams – Take These Chains From My Heart
30. George Morgan – Half-Hearted

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After a hiatus of a few months we return to the history of country music. In the last narrative instalment (Volume 4) we noted the rise of female country singers; some of them will feature in this mix, which covers the years 1950-51, and its follow-up, 1952-53. In the course of the 1950s we will also review country’s contribution to rock & roll, and discuss some of the artists featured. What follows then is a brief overview of country music in the 1950s.

Country had always been a diverse genre. New forms emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bluegrass took country back to its rural roots, with a sound based primarily on the interplay of string instruments — banjo, guitar, fiddle, mandolin. The pioneer of bluegrass was Bill Monroe, a big fellow with a small mandolin, who in 1939 had formed a band called the Blue Grass Boys. The line-up kept changing, with the most consequential incarnation, in 1946/47, including the hitherto unknown Lester Flatt and Earl Sruggs, who soon would form their own band, have a massive hit with the instrumental Foggy Mountain Breakdown (revived later as a theme for the film Bonnie And Clyde), and enjoy long careers together and separately. Bluegrass has never become mainstream. Various revivals and dedicated musicianship have kept the sub-genre alive; it is possibly more popular now than it ever was, thanks to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack  and the efforts of singers such as Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs, Del McCoury, Alison Krauss and Dolly Parton.

Rockabilly borrowed from western swing, boogie woogie and the new genre of black music, rhythm & blues. It had in fact been around for a while: the record commonly identified as the first ever rockabilly record was Buddy Jones’ Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama in 1939, with its boogie woogie piano solo and guitar work that anticipates the sound of the 1950s. The evolution of rockabilly is key to the birth of rock & roll as much as R&B. The slap bass style of playing which was so integral to early rock & roll was a common western swing and rockabilly technique (Bob Wills argued that he had been playing rock & roll since 1928). Western swing artist Bill Haley turned into a rock & roll pioneer via rockabilly. Carl Perkins was first and foremost a rockabilly musician. Elvis Presley was initially regarded as a rockabilly singer who also did R&B — and, as mentioned before, he was a regular on the Louisiana Hayride, having made one appearance at the Opry (supporting Hank Snow).

Other acts initially rooted in country would become rock & roll legends, such as the Everly Brothers  (who were so well served by Nashville songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant), Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. And the folk scene that had begun growing from New York City in the late 1940s (and would reach its zenith with the rise of Bob Dylan in the 1960s) had its roots in country. Woody Guthrie was initially regarded as a country artist (before the term was in wide use, the label “folk” was often employed to describe the genre).

The 1950s also saw a revival of cowboy music, with Marty Robbins enjoying some big success with his Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs and its pop #1 El Paso.

Finally, the 1950s launched the biggest, most important star in country: Johnny Cash. Cash’s influence on almost all areas of country cannot be underestimated. And it was Cash who pioneered a new trend in country: the outlaw movement.

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TRACKLISTING
1. Eddie Kirk – Sugar Baby
2. Moon Mullican – I’ll Sail My Ship Alone
3. Cotton Thompson – How Long
4. Red Foley – Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy
5. Tennessee Ernie Ford - Mr And Mississippi
6. Tex Williams - Wild Card
7. Ole Rasmussen – Sleepy Eyed John
8. Bill Monroe – Alabama Waltz
9. Jesse James – Rag Mop
10. Ted Daffan’s Texans - I’ve Got Five Dollars And It’s Saturday Night
11. Bill Strength – Black Coffee Blues
12. Lefty Frizzell – I Love You In A Thousand Ways
13. Leon Chappel - True Blue Papa
14. Stuart Hamblin – Remember Me, I’m The One Who Loves You
15. Tex Ritter – High Noon
16. Wilf Carter (Montana Slim) - Apple, Cherry, Mince And Choc’late Cream
17. Bill Haley - Rose Of My Heart
18. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – Brown Skin Gal
19. Carl Smith – Mr Moon
20. Hank Williams – Baby, We’re Really In Love
21. Lefty Frizzell - I Want To Be With You Always
22. Johnny Bond - Sick, Sober And Sorry
23. Flatt & Scruggs – Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’
24. Carolina Cotton with Bob Wills – You Always Keep Me In Hot Water
25. Pee Wee King’s Golden Cowboys – Slow Poke
26. Hank Snow & Anita Carter – Bluebird Island
27. Gene Autry – Peter Cottontail
28. Spade Cooley – Indian Summer
29. Cliffie Stone – Jump Rope Boogie
30. Tennessee Ernie Ford – Rock City Boogie

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By the early 1940s the crooners had begun to make their mark, with Jimmie Davies — future Democrat governor of Louisiana — having led the way. Many of them had toiled and crooned in the 1930s. But with a world war slowly engulfing the globe, the market wanted, and got, romance. More than that, men took their country songs with them to the army and disseminated the music among their fellow soldiers. Country music thus found new fans, and its leading singers — Roy Acuff, Gene Autry, Red Foley, Tex Ritter, Eddy Arnold — gained a national audience. In 1945, Arnold even beat the mighty Frank Sinatra in a favourite-singer poll among GIs stationed in Germany.

Some singers hit temporary highs before disappearing, such as Ted Daffan, whose 1944 hit Born To Lose (actually recorded in 1942) would later be covered by Ray Charles on his seminal 1962 LP Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music. Other temporarily bright stars included Wesley Tuttle and Jack Guthrie. The latter, Woody Guthrie’s cousin, was very influential but died at the age of 32 of tuberculosis in 1948.

Western swing continued to grow in popularity. Not only was Bob Wills one of the biggest names in country, but artists such as Pee Wee King (like Wills a bandleader) made an impression. Spade Cooley took the genre towards a more pop-oriented style. Cooley in 1961 was convicted of murdering his wife, dying eight years later in jail (more about him in Vol 5).

Other new stars appeared on the scene. In 1941 Ernest Tubb recorded his first hit record (the honky tonk Walking The Floor Over You, which, unusually for the time, prominently featured the electric guitar, as would in 1948 Arthur Smith’s seminal Guitar Boogie) and the prolific songwriter and singer Cindy Walker hit the country and pop charts with her cover of Bing Crosby’s Long Star Trail. Helped along by the proliferation of hayride and barndance shows on radio, country went mainstream. The most influential of these of course was Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, which attracted the best and most popular stars from other shows, a policy it would follow well into the 1950s (when it nevertheless failed to spot the talents of Louisiana Hayride regular Elvis Presley, even after he appeared on the Opry as Hank Snow’s opening act). Augmenting the Opry line-up, headed and presented by Acuff, were comics such as the wildly popular Minnie Pearl. Not surprisingly, the novelty record was very much part of country music. Some of them, such a Lonzo & Oscar’s I’m My Own Granpa, were even funny.

As the US joined the war, some singers turned to the sort of jingoism which 60 years later Toby Keith exploited to lucrative effect, with a similar lack of tact or sophistication. Very soon after the Japanese attack on the US naval base in Hawaii, the Carson Robison Trio entreated their listeners to Remember Pearl Harbor, demanded that We’re Gonna Have To Slap The Dirty Little Jap and called to arms with Get Your Gun And Come Along (We’re Fixing To Kill A Skunk) — though neither sounded country, or any good, at all — while yodeller Elton Britt promised that There’s A Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere. The latter, recorded on 19 March 1942, narrated the desire of a handicapped country boy to fight in the war. This slice of maudlin patriotism became country music’s first gold single. Zeke Williams’ Smoke On The Water (also recorded by Red Foley) in 1944 represented the victory which within a year would become reality. Around the same time, Woody Guthrie — still in the country fold — threatened just comeuppance for fascists.

Most of the stars of the early 1940s not only survived the post-war years, but benefited from a boom which saw the emergence of new superstars in the late ’40s and early ’50s, such as Merle Travis, Hank Snow (a Canadian!), Webb Pierce, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Hank Thompson, Jim Reeves and so on. Two of these would be monumentally influential: Lefty Frizell and Hank Williams. Debuting in 1947 with the outstanding Move It On Over (which in parts sounded much like the later Rock Around The Clock), Williams scored 36 more hits before his death at 29 on New Year’s Day 1953. There might have been rock & roll without Hank Williams, but perhaps not quite the way we know it. Frizell was just as huge as Williams, at one point in 1951 scoring four simultaneous hits in the country top 10. Frizell exercised a profound influence on future giants of country such as George Jones, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson.

The era also saw the slow rise of the female country singer. Such artists as Sara and Maybelle Carter, Patsy Montana, Louise Massey and Cindy Walker had enjoyed success in the preceding two decades, but there were very few women in country. The early 1950s produced the first enduring superstar, Kitty Wells, and a few others in whose footsteps the likes of Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson, Skeeter Davis and Tammy Wynette would walk. Molly O’Day had briefly attained star status in the 1940s, Goldie Hill was hugely popular for a while, Rose Maddox had a series of hits with her brothers. We will encounter them and others in volumes 6 and 7.

TRACKLISTING
1. Ernest Tubb – Walking The Floor Over You
2. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – Corrine Corrina
3. Hoosier Hot Shots – Dude Cowboy
4. Louise Massey and the Westerners – My Adobe Hacienda
5. Sons Of The Pioneers – Cool Water
6. Carson Robison Trio – Remember Pearl Harbor
7. Elton Britt – There’s A Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere
8. Jimmy Wakely – When It’s Round Up Time In Texas
9. Ted Daffan’s Texans - Born To Lose
10. Cindy Walker – Miss Molly
11. Bob Atcher & Bonnie Blue Eyes – Pins And Needles (In My Heart)
12. Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys – Night Train To Memphis
13. Texas Jim Lewis – Too Late To Worry, Too Blue To Care
14. Rex Griffin – Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby
15. Al Dexter and his Troopers – Pistol Packin’ Mama
16. Red Foley – Smoke On The Water
17. Wilf Carter - A Sinner’s Prayer
18. Woody Guthrie & Sonny Terry – All You Fascists Bound To Lose
19. Bradley Kincaid and his Kentucky Mountain Boys – Ain’t We Crazy
20. Tex Ritter – There’s A New Moon Over My Shoulder
21. Gene Autry – Gonna’ Build A Big Fence Around Texas
22. Wesley Tuttle – With Tears In My Eyes
23. Floyd Tillman - Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin
24. Johnny Bond – So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed
25. Molly O’Day – When God Comes To Gather His Jewels
26. Merle Travis – Divorce Me C.O.D.
27. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – Keep A-Knockin’ But You Can’t Come In
28. Delmore Brothers – Freight Train Boogie
29. Harry Choates – Jole Blon
30. The Prairie Ramblers – I Don’t Love Anybody But You

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The second article in the history of country music covered the trends and artists of the depression and pre-war years, 1930-41. Here we’ll look at some of the songs of the era. The photo on the cover comes from a superb series of colour photos from the US in the 1930s and ’40s.

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Rock ‘n’ roll grew out of R&B and various shades of country, especially rockabilly, a sub-genre that peaked in the 1950s. But what is widely regarded as the first rockabilly number dates back to 1939, Buddy Jones’ Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama. It’s a futile exercise to identify “the first-ever rock ‘n’ roll record”, but any list of contenders must include Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll” features shockingly few early country songs. One that is included is Jimmie Rodgers Blue Yodel No. 9, recorded in 1930 with Louis Armstrong, marking the first instance of a white country singer collaborating with a black musician. As the title suggests, the collaboration with Satchmo was preceded by eight blue yodels, which introduced an Alpine musical form into the crazy stew that also included influences as diverse as Hawaiian sounds and 18^th-century folk ballads from England. By collaborating with Armstrong, Rodgers also helped to introduce jazz to the mix, which would find fuller expression with the rise of western swing.

While Blue Yodel starts our 2-CD set, Red Foley’s Old Shep of 1941 almost bookends it. The maudlin ballad about a child’s dying dog is not really very good (and the sound quality here isn’t great), but it also merits consideration in the development of rock ‘n’ roll for helping to inspire a pre-pubescent Elvis Presley of Tupelo, Mississippi to take up music. In fact, Old Shep was the first song Elvis ever sang in public, at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo in October 1945 (he placed fifth in the talent show). After becoming a rock ‘n’ roll sensation, Elvis paid tribute to the song he once was obsessed with by recording it.

The terribly arbitrary and incomplete Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list also includes Roy Acuff’s Wabash Cannonball — one of the many train songs in country. A folk song from the late 19^th century originally recorded by the Carter Family in 1929, it was Acuff’s breakthrough hit, launching a career that spanned four decades. In 1948 he reluctantly ran for governor of Tennessee on a Republican ticket (the idea initially was a publicity stunt), but lost to two-time governor Gordon Browning, who won 67% of the vote.

One country singer who did become a governor was Jimmie Davis, who governed Louisiana as a Democrat for two non-consecutive stints (1944–48, 1960–64). Davies’ signature tune, You Are My Sunshine, now is Louisiana’s state song. He even claimed to have written it as a school boy, but that is untrue (imagine that, a politician who tells lies). It was written by the Rice Brothers Gang of Shreveport, Louisiana but first recorded on 22 August 1939 by the Pine Ridge Boys of Atlanta. Davies, who recorded his version in 1940, put his co-composer credit on the song after buying the rights to it from the Rice brothers. At campaign rallies, Davies would sing the song while riding a horse called, of course, Sunshine.

Bob Wills had been co-inventing western swing for a few years before he scored his first national hit with New San Antonio Rose, a reworking of his 1938 instrumental song (his use of drums and horns when performing his hit at the Grand Ole Opry caused quite a bit of a stir in Nashville). Arguably the more influential Wills song, however, was 1936’s Steel Guitar Rag, written by Leon McAuliffe, which was pivotal in popularising the steel guitar, which gives country the Hawaiian sound (the steel refers to the slide held in the hand that holds the frets).

Roy Rogers is among Hollywood’s singing cowboys of the movies featured here (though songs by the original singing movie cowboy, Ken Maynard, are quite difficult to find). Rogers was a founder in 1933 of the Sons of the Pioneers. The original pioneers are long gone, but new generations of pioneers are keeping the name alive even now, led by Luther Nallie, who joined the group in 1968. But back in the ’30s, Rogers soon left for the big screen while the Sons of the Pioneers became both country staples and performers on the big screen, including the 1942 movie with Rogers named after the band. They recorded the first version of Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds — written by bandmember Bob Nolan, who first named it Tumbling Tumble Leaves — before Gene Autry made it famous. For his part, Autry was the first to record the standard That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine in 1931. A later compilation will feature the Sons’ other great original, 1946’s Cool Water (also written by Nolan).

Woody Guthrie (pictured) was regarded as a country singer before folk music went its own way. Guthrie of course influenced generations of folk singers; indeed, he spearheaded the folk movement with acolytes such as Pete Seeger. It arguably reached its zenith with the output of Bob Dylan in the 1960s. Dylan also owed a lot to the repository of blues and country. Other than Guthrie, it is evident that Dylan listened much to the original Carter Family. Their rendition of a traditional hymn, Can The Circle Be Unbroken, was covered by Dylan and many others (Carl Perkins also borrowed the chorus for his Daddy Sang Bass, later covered by Johnny Cash with the help of June Carter). Dylan adopted several traditional folk songs, including the Appalachian ballad Pretty Polly for Ballad Of Hollis Brown.

Lastly, Gid Tannen and his Skillet Lickers might have been the first disco musicians: in the introduction to Soldier’s Joy Breakdown, Tannen makes reference to shakin’ booties before his band launches into a remix of the song they first recorded in 1929.

TRACKLISTING
1. Uncle Dave Macon – All In Down And Out Blues
2. Wade Mainer & Zeke Morris - Train Carry My Gal Back Home
3. Arthur Smith Trio – Indian Creek
4. Lee O’Daniel and his Hillbilly Boys - Mellow Mountain Moon
5. Hackberry Ramblers – Cajun Crawl
6. Hoosier Hot Shots - Breezin’ Along With The Breeze
7. Roy Rogers – Hi Ho Silver
8. Bill Boyd and his Cowboy Ramblers – Jig
9. Coon Creek Girls - Banjo Pickin’ Girl
10. Hank Penny’s Radio Cowboys – Cowboy’s Swing
11. The Tune Wranglers – Dixie Moon
12. Patsy Montana with the Prairie Ramblers – Big Moon
13. Light Crust Doughboys – Gin Mill Blues
14. Roy Acuff and the Crazy Tennesseans – Wabash Cannonball
15. Buddy Jones – Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama
16. Swift Jewel Cowboys – Willie The Weeper
17. Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers - Waiting At The End Of The Road
18. The Pine Ridge Boys – You Are My Sunshine
19. Jimmie Davis – Born To Be Blue
20. Delmore Brothers – Wabash Blues
21. Roy Acuff - Old Age Pension Check
22. Louise Massey and the Westerners – Put Your Little Foot Right Out
23. Bob Wills and his Texan Cowboys - New San Antonio Rose
24. Carter Family – My Home Among The Hills
25. Woody Guthrie – Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues
26. Blue Sky Boys – Brown Eyes
27. Tex Ritter – Good-Bye My Little Cherokee
28. Red Foley – Old Shep
29. Texas Jim Lewis – Old Fashioned Hoedown

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The titles of posts in this series may be a bit confusing. They will refer to the timespan covered in the mixes. But this post looks at the era from about 1930 to about 1941. The next post will include the 1937-41 mix, but the text will be a sidebar to this article, also referring to 1930-41. I hope that makes sense…

Record sales collapsed dramatically with the Depression, with sales dropping from 104 million in 1927 to just 6 million in 1932. Some records still sold prodigiously, of course. Gene Autry’s That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine (released in 1931 but becoming a mega-hit a couple of years later, it is sometimes considered the first honky tonk record, a decade before that sub-genre really took hold) sold a million copies, as did Patsy Montana’s 1935 hit I Want To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart.

The 1930s saw the rise of the singing cowboys, combining the motion pictures with records.  There had been singing cowboys before, like the real cowherder Carl Sprague, and the frontier ballads (lovingly collected in the 1910s by John Lomax) contributed to the country repertoire. The breakthrough, however, came with the movie cowboys. The first was Ken Maynard, but more successful were Autry, Tex Ritter (father of the late actor John Ritter) and Roy Rogers, perhaps the most commercially savvy of the lot. Various other country stars made cameos in Hollywood over the years, including Patsy Montana, Pee Wee King, Red Foley, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb and Jimmie Davis. The movie cowboy imagery had an enduring influence, especially in the Stetson hats that periodically become obligatory country uniform and the garish rhinestoned outfits taken to a ludicrous extreme in the 1960s by Porter Wagoner.  The cowboy song has made periodic comebacks, led by the likes of Marty Robbins in the 1950s and Willie Nelson in the ’70s. Apart from Patsy Montana (from Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, Arkansas), there were singing cowgirls too, such as Louise Massey and Kitty Lee. The era was a good time for harmonising sibling acts such as the Monroe Brothers (future bluegrass legend Bill and brother Charlie), the Allen Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers, and  the Coon Creek Girls (three of whose five members were the Ledford sisters).

A massively influential form of country that infused the genre with jazz, blues and pop had its origins in the 1930s: western swing, a term that would be coined only in 1944. Its progenitor was Milton Brown. Brown had just found success when he was killed in a car crash in 1936 at the age of 33. Bob Wills, a member in Brown’s previous band, took the baton and popularised western swing. The charismatic fiddler (who adds the cartoonish falsetto asides in the records) and his Texas Playboys — with their country string and swing horn sections — had enduring success, but had their biggest hit early: 1940’s New San Antonio Rose, with Tommy Duncan on vocals. By then several western swing acts had come and and some already gone. Coming in the wake of Brown and Wills were acts such as cliff Bruner, Hartman’s Heartbreakers, the Light Crust Doughboys, Swift Jewel Cowboys, Hoosier Hot Shots, the Tune Wranglers and Hank Penny, who in his long career would staddle various forms of country. Some country artists, such as Patsy Montana and Louise Massey, would dabble in western swing occasionally.

1940s country legend Merle Travis defined western swing this way: “Western Swing is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music they feel, beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brains. When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have western swing.” When rock & roll broke big in the 1950s, Wills caustically remarked that he and his likes had been playing that already in the 1930s. Arguably, Uncle Dave Macon (born in 1870!) was the first rock ‘n’ roller; he was the first country singer to feature the word “rock” in a songtitle, back in 1927.

The Depression gave rise to a series of songs with socialist undertones (though nobody would call it that), and not only by Woody Guthrie. Socially critical songs preceded the Depression, of course. Bob Miller, a collaborator with Irving Berlin, wrote Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat in 1928, for example. In 1932 he called people to come out and vote in the election that brought Franklin D Roosevelt into the White House, with the promise that “the poor forgotten man” is “gonna cause a change”. Bob Miller also predicted the 1937 assassination of Louisiana’s wealth redistributing governor Huey Long in his 1935 song The Death Of Huey P Long. Even the fun-loving Uncle Dave Macon sang about living in hard times. Woody Guthrie was regarded as a country singer, and articulated the injustices of capitalism and society in ways that anticipated the schism between country and folk music.

TRACKLISTING
1. Jimmie Rodgers & Louis Armstrong – Blue Yodel No 9 (2:39)
2. Allen Brothers – New Chattanooga Blues (3:04)
3. Charlie Poole – It’s Movin’ Day (3:26)
4. Bud Billings & Carson Robison – When Your Hair Has Turned To Silver (3:45)
5. Ken Maynard – The Lone Star Trail (3:12)
6. Cowboy Ed Crane – Starving To Death On A Government Claim (2:58)
7. Three Tobacco Tags – Aint Gonna Do It No More (2:54)
8. Gene Autry & Jimmy Long - That Silver Haired Daddy Of Mine (2:46)
9. Glen Rice and his Beverly Hill Billies – Ridge Runnin’ Roan (3:12)
10. Jimmie Rodgers – I’m Free (3:05)
11. Delmore Brothers – Brown’s Ferry Blues (2:33)
12. Ernest V. Stoneman – All I Got’s Gone (2:54)
13. Sons Of The Pioneers - Way Out There (3:20)
14. Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers – Soldier’s Joy Breakdown (2:54)
15. Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies – Garbage Man Blues (2:42)
16. Shelton Brothers – Ridin’ On A Humpback Mule (2:37)
17. Patsy Montana and the Prairie Ramblers – I Wanna Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart (3:07)
18. Carter Family - Can The Circle Be Unbroken (Bye And Bye) (3:10)
19. Coon Creek Girls - Pretty Polly (2:52)
20. Blue Sky Boys – I’m Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (2:54)
21. Milton Brown and his Brownies – Yes Sir (Just Because) (2:41)
22. Bob Wills - Steel Guitar Rag (2:46)
23. Hartman’s Heartbreakers – No Hugging Or Kissing (2:40)
24. Jimmie Davis - Mama’s Getting Hot And Papa’s Getting Cold (2:54)
25. Monroe Brothers – Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms (2:28)
26. Hartman’s Heartbreakers with Betty Lou – Feels Good (2:33)
27. Sons Of The Pioneers - Tumbling Tumbleweeds (2:35)

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Previously in A History of Country
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In the fourth instalment of this series we’ll look at Chuck Berry’s hit that deliberately borrowed from a country tune, a song that made a four-stage transition from crooner standard to soul classic, and Bob Marley’s possibly unintended homage to a kids’ TV show. I should stress that I’m not suggesting plagiarism or other unethical actions by anybody (let’s save that for the inevitable mammoth Led Zep post).

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Dykes Magic City Trio – Ida Red (1927).mp3
Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys – Ida Red (1938).mp3
Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys – Ida Red Likes The Boogie (1949).mp3
Chuck Berry – Maybellene (1955).mp3
Chuck Berry himself said that he based Maybellene, his debut record, on country musician Bob Wills’ vocal version of the traditional fiddle number Ida Red, recorded in 1938. Released on Chess in July 1955, Maybellene was a breakthrough song for the nascent rock & roll genre. Berry’s debut single was the first rock & roll record performed by a black musician to break the Billboard top 10 (those were pioneer days; bear in mind that Elvis was still a regional star and yet to sign with RCA).

Playing the piano at that session was Johnny Johnson, who had given Berry something of a break in 1952 when he let him join his Sir John Trio, and to whose prodigious drinking Berry’s later hit Johnny B. Goode was dedicated. One of the trio’s staple songs was a take on Ida Red, based on Wills’ 1938 recording. Berry, already brimming with charisma and showmanship, had taken that song to Chess in Chicago, and signed for the label as a solo artist. Pragmatically, Johnson and the third member of the trio, drummer Ebby Hardy, became members of Berry’s backing band. Now Leo Chess suggested that Ida Red be remodelled as a 12-bar blues, with different lyrics. Johnson reworked the arrangements, and Berry came up with the lyrics about the car and a girl, those rock & roll staples.

Bob Wills claimed that he played rock & roll decades before the genre was invented. He can’t have meant the sound itself, but the fusion of musical influences from across the racial divide, and the innovative use of instrumentation in the western swing sub-genre of country which Wills helped pioneer. On Ida Red, which preceded Wills breakthrough hit New San Antonio Rose by two years, Wills used drums, which were very unusual in country music (a term which wasn’t even known yet). The song, one of several riffing on the Ida Red character, had first been recorded  in 1924 by Fiddlin’ Powers & Family, and to greater public attention by the Dykes Magic City Trio in 1927. Wills put the tune to a 2/4 beat and gave the it new lyrics, which borrowed from a 1878 song called Sunday Night, written by Frederick W Root. In 1949, Wills revisited Ida Red with a sequel titled Ida Red Likes The Boogie.  Berry and Johnson may well have known that version, and one can imagine how it might have served to inspire Maybellene (just listen to the guitar), but it is the 1938 recording only which they have credited as the template for the song.

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Ruth Etting – Try A Little Tenderness (1933).mp3
Bing Crosby – Try A Little Tenderness (1933).mp3
Little Miss Cornshucks – Try A Little Tenderness (1952).mp3
Aretha Franklin – Try A Little Tenderness (1962).mp3
Sam Cooke – Medley-Try A Little Tenderness/(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons/ You Send Me (1964).mp3
Otis Redding – Try A Little Tenderness (1966).mp3
Before it became a soul standard, Try A Little Tenderness was a standard, first recorded by Ray Noble and his Orchestra in 1932, and a year later by Ruth Etting, then by Bing Crosby, and subsequently by vocalists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Jimmy Durante.  Otis Redding is being credited with reinventing the sing as a soul tune, but his take was only the fourth (and final) stage of the tune’s evolution as a soul classic.

Before Otis, Sam Cooke recorded a fragment of the song as part of a rather lovely medley on his 1964 Sam Cooke At The Copa album. It was in fact that fragment which gave Stax executives the idea that Redding should cover it in 1966. Otis did so with great reluctance, not because he hated the song, but because he felt he could not measure up to his by now deceased hero Cooke. Produced by Isaac Hayes and backed by Booker T & the MGs, Redding did all he could to mess up the song so that it could not be released. He failed, and the song is now irrevocably his.

Redding apparently knew only Coke’s version (hence the abridged lyrics). Cooke in turn had decided to include Tenderness in his medley having heard the song on Aretha Franklin’s 1962 album The Tender, The Moving, The Swinging Aretha Franklin. As fine as an interpreter of songs as Franklin would become (and already was at the age of 20), her version — soul-inflected vocals backed with an easy listening string arrangement — seems to have drawn from that by the forgotten Little Miss Cornshucks, whose 1951 recording was the first to Try A Little Tenderness the R&B treatment.

Born Mildred Cummings in Dayton, Ohio, in 1923, Little Miss Cornshucks came to the notice of future Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun while performing in a Washington club during her 1943 US tour, where her stage appearance was based on the rural shtick her name suggests, wearing the shabby dress she would later sing about. She was the first artist he recorded, and thereby the impetus for what would eventually become Atlantic Records (on which Aretha Franklin would record, though in 1962 she was on Columbia). Little Miss Cornshucks broke through as a recording artist in the latter years of the 1940s, particularly with her signature song So Long. Soon her star faded. In 1952 she recorded on three different labels, including Columbia. Her version of Try A Little Tenderness, however, was released in late May on Coral, a subsidiary of Decca, for whom she had recorded So Long.  Little Miss Cornshucks soon drifted away, just as her imitator Miss Sharecropper started to find success on Atlantic as LaVerne Baker. She died in 1999. (Read the full story of Little Miss Cornshucks at the excellent No Depression archives)

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Banana Splits – The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana) (1968).mp3
Bob Marley – Buffalo Soldier (1980).mp3
This series was inspired by Timothy English’s books Sounds Like Teen Spirit (website and buy), a collection of “stolen melodies, ripped-off riffs”. The book includes a number of surprising instances of soundalikes. One of the least expected is the connection between the theme song of a late 1960s US television kids’ show and a Bob Marley hit.

Buffalo Soldiers, a song about a regiment of black soldiers who fought in wars against Native Americans on the side of their oppressor, was recorded during the 1980 sessions for  Marley’s Uprising album (it was a posthumous hit in 1983 after inclusion on the Legend album). English writes that “in the middle, and again at the end of Buffalo Soldier, Marley breaks into a wordless note-for-note rendition of – of all things – the Banana Splits Theme.” He is referring to the woy-yoy-yoy ad lib, which does indeed sound exactly like the beginning and chorus of the theme song, written by Mark Barkan, who also wrote Manfred Mann’s Pretty Flamingo, and Richie Adams, both of whom also contributed to The Monkees and The Archies (other writers for the Banana Splits show included Gene Pitney, Al Kooper and Barry White).

The Banana Splits Adventure Hour was a late ’60s kids’ TV show modelled loosely on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Monkees, with stuffed animals taking the parts of the musicians (yeah, I know). English alleges no plagiarism on Marley’s part, but speculates that a little known passage in the life of Robert Nesta Marley  might have implanted the relatively obscure TV theme — it just scraped into the Billboard top 100, peaking at #96 in February 1969 — in the great man’s head. Periodically, the pre-fame Marley would live with his mother Cedella in Wilmington, Delaware, working at the Chrysler assembly line. One such spell, with his kids in tow, was half a year from April to October 1969, just as the Banana Splits show was running on Saturday morning TV and its theme possibly received some residual radio airplay…

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After offering a “Christmas mix, not for Mother” last year, I feel obliged to make amends to your Mom by creating a mix she might like. Yes, it’s all gloriously retro this year. The youngest of the songs, as far as I can tell, is Jim Nabor’s version of Sleigh Ride from 1968; the oldest, Eddie Duchin’s (Don’t Wait Till) The Night Before Christmas, is 30 years older. Most of the songs here come from the 1940s and ’50s. A hurriedly put-together front and back CD cover is included, and as always the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R, which might sort out the Christmas prezzie for some relatives. If this mix is popular enough, I’ll do a second volume. Let me know what you think in the comments section (you do know that bloggers really like to receive comments, so don’t be shy).

Fans of The Originals series will appreciate the first version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by Jimmy Boyd, then 13, which was released in 1952. Boyd died in Mach this year at the age of 70.

TRACKLISTING
1. Sammy Davis, Jr - Christmas Time All Over The World
2. Burl Ives – A Holly Jolly Christmas
3. Billy May - Do You Believe In Santa Claus
4. Dean Martin - Rudolph, The Red-nosed Reindeer
5. Lena Horne - Santa Claus Is Comin To Town
6. Nat ‘King’ Cole – Mrs. Santa Claus
7. Gene Autry – Here Comes Santa Claus
8. Andrews Sisters - Winter Wonderland
9. Connee Boswell - Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
10. Dinah Washington – Ole Santa
11. Fontane Sisters – Nuttin’ For Christmas
12. Frank Sinatra – Jingle Bells
13. Brenda Lee - Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
14. Ernest Tubb – Blue Christmas
15. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys – Santa’s On His Way
16. Jogi Jorgensen – I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas
17. DeCastro Sisters - Snowbound For Christmas
18. Jim Nabors – Sleigh Ride
19. Perry Como – Silver Bells
20. Bing Crosby – Frosty The Snowman
21. Jimmy Boyd – I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
22. Louis Armstrong – Zat You, Santa Claus?
23. Lionel Hampton & his Orchestra – Boogie Woogie Santa Claus
24. Judy Garland – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
25. Ella Fitzgerald – The Secret Of Christmas
26. Eddy Duchin Orchestra – (Don’t Wait Till) The Night Before Christmas
27. Gordon Jenkins Orchestra – White Christmas
28. Les Brown Orchestra feat Doris Day – The Christmas Song
29. Red Foley – Put Christ Back Into Christmas
30. Rosemary Clooney – Happy Christmas, Little Friend

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