As the ballad and folk song collectors were continually discovering, throughout the country, not just in the South, there was no lack of people singing and playing in their homes and communities. Ballads and folk songs were common among the folk. With the developing mass media, however, particularly phonograph records after the turn of the century, and radio following World War I, folk music was becoming increasingly commercial and widespread. Almost simultaneously, southern rural performers were heard over the airwaves and on records.
Old-time fiddlers A. C. “Eck” Robertson, from Texas, and Henry Gilliland, from Oklahoma, traveled uninvited to New York City on July 1, 1922, and were able to record the tunes “Sally Gooden” and “Arkansas Traveler” at the Victor Records studio. This is considered the first commercial country record. Fiddlin’ John Carson followed in June 1923, when Ralph Peer, who worked for Okeh records, traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to record the champion fiddler at the urging of furniture store owner Polk Brockman. Carson’s “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cack-ed and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” unexpectedly became the first country music hits. Soon after multi-instrumentalist and singer Henry Whitter released “Lonesome Road Blues” and “Wreck on the Southern Old 97.” Numerous record companies—Brunswick, Gennett, Paramount, Victor, and Columbia, as well as Okeh—had discovered a musical gold mine in “old familiar tunes” and “old-time music” (often characterized as “hillbilly” songs after 1925).
Individual performers, string bands, duos and trios, and variouscombinations were soon crowding around recording horns set up in recording studios, hotel rooms, or anywhere else where the sounds could be captured. “The early hillbilly musicians, forthe most part, were folk performers who stood in transition between the traditional milieu that had nourished them and the larger popular arena which beckoned,” Bill Malone, the music’s prime historian, has written. “Folk musicians did not cease to be folk merely because they stepped in front of a recording or radio microphone, nor did the original audience change instantaneously. But once a career began to blossom and the audience began to expand through radio coverage, record sales, and the like, the temptation to alter a style or freshen one’s repertory might become resistible.”
But most important, Malone notes, the “early commercial performers were, by and large, working people who played music in their leisure hours.” One notable exception was Vernon Dalhart, a professional singer with a trained voice, who recorded extensively through the decade under a variety of pseudonyms. His hits included “The Wreck of the Old 97” and “The Prisoner’s Song.” Other important performers included Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, the Skillet Lickers (groups often had deliberately hokey names), Bradley Kincaid, Buell Kazee, Kelly Harrell, and Ernest Stoneman. Their songs were either selected from a broad nineteenth century folk and popular legacy, or were recently composed songs and ballads. Carson Robison, for example, wrote numerous fresh hillbilly tunes such as “Wreck of the Number Nine” and “Carry Me Back to the Lone Prairie.” Event songs, often about real tragedies, were widespread, such as Andrew “Blind Andy” Jenkins’s very popular “The Death of Floyd Collins.”
Oddly, the two most influential and popular performing acts were discovered during the same recording session in Bristol, Tennessee, in late July/early August 1927. Ralph Peer, using a then state-of-the-art electronic recording system, recorded a number of performers over nine days, including the previously recorded Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, Blind Alfred Reed, Uncle Eck Dunford playing “Skip to Ma Lou,” the first recording of this common play-party song, and most significantly Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and her cousin (and A. P.’s sister-in-law) Maybelle, were from Scott County, Virginia, and had a broad repertoire of traditional ballads and sacred songs. They would eventually record more than 300 sides for various companies, including the enduring “Wildwood Flower,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” “Worried Man Bues,” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” They would enjoy a long, highly influential career.
On the same day Peerrecorded Rodgers, a formerrailroad man from Mississippi, who had a unique voice and presentation. Until his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1933, Rodgers was a transforming figure, the first country singing star, a singer and songwriter who revolutionized the developing profession. He introduced the blue yodel, combining both black and white influences, with such songs as “T for Texas,” and also made hits out of “Away Out on the Mountain,” “TB Blues,” and “Peach Picking Time in Georgia.” (Numerous others began their careers as Rodgers’s musical clones, including the later cowboy star Gene Autry.)
Musicians developed professional lives through recordings and personal appearances, and especially with their performances on the proliferating number of country radio shows. Commercialradio waslaunched in Pittsburgh in 1920, and two years later Fiddlin’ John Carson appeared on an Atlanta station. The launching of the Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago in 1924, however, began the era of regular country music shows. Over the years the Barn Dance promoted the careers of many musicians, beginning with Bradley Kincaid. More well known, and still going into the twenty-first century, was Nashville’s Grand Ole’ Opry (originally the WSM Barn Dance) begun in 1925 by George Hay. Early performers included Dr. Humphrey Bate and the Possum Hunters, The Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Gully Jumpers (Hay liked folksy-sounding names), Sam and Kirk McGee, and particularly Uncle Dave Macon, a rollicking banjo player. While performers were hardly paid for their radio appearances, these spots became vital for promoting their record sales and concert appearances. Radio barn dance shows would proliferate throughout the country in the 1930s. The only black radio performer was harmonica whiz DeFord Bailey on the Grand Ole Opry, starring from 1926 to 1941 (his race was not identified for the listening audience).
From Volk to Folk: German Element of Folk Music
