When I first moved to Nashville, I was 19.
I was too young to wait tables, so I got a job as a tour guide
at the country music hall of fame.
And it turned out to be such a blessing because I got...
I got to listen to so much music.
All day, every day, I got to...
It was my job to learn the history of country music.
We had this painting in the museum called "The sources
of Country Music", the last painting of Thomas Hart Benton.
I had to tell people about it.
I hung out with this painting a lot.
Looking at this painting is like looking at an old friend for me.
So it shows the barn dances, it shows the railroad,
riverboats, the gospel choirs, the lap dulcimers,
and the fiddles.
And it shows the cowboys and the banjo coming from Africa
and the slaves, and how all of this came together.
It's just a beautiful thing to look at because it's the...
It's the closest thing, visually, really, to what
country music sounds like.
It's so colorful. There's so much energy in it.
Country music Rose from the bottom up,
from the songs Americans sang to themselves in farm fields
and railroad yards to ease them through their labors
and songs they sang to each other on the porches
and in the parlors of their homes when the day's work was done.
It came from the fiddle tunes they danced to
on Saturday nights to let off steam
and from the hymns they chanted in church on Sunday mornings.
It filtered out of secluded hollows deep in the mountains
and from smoky saloons on the edge of town, from the barrios
along the Southern border, and from the wide-open spaces
of the western range.
Most of all, its roots sprang from the need of Americans,
especially those who felt left out and looked down upon,
to tell their stories.
There's something about the lyrics, to me,
that just separate it from everything else...
Songs that you go, "That happened to me yesterday",
or, "that happened to me last week",
or "I'm going through that heartbreak right now", you know.
Well, to me, it's soul music.
It's probably the white man's soul music.
And it comes from the heart.
I believe that you can go look and find a country song
to fit any mood you're in,
any song that will help you feel better.
Sometime it might make you cry, but you'll feel better,
you can find that song.
That's what I believe.
Lovin', cheatin', hurtin', fightin', drinkin',
pickup trucks, and mother.
You also have to hand in there a few
death, murder, mayhem, suicide, you know, songs,
you know, that are real.
I think it's just simple ways of telling
stories, experiencing and expressing feelings.
You can dance to it, you can cry to it,
you can make love to it,
you can play it at a funeral, you can...
It's just really has something
in it for everybody, and people relate to it.
It's about those things that we believe in
but we can't see, like dreams and songs and souls.
They're hanging around here, and different songwriters reach up
and get them.
Country music comes from right in here,
this heart and soul that we all have.
It's great music that really hits us, because we're all human.
"Country Music", the songwriter Harlan Howard
said, is "three chords and the truth".
Truth telling, which country music at its best is...
Truth telling, even when it's a big fat lie.
It's what American folk music has come to be called
when it followed the path of the fiddle and the banjo.
All of American music comes from the same place.
It's just sort of where it ends up,
and country music is one of the destinations.
Yeah!
Country.
By the early 1920s,
a Georgia factory worker named John Carson had
been playing the fiddle for nearly 40 years, ever since his
grandfather first gave him one at age 10.
Although music was his passion, he had to support his
growing family working in one of Atlanta's textile mills,
making $10 a week for 60 hours of labor.
But on Saturday nights, in the crowded factory neighborhoods,
Carson and his friends started to make a little extra money
playing at square dances for families who had migrated from
their farms to Atlanta, now one of the south's biggest cities.
"Fiddlin' John" Carson soon began appearing wherever
an audience could be found... Store openings and farm auctions,
confederate veterans' reunions,
and political events ranging from Ku Klux Klan gatherings
to a rally in support of a communist organizer.
At the Georgia old-time fiddlers' convention, Carson found his biggest audiences.
Each year, several thousand people came to hear music that
reminded them of simpler times and the rural homes of their past.
Going to a dance was sort of like going back home
to mama's or to grandma's for Thanksgiving.
Country music is full of songs about little old log cabins
that people have never lived in, the old country church
that people have never attended.
But it spoke for a lot people who were being forgotten
or felt they were being forgotten.
Country music's staple, above all, is nostalgia.
Just a harkening back to the older way of life, either real or imagined.
Well, all right!
In 1922, Carson's audience expanded again
thanks to a new technology.
The "Atlanta Journal" began operating the south's first
radio station, whose call letters WSB stood
for "Welcome South, Brother".
Anyone who could sing, whistle, recite, play any kind
of instrument, or merely breathe heavily was pushed
in front of the WSB microphone.
None of the talent was paid, but that made no difference.
They trouped to WSB to perform, and Aunt Minnie
stayed home to listen.
The radio exposure brought Carson invitations to
play at paid performances in country schoolhouses
and small-town theaters throughout the region.
Until I began to play over WSB,
just a few people in and around Atlanta knew me.
But now my wife thinks she's a widow most of the time
because I stay away from home so much playing around over
this part of the country.
Radio made me.
But an older technology
would now bring Carson and his kind of music
to even more people.
Ever since Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph,
Americans had been buying the machines for their homes.
Most of the music available to them was by "high-brow"
artists like opera tenor Enrico Caruso.
Then, in the summer of 1923, a young man from Missouri
named Ralph Peer would change all that.
You couldn't possibly be a success... at least, it would
be unusual to be a success... if you knew too much about music.
You have to be a businessman and a prophet, and you also
have to be somewhat of a gambler.
By age 31, Ralph Peer had risen through
the ranks of the new general phonograph company, which had
carved out a niche with records aimed at America's
immigrant populations.
Italian, German, Russian, Scandinavian, Polish, Greek,
Turkish, Yiddish, Slovakian, Lithuanian, and Chinese households
all could buy music recorded in their own languages.
In 1920, Peer had discovered another
untapped niche in the market.
With the company's Okeh Label, he recorded vaudeville singer
Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues", the first recording
aimed at a black audience.
It sold 75,000 copies in its first month.
Seeking more black musicians for what the label now called
its "race" records, in June of 1923, Peer brought Okeh's
engineers to Atlanta.
But after recording two female blues singers and a quartet
from Morehouse College, he was introduced to radio station
WSB's new celebrity, "Fiddlin'' John" Carson.
Peer was reluctant to record Carson at first, uncertain
a market even existed for old-time music.
A year earlier, Texas fiddler Eck Robertson had recorded two
songs for the powerful Victor talking machine company,
but they had not sold well.
Ralph Peer decided to take a chance on "Fiddlin'' John".
He recorded Carson playing an old minstrel song, "The Little
Old Log Cabin in the Lane", romanticizing slave life.
"Fiddlin' John" Carson comes up to the microphone,
and he grabs his fiddle, and he busts right into
a tune that he's known all his life.
In Atlanta, the records sold like hot cakes.
Peer realized that there was another segment of America,
predominantly white, working-class southerners,
eager to buy recordings of music they were familiar with.
Ralph Peer began looking for other artists like "Fiddlin'' John"
and soon proclaimed in an advertisement that Okeh had
"uncovered a brand-new field for record sales" and offered
"old time pieces" that were setting off, he said,
a craze for this "hill country music".
"The phonograph companies have opened a new market,
one that they had not dreamed existed:
A wide market among the folk of the mountains,
of the mining districts and the timberlands.
"Plain folk to whom the story is the important part of any song,
who like the accompaniment simple
and the words understandable".
"Collier's" Magazine.
Country music is the music of the working class, is the music of people
who don't have a lot of power.
We like to talk about the founding fathers a lot,
but the people who built this country, that's the people
where country and blues come from,
you know, are those people.
And you don't have America without them.
Ralph Peer may have discovered a new field for record sales
in the 1920s, but the music itself was anything but new.
It sprang from many sources, some of them older than the nation itself.
The first colonists brought with them ballads from
the British isles that were already centuries old...
Songs that told stories, often of lost loves, murders, or tragic events.
Some were passed along in the new world relatively unchanged
from generation to generation.
"Barbara Allen", the plaintive story of an unrequited love,
a broken heart, and two deaths,
dated all the way back to the 1600s.
It was nearly 300 years old when Bradley Kincaid, who had
learned it from his uncle in Kentucky, first sang it on the radio.
I grew up in the great smoky mountains of east Tennessee.
My mother was a great singer!
She had one of those old mountain voices.
She used to sing all those songs from the old world...
"Barbara Allen", "Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree".
She said that's how people used to carry the news,
when they brought those old songs over from the old world...
Those old Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh ballads.
She told a great story, and it was all believable.
So just watching mama was like watching TV, hearing her sing
and tell all these stories.
I got to finish it.
For generations,
Americans had also been adapting melodies from the old world
by attaching new lyrics to match their experiences in the new world.
"Bury me not on the lone prairie" came from an old
sailor's song, "The Ocean Burial".
"The Streets of Laredo" took its tune from an Irish ballad
written around 1700, "The Bard of Armagh".
We took that melody, and we wrote
about gun fighters gettin' killed.
We didn't invent country music,
and I don't wanna say we stole it.
That's a pretty strong word.
But I will say that we adapted it from the English,
the Irish, and the Scottish people.
Nowhere was music more essential than in church.
The hymns people sang on Sunday mornings warned them
of God's eternal judgment, but also offered the promise
of salvation, even to the sinners who had been out
carousing Saturday night.
The best Christian in the world is the one who
realizes that he needs to be.
You know, you've got to experience Saturday night
sometimes to know what Sunday morning's all about.
Human beings, what do we think about?
We got very basic things.
We think about our sexual relationship, that we need to
propagate our species that makes our life sweet and also
bitter, and our relationship to whatever our lord is.
So, we put those two things right together.
The Saturday night function
and the Sunday morning purification.
And you got to get purified on Sunday so you can do
the same thing again next Saturday.
Come on, now.
Well, I went to the old "primitive" baptist,
where they all get up together and sing the same part,
no music, or nothing.
Everybody sung lead.
That's the way it was in the old baptist sound.
Someone would lead the song, and give it out.
You call it "lining". You say, "tarry with me, my savior".
Then you'd...
And they'd know what to do.
Most people couldn't read music, so singing schools
were organized to teach them a basic system called shape notes.
Songbook publishers dispatched traveling quartets to
demonstrate how to add Harmony to the songs, and then sell their products.
People congregated at singing conventions
and gospel tent revivals, where they sang old spirituals
born in black churches
or popular hymns like "Will the Circle be Unbroken?"
And a cheery gospel tune, "Keep on the Sunny Side",
inspired by the writer's invalid cousin who asked that
his wheelchair always be pushed "on the sunny side" of the street.
Sometimes, revival organizers simply set religious lyrics to
popular melodies everyone already knew.
"Why", the saying went, "should the devil have all the good tunes?"
Then you go...
That makes you feel good.
You can have a hip hurting, you can have arthritis,
you can have anything wrong with you,
but, again, if you can sing that song,
you're gonna feel better.
Jazz emphasizes this, and blues emphasizes this,
and country emphasizes this, you know,
but where they all start is in this beautiful sort of boiling
American music pot.
The instruments people played came from every corner of the globe.
Fiddles were the most common, having been brought to America
by successive waves of immigrants.
The first known fiddle contest in north America was
advertised in Virginia in 1736, 40 years before
the Declaration of Independence.
There is no difference between a fiddle and a violin.
I went to see Itzhak Perlman at the Opry house in Nashville.
And somebody took me backstage before the show.
And I said, "Hi, Mr. Perlman. I'm Charlie Daniels.
I am a fiddle player".
He said, "we are all fiddle players".
So, if Itzhak Perlman is a fiddle player, I'm proud to be
associated with the fiddle.
The banjo,
second only to the fiddle early on, came to America as
a gourd with a fretless neck, brought by slaves from Africa.
It's a drum. You know, it's...
This thing came from Africa.
This thing is part of a long tradition.
They've got hieroglyphics of these at the pyramids in Giza.
It's America...
But it's got Africa in it.
The banjo eventually became
the instrument of choice for many musicians in the 19th century.
There's something mysterious about the sound
of a 5-string banjo or even a 4-string banjo.
It doesn't make you sad. It makes you feel better.
The banjo is a sound that captures people.
It's hard to ignore because it's so percussive.
By the 1920s, Charlie Poole, a textile
worker from Eden, North Carolina, had become
the best-known banjo player in the nation.
He had broken several fingers playing baseball, resulting
in a permanently curled right hand that forced him to
develop a unique, 3-fingered style,
but most musicians still preferred the "clawhammer" or "frailing" method.
So I play it in the clawhammer style.
So when the minstrel came to town, he would...
It's that kind of rollicking, fast-paced,
you know, train whistle kind of stuff.
In the mid-1800s,
another instrument had gained popularity.
Christian Frederick Martin immigrated to New York from
Germany and started producing small gut-string guitars,
whose light sound made them appropriate
for the instrument's main market at the time:
Polite parlor music.
Then black, Hawaiian, and Latino musicians adapted it to
more diverse styles, and when Martin's grandson designed
a new model in the early 20th century,
with a larger body and stronger neck to permit steel strings,
the guitar began to rival the fiddle and banjo in its use.
Orville Gibson of Kalamazoo, Michigan, made guitars, too,
and innovated with the design of another instrument the mandolin.
One of the things about guitars, mandolins,
and banjos that made them popular is you could hear them.
You could hear a fiddle from far away.
You could hear the chords of the guitar and you could hear the banjo.
Another thing is you could carry them with you.
You could put it over your back.
You could tie it to your horse.
You could bring it along,
and you could take it anywhere.
The piano, not so much.
Not all of the music people considered "old-time"
was actually rooted in the deep past, nor did it spring
exclusively from the rural south.
Long before phonographs and radio, traveling shows had
crisscrossed the country, featuring music by
professional songwriters from the cities.
Beginning in the 1840s, Stephen Foster created
a string of heartfelt songs, like "Beautiful Dreamer"
and "Hard Times",
that ended up in the parlors of homes across the nation.
Though he was a northerner who traveled only once below
the Mason-Dixon line, Foster also contributed tunes that were
spread by itinerant minstrel shows... white professional
musicians dressed in blackface, who danced
and performed songs that audiences believed
imitated African-American music and sentimentalized life
in the antebellum south...
"Camptown Races", "My Old Kentucky Home",
"Old Folks at Home".
It's a lot of nostalgia.
In minstrelsy, they sell this version of the American south
like "darkies praising their masters".
Old Uncle Tom, who wishes he was back home in the old south.
That's always been so interesting to me,
the fascination that white cultures here have had with black culture.
On the one hand, it's like the language that is used is so negative.
On the other hand, there is just, like, "but the music!
"But the dance! It's so cool".
The only source of income for a professional
songwriter like Foster was the royalties from sales of sheet music.
His songs were immensely popular, but because of LAX
copyright laws, when he died in New York City's Bellevue Hospital
in 1864 at age 37, Foster was virtually penniless.
Many other songs considered quintessentially Southern
and rural, in fact, came from northern, urban sources.
"Carry Me Back to Old Virginny", was written
by James A. Bland,
a college-educated African-American
born in Flushing, New York.
"Dixie", played at the inauguration
of Jefferson Davis in Alabama, was credited to
Daniel Decatur Emmett of Ohio.
By the 1920s,
as minstrel shows were fading, Ralph Peer recorded Emmett Miller,
still appearing in blackface, singing "lovesick blues",
to which he added a distinctive yodeling break.
Like so much other music of the time, it drew deeply from
so-called "race" music, even if that music was performed
almost exclusively by whites, most of them southerners.
The south itself is a place of black and white southerners.
I mean, it's... there's no "white" south.
It's not Scandinavian.
It is a place where black and white people live,
cheek by jowl, as we say.
And the influences go back and forward.
You have the cultures coming together.
And whenever you have these
contradictions together in the south,
you have a lot of the opposites that create a richness.
I think that friction is a good way to look at the music.
Because of this rub between white and black, country music
comes from the south because this is where slavery happened.
The rub is people mixing.
It starts going back and forth, and it becomes this beautiful mix of cultures.
They met and mingled, and became this edge,
but the heart spoke musically to each other.
And then somebody from up here says,
"we can't have that.
You guys can't be doing stuff together".
That's what the rub is.
By the 1920s,
slavery had been abolished for more than half a century,
but segregation was still rigidly enforced
in every aspect of life,
except in the music that kept crossing the racial divide.
Through the ages, blacks imitating whites
imitating blacks imitating whites.
You have the banjo, which comes from Africa.
And you have the fiddle,
which comes from the British isles and from Europe.
And when they meet, they meet in the American south.
And that's the big bang.
African-American style was embedded in country music
from the very beginning of its commercial history.
You can't conceive of this music existing
without this African-American infusion.
But as the music developed professionally,
too often, African-Americans were forgotten.
Country music wasn't called that yet,
but it was music of the country.
It was a combination of the Irish, the recently freed slaves
bringing the banjo into the world, the Spanish effects
of the vaqueros down in Texas, the Germans
bringing over the oompah of polka music all converging.
Sprouting from so many roots...
Old ballads and hymns, tin pan alley compositions,
minstrel shows, and African-American blues...
The music Ralph Peer and his competitors had begun
recording in the 1920s was hard to categorize
or precisely define,
but for marketing reasons, the companies needed a name for it.
In 1925, Ralph Peer recorded a spirited
string band fronted by Al Hopkins in New York City.
As they were leaving, he asked what name he should use
for them in his advertising.
Hopkins answered, "call us anything.
We're nothing but a bunch of hillbillies
from North Carolina and Virginia".
Peer had the name he needed.
Soon, magazines and newspapers were referring to the entire
style as "hill-billy music".
Not every artist appreciated the term or the way they were
often portrayed as quaint and quirky backwoods hayseeds.
The editor of "Variety" magazine described hillbillies as
"illiterate and ignorant", poor white trash
with the intelligence of morons".
"Hillbilly was not a funny word", one musician said.
"It was a fighting word".
It doesn't offend us hillbillies.
It's our music.
But if you're an outsider and you're saying it's "hillbilly music",
'cause you don't know any better, it's almost like a racist remark.
If we're hillbillies, we're proud of that.
But you're not allowed to say it if you don't really know
what you're talking about or mean it.
But as long as it helped sell records,
many performers were fine with it,
including "Fiddlin'' John" Carson,
who had already adopted the persona
of a country bumpkin from north Georgia rather than
the former Atlanta mill worker he really was.
... Would take advantage of this offer...
Radio was exploding.
There were now hundreds of stations in every corner
of the country, and to attract more listeners, they all
borrowed from one of the oldest traditions
of mixing music and commerce, the traveling medicine show.
In a medicine show, you come into town, you set up
in the town square, and you hawk an elixir.
You've got this remedy.
And you pass out handbills, and you take
personal testimonials from paid dudes out there in the audience.
And they tell you about how wonderful they feel,
how their dropsy went away and how their sores
and festering wounds have healed because of this
corn whisky, this snake oil.
So, you've got your product,
and music is only there to push your product.
Music is just like the soapbox you stand on.
It's all about the message,
and radio amplified that.
The radio changed everything.
In tiny Milford, Kansas,
Dr. John R. Brinkley had set up a clinic
that promised to restore men's sexual potency by a special technique...
Implanting Billy goat testicles into them.
To promote his business, Brinkley started radio station
KFKB... whose call letters stood for
"Kansas First, Kansas Best"...
And filled most of the broadcast day inviting listeners
to his clinic and assuring them that "a man
is as old as his glands".
Brinkley, on radio: This is a welcome opportunity
and one that you should take advantage of
while it is possible for you to do so...
He filled the rest of the schedule with crop reports,
weather forecasts, and live music by "Uncle" Bob Larkan,
the Arkansas state champion fiddler.
Shenandoah, Iowa, had two radio stations, owned by
competing seed stores.
They staged fiddle contests and live music from groups
named the "Cornfield Canaries" and the "Seedhouse Girls",
in between pitches for their products.
Sales skyrocketed.
And before long, Shenandoah, population 5,000, was flooded
with visitors from all over the Midwest who wanted to
watch the broadcasts in person, prompting
both companies to build ornate auditoriums, arcade shops,
a miniature golf course, and tourist cabins to
accommodate the crowds.
But they were soon eclipsed by
Sears, Roebuck in Chicago,
which launched station WLS,
for the "World's Largest Store".
On Saturday night, April 19, 1924,
WLS premiered a new show, "The National Barn Dance".
It was modeled after a square dance program
already popular in Fort Worth,
but the Chicago show quickly became
the biggest of its kind in the nation.
Meanwhile, in Nashville, Tennessee,
the success of stations like Chicago's WLS
and Atlanta's WSB caught
the attention of Edwin Craig, the son of the founder
of National Life and Accident Insurance Company.
A radio station, he believed,
might prove an effective way
to help the company's 2,500 salesmen,
who sold low-cost sickness and burial policies door-to-door
to working-class families in more than 20 states.
Edwin Craig's father was against it.
My grandfather thought it was
a waste of money and time.
"We are in the insurance business, and that's what we should do".
But Edwin said, "Dad, let me show you
that this can sell insurance".
The whole idea was to sell insurance.
With his father's reluctant permission, Craig
set up a studio on the 5th floor of the company's
downtown office building,
with thick carpets and pleated drapes hung from the ceiling
to improve the acoustics.
They began broadcasting on October 5, 1925,
with the call letters WSM.
"We Shield Millions".
And that became the logo of the station.
And it was built around a shield, "We Shield Millions".
Craig recruited the personable George D. Hay
from WLS and made him WSM's program director.
Though only 30 years old, hay called himself "the solemn
old judge", and often punctuated his broadcasts by
blowing on a wooden riverboat whistle.
On November 28, 1925, George Hay invited
an elderly musician named Uncle Jimmy Thompson,
a fiddler since before the civil war, to perform on the air.
He called his instrument "Old Betsy", which he said had been
passed down from his ancestors in Scotland, and that night
played for a solid hour.
The response persuaded hay to schedule
a regular Saturday night barn dance on WSM,
using local talent willing to work for free.
Dr. Humphrey Bate,
a Vanderbilt-trained physician from a prominent
Tennessee family with a passion for old-time music,
brought his string band to the show.
Hay liked their music, but insisted they needed a new name.
Dr. Bate's orchestra soon became the possum hunters.
Hay would do the same with other bands, insisting they
take on hillbilly personas, even if they were urban sophisticates.
The biggest star of WSM's new barn dance was David Macon,
who had once made his living driving mule wagons
near Murfreesboro, playing his banjo as he traveled,
and singing, it was said, "in a voice you could
hear a mile up the road".
And now friends, we present Uncle Dave Macon,
the Dixie Dewdrop... with his plug hat, gold teeth,
chin whiskers, gates-ajar collar, and that million-dollar
Tennessee smile, and his son Dorris.
Let her go, Uncle Dave!
Known as "Uncle Dave" Macon, he entertained
audiences with his versatile banjo picking, his mixture
of old-time and tin pan alley songs, and his boisterous antics.
Uncle Dave Macon had a verve and a vitality
and an energy that scarcely any younger performer possessed.
It was a real treat not only to hear him sing and play
the banjo, but to watch him.
He played, he twirled the banjo, he stomped his feet,
he whooped and yelled, and he was a storehouse
of stories.
Macon was proud to be called a hillbilly.
In 1924, he had been the first to use the term in a recording.
He billed himself as "The struttinest strutter
that ever strutted a strut".
He was just such a down-home, folksy entertainer.
And he sang songs largely borrowed
from the black tradition
and didn't do anything to hide it, either.
I didn't play while I was working,
but whenever we stopped to eat
or take a break, I'd pull out my harp and start blowing on it.
One time I was working for a white feller in a cornfield,
and he told me that if I worked for him, I'd have to
leave my harp at home.
"Well", I told him, "if I do, I'll have to stay at home with it".
I meant it, too.
Deford Bailey.
Another regular on WSM's "Barn Dance" was Deford Bailey.
He was born about 40 miles east of Nashville in 1899,
the grandson of a slave.
Instead of a baby rattle, Bailey told people,
his parents gave him a harmonica.
At age 3, he was stricken with polio and confined to his
bed for nearly a year.
It left him with a slightly deformed back
and stunted his growth.
And in that time that he was laying in the bed for a year, he would listen to
trains go by, and he would blow his harmonica just like 'em.
He listened to dogs baying, and he played just like 'em.
He could mimic anything.
Bailey was barely 4'10" tall,
weighing less than 100 pounds.
And by 1925, he was living in Nashville, where he
had held a series of jobs...
A houseboy for several wealthy families,
working in the kitchen at the Maxwell house hotel,
shining shoes at a local barber shop... all the time
developing his own style on the harmonica and hoping to
make a living with his music.
One of his favorite tunes was the "fox chase",
a song that dated back to
Irish bagpipe music and that Bailey had heard his
grandfather play on the fiddle.
His version added the shouts of the fox hunter urging his
hound dogs on, without skipping a beat on the harmonica.
When I was a kid, I listened to the radio and I...
I remember him.
Boy, he'd play the "fox chase" and... and you would...
You were right there with him, chasing that fox. Ha ha!
Deford Bailey and his famous "fox chase".
Along with "Uncle Dave" Macon and the possum hunters,
Deford Bailey quickly became one of WSM's
most popular performers, appearing on the show
more than any other act.
Needless to say, we thoroughly enjoy
your Saturday night program.
I have one request to make, and that is when your
harmonica artist puts on the "fox hunt", that we are given
some advance notice.
Last night, my old bird dog was laying
in front of the fireplace when your artist
repeated the words, "get him! Sic him!"
Before anyone could interfere, my old dog had turned over
two floor lamps and a smoking stand.
Mrs. Holloway Smith, Jefferson City, Missouri.
Between the broadcasts,
like the "Barn Dance's" other stars,
Bailey spent the week touring in other towns.
You know, you've got Deford Bailey
and "Uncle Dave" Macon.
Uncle Dave Macon's father was a captain in the confederate army.
Deford Bailey's grandparents were slaves.
Now they're working... they're driving in a Packard car,
crisscrossing the south.
Deford can't stay in any of the hotels "Uncle Dave" is in,
he can't eat in any of those restaurants, but he is free
when he's standing up on the stage.
Meanwhile, the hillbilly image George Hay
promoted for the show had begun to grate
on Nashville's business leaders and social elite.
Edwin Craig's country club friends worried that the "Barn Dance",
even though it was broadcast only once a week,
was damaging the city's reputation.
Nashville was viewed as the "Athens of the South".
We have the big fine Parthenon, which is an exact
replica of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.
And we have these wonderful universities.
They thought the hillbilly music was tacky and terrible.
They'd rather stay the "Athens of the south",
and don't talk about country music.
To mollify his critics, Edwin Craig
began broadcasting a more refined show from NBC,
featuring the New York symphony conducted by
Dr. Walter Damrosch, just before switching to the "Barn Dance".
One night, Damrosch closed his show with the orchestra
imitating the sound of a train coming into a station.
Judge hay came on the air immediately afterward
and called on Deford Bailey, who performed a harmonica piece
that duplicated the sound of a steam locomotive
as it starts off slowly, picks up speed, and then fades away
into the distance.
"Some people can play the train", Bailey said,
"but they can't make it move like I do".
"We had been listening to music taken largely from grand opera",
hay informed his listeners when Bailey was finished.
"From now on, we will present the Grand Ole Opry".
Then he blew his trademark wooden whistle and instructed
his entertainers, "let's keep it close to the ground, boys",
meaning nothing too fancy.
Within a few weeks,
the "Barn Dance" had a new name:
The "Grand Ole Opry".
It would eventually become the longest-running show on American radio,
and it was doing exactly what Edwin Craig had intended:
Reaching a far-flung audience to help
national life's sales force.
"Hello, Ms. Jones. I'm from the 'Grand Ole Opry.'
can I come in a few minutes and talk to you
about some insurance?"
Your Saturday night "shindig" has got my floors
down to the second plank, and I'm afraid someone
will drop through on my barrel of preserves.
Would you please send one of your agents down here to
insure my carpets, floors, shoes, and everything
in connection with the household?
George Britting.
By 1927, the roaring twenties had
reached a full head of steam.
The nation's wealth had more than doubled,
and for the first time, more than half of all Americans
now lived in towns and cities.
Prohibition had made
the manufacture and sale of liquor illegal,
but people found plenty of ways to drink.
It was called "the jazz age", named for the hot, syncopated
music that originated in New Orleans and was sweeping
the country.
For some, like the automobile tycoon Henry Ford, the new music
represented everything they considered wrong with the country's moral direction.
Henry Ford felt that jazz was a "Jewish conspiracy
to africanize American taste".
What he hoped to do was to reintroduce the old-time dances
of his youth, along with the string bands
and the fiddling that had accompanied these dances.
And in revitalizing the older forms of music,
he would also revitalize the older society.
Ford encouraged his car dealers to sponsor
traditional fiddle contests and published a book
describing old-time dance steps,
all in the belief it could somehow
turn people away from jazz and restore American culture
to a seemingly simpler, more virtuous past.
No one had done more than Ralph Peer to bring both kinds
of music to the public.
Since recording "Fiddlin'' John" Carson
and other hillbilly acts,
he had also brought more black musicians
into the studio for his "race" records:
W.C. Handy;
Jelly Roll Morton;
Gus Cannon's jug stompers;
and king Oliver and his creole jazz band,
with a young Louis Armstrong on cornet.
To Peer,
hillbilly music and the blues shared common roots.
But as a businessman,
he was less interested in music history and theory
than in profits, and by July of 1927,
he was enjoying plenty of them.
He had left his job with Okeh and joined the biggest
recording label in the nation,
the Victor talking machine company,
after making them an unprecedented offer...
He would work for no salary if he could control the copyrights
of the songs and collect the publishing royalties.
Then he offered his artists something equally
rather than buying the copyrights outright
for a nominal fee and keeping all the royalties,
as most publishers did,
he would share a portion of future royalties
with them if they had written the song.
He called it a "square deal", one that had been denied artists
in the past, and many of his musicians were lured by
the incentive to follow him to Victor.
Among them was Ernest "Pop" Stoneman,
a carpenter from the Blue Ridge section of southwest Virginia,
near the town of Galax.
When Stoneman had heard
some of the early hillbilly recordings in 1924,
he told his wife he could sing better than that,
and went to New York to prove it.
His recording for Peer of "The Sinking of the Titanic"
became one of the biggest hits of the day.
Soon, he was Victor's top hillbilly artist
and making enough money to buy some land and build a new home
for his wife and growing family, which would eventually
number 23 children.
Peer wanted to make more recordings of Stoneman.
Stoneman suggested that Peer come to him, and bring his
equipment to nearby Bristol,
a city which sat astride the Virginia-Tennessee border.
He promised that the region was home to plenty of other acts
that would make the trip worthwhile.
Ralph Peer had been corresponding
with "Pop" Stoneman, who said,
"you need to come to Bristol so that we can capture
some of this lightning in a bottle",
this sound that was coming out of the hills
around Galax, Virginia.
Peer and two engineers arrived in Bristol
in late July 1927 and set up their temporary studio
on the second floor of a vacant building,
a former hat company on the Tennessee side of Bristol's main street.
They were using new equipment now, which greatly improved
the fidelity of the sound...
An electric carbon microphone instead of a horn
that permitted performers to sing
with greater intimacy rather than shouting to be heard.
All of the equipment, except the microphone,
would be hidden from the artist.
Stoneman and his group laid down
10 tracks, but Ralph Peer became worried
that not enough other artists were turning up.
He invited the editor of the "Bristol News Bulletin"
to attend the morning session, hoping for some free publicity.
Intensely interesting is a visit
to the Victor talking machine recording station.
This morning, Ernest Stoneman and company
were the performers,
and they played and sang into the microphone
a favorite in Grayson County, Virginia,
namely "I love my Lulu Belle".
He received from the company over $3,600 last year
as his share of the proceeds on his records.
$3,600 was nearly 4 times the average yearly income in America.
This worked like dynamite.
After you read this,
if you knew how to play "C" on the piano,
you were gonna become a millionaire.
Groups of singers arrived by bus, horse and buggy,
train, or on foot.
Ralph Peer.
Now groups eager to become stars were
quickly added to the recording session,
including the Bull Mountain Moonshiners,
Red Snodgrass' Alabamians,
and the West Virginia Coon Hunters.
But much more important to Ralph Peer
and to the future of country music would be
the two acts that showed up in Bristol the next week...
Three members of a family from nearby Maces Spring, Virginia,
named the Carters,
and a former railroad brakeman from Meridian, Mississippi,
Jimmie Rodgers.
"Success", Peer once said, is "the art of being
where lightning is going to strike".
It was about to strike for him, twice, and in the same location.
The only thing missing in the newspaper ad,
to me, was, "bring your songs.
Bring your talent to the microphones to audition",
or whatever.
And they should have added, "we're going to start an industry now".
Because that's what happened.
The Carter Family were elemental.
It's like, you know, it was the atom.
It was the beginning of the building blocks for the rest of us.
And, um, those first recordings
and those songs, they were captured rather than written.
You know, they were in the hills like rock formations.
So, in 1927, those first Bristol recordings,
these songs that were part of the collective unconscious
were gathered together, documented forever,
with these plaintive voices and these elemental guitars.
The bedrock was formed for the rest of us.
Alvin Pleasant Carter was 35 years old
that summer of 1927, trying to make ends meet
in the southwest corner of Virginia
in one of the state's most impoverished counties
in an area called Poor Valley.
A.P. had been born with a palsy,
a slight shaking in his hands, and sometimes in his voice,
that his mother blamed on a lightning bolt
that had struck the ground next to her just before his birth.
Although his schooling ended when he was 10,
he had learned to play the fiddle
and read the shape-note songbooks
used in the local Methodist church,
impressing people with his rich bass voice.
He took a job selling fruit tree saplings,
rambling for miles on foot from farm to farm.
In 1914, after crossing clinch mountain
to find customers on the more prosperous side called Rich Valley,
he heard a young woman's clear and deep voice singing nearby.
It caught his interest.
So did the singer herself.
Sara Dougherty was barely 16 at the time
and steeped in old mountain ballads and gospel hymns.
A year later, they married.
A.P. brought her by wagon to a two-room cabin in Poor Valley,
later building a more proper home
in the foothills of clinch mountain,
not far from Maces Spring.
As restless as he was ambitious, A.P. would be gone
for weeks at a time over the next 10 years,
selling his trees while leaving Sara to care for their children,
tend the crops, chop firewood,
and handle all the responsibilities
of a mountain home without his help.
When he was home, they sang at church gatherings.
After one man gave Sara $10 because, he said,
she had "the prettiest voice I ever heard",
A.P. got the notion they might make a little money
with their music.
In 1926, a scout for the Brunswick Label appeared in the region.
He was looking for a singing fiddler, and suggested putting
Sara in the background because, he said,
a woman in the lead could never be popular.
A.P. wouldn't agree.
Instead, he added another woman to the group...
A younger cousin of Sara's named Maybelle Addington,
a shy teenager who had learned to play the banjo
from her mother as well as the autoharp.
Then she took up the guitar and mastered it.
When Maybelle married A.P.'s brother, Eck Carter,
the couple moved to a two-story house
less than a mile from A.P. and Sara's home.
In late July of 1927,
A.P. heard about Ralph Peer's Bristol sessions,
and announced they were going.
The women were reluctant at first.
Sara was still nursing her third child,
and Maybelle, now 18, was pregnant.
Eck was against it, too,
since his wife was so far along.
But A.P. was insistent,
persuading Eck to lend him his car
by promising to weed his brother's cornfield in exchange.
It took them all day to make the 26 miles to Bristol.
The next morning, August 1, 1927,
they auditioned for Peer.
"As soon as I heard Sara's voice", he recalled,
"that was it.
I knew it was going to be wonderful".
That evening,
the Carters returned to record four songs,
beginning with "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow",
an old tune Sara and Maybelle had known all their lives.
Although A.P. hadn't written the original,
Peer considered his arrangement of it and the others they played
different enough for Carter to claim a composer's credit
and permitting Peer to be the publisher.
And so simple, right?
I mean, it's like you've heard the melody a million times.
That's one of those songs that feels like it's always existed.
If Taylor swift or Carrie Underwood
or whoever the hottest girl of the moment is
wants to know where they come from,
they need to go all the way back to the voice of Sara Carter
'cause she was the first one.
It's Sara. Then there's been everybody else.
It's that simple.
As far as guitar playing goes,
there's Maybelle, then there's everybody else.
That's the genesis of it all.
The trio performed two takes of each song that night,
Sara singing lead and playing autoharp;
Maybelle on the guitar and adding harmony,
A.P. sometimes joining in.
Peer was impressed.
He invited the Carters to come back the next morning for another session.
Only Sara and Maybelle showed up.
A.P. may have been getting a car tire replaced.
It didn't bother Peer.
He had Sara sing two solos with Maybelle on the guitar.
One was a tune Sara said she didn't like
but agreed to perform:
"Single Girl, Married Girl",
which compares the carefree life of an unmarried woman
to the burdens of a wife left at home
to care for her babies.
It cut too close.
Well, the single girl has the good life,
and the married girl, it's hard. It's tough.
Performed by a married girl
who, I don't think she wanted to be married anymore.
With the sessions concluded
and $300 in their pockets
as payment for recording six songs,
the group now called the Carter Family
headed back to Maces Spring.
"We made it home", Sara remembered,
"and never thought no more about it.
We never dreamed about the record business turning out
the way it did".
A.P. started work hoeing his brother's cornfield,
just as he'd promised.
Meanwhile, back in Bristol,
Peer was about to record someone else
who would also change hillbilly music forever.
Somebody told me a story one time
about Red Foley and Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb.
They got together one time,
and they were all big Jimmie Rodgers fans,
and they said, "could we agree
on our favorite ten... Top ten Jimmie Rodgers songs?"
And they said, Wills said, after a lot of debate and talk,
said they couldn't get it down to less than 50.
James Charles Rodgers from R, Mississippi,
was still a month shy of his 30th birthday in August of 1927,
but he had already packed several lifetimes
into those years, most of them spent in constant motion.
His mother had died by the time he was 6,
and his father, who quickly remarried,
was often absent, working as a foreman
for the New Orleans and northeastern railroad.
Little Jimmie ended up in the care of a spinster aunt,
who was charmed by his irrepressible good humor
and indulged his adventurous spirit.
He started skipping Sunday school,
then school itself,
preferring instead to shoot dice with the shoeshine boys
at a local barbershop,
listen to traveling salesmen swap stories,
or haunt Meridian's theaters that offered silent movies
between vaudeville acts.
He picked up the mandolin, then the banjo,
then the guitar;
won an amateur contest singing
"Bill Bailey, won't you please come home?";
and at age 13 ran away for a while
with a traveling medicine show
before his father retrieved him in Alabama
and put him to work as a water boy
for the railroad's mostly black crews,
who laid and maintained the tracks.
Just look at the train yards north or southbound.
You can almost see and hear Jimmie Rodgers
and those characters that he worked with in those yards.
And you can hear the music of Mississippi.
You can hear the music of the old south being sung to him
almost like those field chants
or, you know, the labor camps, or when they would drag tie.
You can absolutely see how Jimmie Rodgers took it all in.
Off and on for the next decade,
he held a series of railroad jobs...
Flagman, baggage man, and then a brakeman on the run
between Mississippi and New Orleans,
but it was never steady work.
He married at age 19, was separated in less than a year,
hoboed around the country, then came back to Meridian,
and in 1920, after his divorce came through,
married Carrie Williamson,
the 17-year-old daughter of a Methodist preacher.
9 months later, she gave birth to Anita.
When he wasn't working,
Jimmie loafed around poolrooms and rail yards;
when he was working, his paychecks quickly disappeared...
On tickets to shows,
on every phonograph record he could buy,
and on a men's perfume he had discovered in New Orleans...
Black Narcissus, whose scent, he thought,
masked the harsh smell of railroad fumes.
Woman, as Carrie Rodgers: His pockets all had holes in them.
Any money that went into them went right on out again.
He always declared that money was no good
until after you'd spent it.
Then it was good, for it had furnished you
and those around you with the good things of life.
"It was chicken one day, feathers the next",
Carrie remembered, "but it seemed that our chickens
were mostly all feathers".
Rodgers joined another traveling show in 1923,
performing some blues numbers he'd picked up,
but it was cut short when he got called home
after his and Carrie's 6-month-old second daughter died.
A year later came more bad news.
Working once more for the railroad,
Rodgers developed a hacking cough.
Carrie noticed flecks of blood in his handkerchief.
A doctor diagnosed the problem:
It was tuberculosis,
at the time the leading cause of death in the United States.
There was no known cure.
Woman, as Carrie Rodgers: When he was released
from the hospital, we knew...
Knew that never again should he be a ladder climber,
never again ride the decks and test his lungs
against roaring winds,
never again collect a railroader's stake.
Rodgers turned to music
as his last chance to support his wife
and surviving daughter.
He played for dances around Meridian
and briefly joined a medicine show,
strumming his banjo in blackface
on village street corners
while a so-called doctor peddled snake oil to passersby.
He would visit stores
and talk the owner into selling him a guitar on credit,
then go to the nearest pawn shop to hock it for cash.
In early 1927, Rodgers moved his family to Asheville, North Carolina,
hoping the mountain air would improve his health.
There he met a string band trio called The Tenneva Ramblers
and formed a quartet.
The group was barely scraping by
when one of the members decided to go ask his father,
a barber in Bristol, Tennessee,
for help getting a better car for touring.
Rodgers went along with him.
They arrived on August 1st, the same day the Carter Family
were doing their first recording,
and went to a boarding house
near the building Ralph Peer was renting.
There they learned that the town was full of musicians
trying to make records with the Victor label.
They hurried back to north Carolina
for the other band members
and returned to Bristol on August 3rd.
But as they rehearsed in the boarding house,
the group fell apart.
The other members said Rodgers couldn't play well enough.
An argument broke out and ended
when Rodgers said they could do what they wanted.
He would record by himself with just his guitar.
The Tenneva Ramblers weren't really anything special.
Breaking up might be the best thing
that ever happened to country music.
On the afternoon of August 4, 1927,
Jimmie Rodgers entered Ralph Peer's makeshift studio.
"I liked him the first time I saw him", Peer recalled.
Rodgers sang only two tunes that day,
"The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep".
He assured Peer that with a little more time,
he could come up with a lot more.
Then he left town.
During his two weeks in Bristol, Peer recorded
more than two dozen performing acts.
A few of them would go on to have
long careers in the music business;
most would soon be forgotten.
But by discovering the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers,
Ralph Peer had set the future of country music in motion.
I think Jimmie Rodgers represented
the rambling side of country music...
The desire to hit the road,
leave responsibilities behind,
to go out and experience the world.
The Carter Family, on the other hand,
embodied the sanctity of the home and of the family,
particularly mother, who kept the home together.
And those have been two important impulses
in country music ever since
'cause sort of the reverse sides of the same coin.
That November,
shortly after his first recording had been released,
Rodgers showed up unannounced in New York City
with only $10 in his pocket.
He checked into an expensive hotel,
showed the desk clerk a copy of his new record
and brashly told him to charge everything
to the Victor company.
Then he called Ralph Peer
to say he was ready for another session.
Among the four sides Rodgers recorded
a few days later was one he had strung together
from a mixture of songs
he had heard over the years...
A standard 12-bar blues melody
with snatches of borrowed lyrics
that introduced Thelma,
"that gal that made a wreck out of me",
but bragged, "I can get more women
than a passenger train can haul",
then warned, "I'm gonna buy me a pistol
just as long as I'm tall"
and, "I'm gonna shoot pore Thelma
just to see her jump and fall".
To it he added what he called a "Blue yodel",
something he had been developing
that also drew from deep roots...
The alpine yodels that became popular in America in the 1840s,
then were adapted by black and blackface minstrel singers
at the turn of the century.
Jimmie Rodgers was conflating the blues
with the rural white experience and sound.
And I think this went on a lot.
We just don't see it until he showed up.
And, of course, he had that little yodel,
And, people hadn't really heard that before.
He was "tacking yodels
onto just about everything", Carrie remembered.
"Even his share of conversation around the house was largely yodels".
Peer released the new song under the title "Blue Yodel"
in the spring of 1928.
It was an immediate hit.
Well, he had songs that spoke
in the language they understood
about subject matter they understood.
He had this wonderful ear and this wonderful voice.
And his delivery was totally, totally unheard of.
I think it came out of the black blues
and mixed in with his yodeling,
and they called him the "blue yodeler".
Rodgers had even greater success
with a song recorded in a third session,
also derived from African-American blues
and jug band musicians... "he's in the jailhouse now".
We get to go to the other side of the tracks
when we buy Jimmie Rodgers records.
We're able to go to those juke joints
that we're not invited to.
Whether we know it or not, that's where the appeal is.
By midsummer of 1928
with the release of more songs,
"Brakeman's Blues" and a number Peer entitled "Blue Yodel No. II",
royalties started pouring in... $1,000 a month,
which Rodgers spent as quickly as they arrived.
He paid $1,500 for the "Jimmie Rodgers special",
a personalized Martin guitar with gold inlay,
his name spelled out in mother of Pearl on the neck,
and the word "thanks" emblazoned on the back.
He began a tour of major theaters and auditoriums
in the south, making $500 a week,
sometimes appearing in his railroad outfit
and billing himself as "the singing brakeman".
In Miami, appearing before a huge international men's Bible class,
he admitted he didn't know any church songs,
so he sang "In The Jailhouse Now"
and the racy "Frankie and Johnny" instead.
They gave him a standing ovation.
Then he made a triumphant return to Meridian,
arriving in a shiny new car,
wearing expensive clothes and diamond rings,
and making a public point of paying off his old debts.
He talked about us.
He was our representative.
As country people, he was our ambassador.
He was a rogue just like the rest of us.
He had hard times just like the rest of us,
but we appreciated him dressing up in his cool clothes
and driving in his fancy car
and talking about us country people.
He represented us well.
Rodgers added a string of personal appearances
and autograph sessions at local music stores
and caroused with old friends
despite his increasing exhaustion.
Each performance left him weaker,
dripping in sweat and gasping for breath.
One night, he blacked out backstage.
A doctor told him that without proper rest,
he wouldn't live more than another year or two.
Instead, Rodgers booked himself on another tour
and another recording session.
Ralph Peer now began experimenting
with new orchestrations and styles for his star...
Jazz ensembles, small orchestras,
African-American jug bands, ukuleles,
champion whistlers,
or simply musicians Jimmie Rodgers
happened to have met the day before a recording session.
Peer said, "he could record anything".
It didn't matter to him where the music came from.
It didn't matter to him what the style was that he played.
I think he was willing to do whatever was commercial,
whatever would catch the attention of listeners.
To help him come up with more songs
that could be copyrighted,
Rodgers had enlisted Carrie's sister,
Elsie McWilliams, a Sunday school music teacher
with a gift for turning an overheard phrase
or random incident into a melody with lyrics.
Jimmie couldn't read musical notations.
"Crazy little fly specks with funny tails", he called them,
so she often came to teach her new compositions to him in person.
In all, Elsie McWilliams would write or contribute to
more than a third of Rodgers' recorded songs.
At one session in Dallas,
which would include a Hawaiian steel guitar player,
Elsie heard Jimmie say, "I'd like to have me
one of them hula-hula girls".
That night she came up with a new song, which they recorded
"everybody does it in Hawaii".
With its suggestive double entendres,
the song earned a warning from "Variety" Magazine
that record dealers should "not sell this into polite families",
because, the review said,
"it's never made clear what everybody does in Hawaii".
At another session out in Hollywood,
Peer would bring in a 28-year-old trumpet player
to accompany Rodgers.
It was Louis Armstrong, who was on his way to becoming
the most influential jazz artist of all time.
They both were pushing the boundaries of their music.
My father wanted to get them together
to see what would happen, to have that chemistry experiment,
because he knew both individuals.
He knew the strength of their personalities.
And he knew their artistic talent.
Together, they recorded
"Standin' on the Corner", the story of a Tennessee hustler
arrested on Beale Street in Memphis.
Peer released it as "Blue Yodel Number 9".
Hyah! Hyah!
Meanwhile, Rodgers had relocated to Texas,
whose dry climate had attracted several sanitariums
for treating tuberculosis.
In his new surroundings,
he became the "yodeling cowboy",
inspiring a generation of followers to believe
that all cowboys not only sang but yodeled.
Sure.
Give me that old guitar, then...
In the fall of 1929,
Peer brought Rodgers to a studio in Camden, New Jersey,
to make a short talking picture.
Many music executives saw the talkies
as a threat to live performances.
Peer saw them as another opportunity
for his star to become better known.
In 1928, Ralph Peer had called
the Carter Family back into the studio.
Their first recordings had sold well, and he was eager
to capitalize on their growing popularity.
They recorded 12 more songs.
Among them was "Keep on the Sunny Side",
which A.P. would adopt as the Carter Family's signature tune,
and another song,
"I'll Twine Mid the Ringlets",
that had been handed down
in Maybelle's family for generations.
And then we get into...
The Carters' re-titled their version
"Wildwood Flower", featuring Sara singing alone,
with Maybelle demonstrating a guitar technique
she was perfecting in which she picked the melody
with her thumb on the bass strings
while simultaneously providing the rhythm and chords
with her other fingers.
"I didn't even think about it", she said.
"I just played the way I wanted to, and that's it".
It would come to be called the Carter scratch.
Maybelle used a thumb pick and a finger pick
when she played guitar.
And she really only used two fingers...
The thumb and the forefinger.
This thumb was the driving force for the melody.
And grandma would just tell me,
because I was so little when she taught me the Carter scratch,
she said, "this middle finger, you just keep it going no matter what".
Ha ha! And that was kind of like the clue to it all, to a small child.
To me, mother Maybelle as a guitarist
was maybe the most iconic instrumentalist
that we've ever had.
There's rhythm,
and there's the melody.
And at its simplest place,
it still carries maybe the most poetry.
Maybelle's technique would become
one of the most copied guitar styles in music history.
I was talking to Duane Allman's daughter
a while back, and she told me,
"my mama told me that daddy
taught her how to play 'Wildwood Flower' on the guitar".
Now, can you imagine Duane Allman saying, "no, honey, it's like this".
That's how powerful the Carter Family music was.
There's not a guitar player that's picked up
a 6-string, I don't think, that hasn't touched
on some Carter Family music.
When "Wildwood Flower",
and "Keep on the Sunny Side" sold more than 100,000 records,
royalties started flowing in to Maces Spring.
A.P. was able to buy his first automobile.
He scoured the area for new songs he could copyright,
searching for them among his neighbors,
returning with his pockets filled with scraps of paper
containing bits and pieces of lyrics.
He was a song catcher.
He'd hear about someone having a song, you know,
three hollers over,
and it would take him all day to go up
and hear this person, you know,
and then he'd come back home.
But he'd have a new song that he had never heard before.
A.P. had trouble remembering melodies,
so Sara and Maybelle would set the words
to old ones they had known for years.
Then the three of them would practice the new arrangements.
In the summer of 1928,
A.P. was on a song-gathering trip in Kingsport, Tennessee,
in the black section of town,
when he met a blues singer and slide guitar player
named Lesley riddle.
Riddle had lost a leg in an accident
and now supported himself
playing on street corners and railroad depots.
A.P. invited him to help in the hunt for new songs,
and riddle accepted, ultimately making 15 trips
with Carter through Virginia, East Tennessee, North Carolina,
and parts of Georgia.
Man, as Lesley riddle: He'd just go into people's homes
and tell them, "hello. I was told by someone that you
got a song, kind of an old song.
Would you mind letting me hear it?"
So they'd go and get it and sing it for him.
He'd go 90 miles if he heard someone say
that someone had an old song
that had never been recorded or didn't have a copyright.
While Carter wrote down the words,
riddle focused on memorizing the melodies.
"I was his tape recorder", riddle said.
Riddle also shared some blues guitar stylings with Maybelle
and introduced the Carters to hymns sung
in African-American pentecostal and baptist churches,
which they added to their own gospel and sacred selections.
One melody he taught them
was "When the world's on fire".
The Carter Family would later reuse the basic tune
for another song, "Little Darling, Pal of Mine".
A few years after that, Woody Guthrie,
an admirer of the Carters, would incorporate it
into his classic "This Land is Your Land".
That's America.
It came from this black church
and ended up as this folk anthem.
You know, you have all these... These different people going,
"I love that. Let me use it".
It's not, like, "we can't use that because it's black".
But it's, like, "I love that".
That's the beautiful part of American music, is,
like, it doesn't matter who it came from.
"I love that, and I want to do something with it".
Unlike Jimmie Rodgers, who toured constantly,
the Carters stayed close to home.
Maybelle was now a mother, too.
Her daughter Helen had been born
shortly after the Bristol sessions;
a second daughter, June, came along in the summer of 1929.
Sara had her own three children to care for,
and she hated public performances
in front of total strangers.
But A.P. organized short trips
in which they were fed and housed overnight
by rural fans.
He tacked up posters on barns and trees, announcing
an appearance by the trio in churches, schools,
or small-town theaters.
Admission was from 15 to 25 cents.
"The program", the posters promised, "is morally good".
During performances, A.P.'s attention
sometimes seemed to wander.
"If he felt like singing, he would sing", Maybelle said.
"If he didn't, he looked out the window.
So we never depended on him".
Most of the time, the Carters stayed in Poor Valley,
where neighbors often gathered outside their house
just to hear them practice
for the increasing number of recording sessions
Ralph Peer was scheduling for them
in Atlanta, Memphis, Charlotte, and Camden, New Jersey.
The session fees and royalties from record sales...
700,000 copies in two years... Provided a steady income.
A.P. bought larger pieces of land.
Sara got herself some perfume and a mink stole.
Maybelle purchased a bigger Gibson guitar for $275.
Both women indulged themselves by buying motorcycles.
Then in October of 1929,
the financial bubble that had fueled
the roaring twenties burst.
The stock market crashed,
and the nation descended
into what would be called the great depression.
Banks and businesses failed by the thousands.
Millions of workers lost their jobs.
In major cities, destitute residents relied on breadlines
and soup kitchens merely to survive.
The recording industry was hard-hit.
Between 1929 and 1930,
record sales in the United States dropped
from $74 million to $46 million,
then to 17 million in 1931.
No artist was immune,
although for a while sales of Carter Family records held up,
partly thanks to their song "Worried Man Blues",
their best-seller of 1930,
which seemed to both capture the nation's mood
and express the hope that "I won't be worried long".
Pick that thing, boy.
By 1932,
Jimmie Rodgers was more popular than ever.
Hard-up farmers were said to come to town and tell
storekeepers, "give me a sack of flour, a slab of bacon,
and the latest Jimmie Rodgers record".
Fans wrote him letters as if all his songs were
true stories from his life.
They asked him why he had wanted to shoot poor Thelma,
about his time in the jailhouse
or out on the open range,
even castigated Carrie on the belief she had loved
another man while he served as a brakeman riding the rails.
"They proved the sincerity that was in his voice as he sang",
his wife recalled.
"He'd had troubles. He'd suffered.
Those truths were in his songs".
With the famous humorist will Rogers, he made a tour
on behalf of victims of the depression and the dust bowl.
Their appearances raised $300,000 in much-needed relief.
But the deepening economic crisis
affected Jimmie Rodgers, too.
"You're still at the top of the heap",
Ralph Peer assured him, "but the heap isn't so big".
To help pay his bills, Rodgers
kept on touring despite his worsening health.
He seemed to draw strength from his audiences,
even if they were now in smaller venues.
He would stop in the center of a town and play for free,
gaining the publicity he wanted
for that night's paid performance,
then move on the next day.
Everywhere Rodgers went, legends grew up.
A blind newsboy in McAlester was said to have been given a new guitar;
a widow in another town was said to have had
her mortgage paid off.
Sometimes he liked to invite pretty women
to ride around town with him in his shiny car.
After a stop in O'Donnell, Texas, people said he left
two divorces and three separations in his wake.
And everywhere he went,
his music resonated,
especially "Mule Skinner Blues".
"Mule Skinner Blues", his delivery on it
was so tremendous.
I don't know. It just...
It rolls with the flow.
It starts out with a bang and ends up with a bang.
And it has something to say, and it's entertaining.
It's just good.
The bank robber Bonnie Parker
in the midst of a crime spree
with her lover, Clyde Barrow,
spent some of their stolen money
to buy every one of Rodgers' records.
In Brownwood, Texas, a young Ernest Tubb remembered
people lining up for blocks to see him in person,
paying a dollar and filling a local theater
that had trouble getting half that crowd
for a movie costing a dime.
But it all came at a cost.
He traveled now with bags full of medicine,
whose smell he masked
with his black narcissus perfume
and increasing doses of morphine he took with shots of whisky
to combat the pain that racked his chest
with prolonged fits of coughing that brought up bloody spittle.
He collapsed from exhaustion more frequently,
had night sweats that kept him from sleeping.
Rodgers made no secret of the disease that was killing him
or how he intended to respond to it.
"I'm not going to lay in one of these hospital rooms
and count the fly specks on the wall", he told people.
"I want to die with my shoes on".
Woman, as Carrie Rodgers: I now came to realize the awful import
of those two simple words "wasting away",
and I asked myself frantically,
how long? A month? Two? A year?
Rodgers convinced a prisoner
in a Texas penitentiary to write him
a song about his tuberculosis, "Tb blues",
to which he added a final stanza:
"Gee, but the graveyard is a lonesome place.
"They put you on your back,
throw that mud down in your face".
Hundreds of thousands of other Americans had tuberculosis, too.
"Lungers" they were called,
and many families had been touched by the disease
in one way or another.
At one performance, a person in the audience
shouted out some encouragement.
"Spit 'er up, Jimmie", he said, "and sing some more".
To the Lungers, it was a greater tonic
than any physician had been able to prescribe.
It was their own language.
So they chuckled, "old boy Jimmie. He knows!"
And their chuckles were good medicine.
On may 14, 1933, Rodgers arrived in New York City
and checked into the same hotel near Times Square
where he had stayed back in 1927,
when he was a complete unknown.
As always, he was worried about money
and wanted to go back into the studio.
Ralph Peer was shocked at his appearance
and insisted he rest a few days
before starting his recording session.
On may 17th in the Victor studio,
he began the way he had started his recording career...
Just himself and his guitar.
In two long, difficult days,
he laid down six songs.
The tuberculosis was shredding his lungs,
and he was heavily sedated for the pain,
sipping whiskey to clear his throat between takes.
The engineers had to carry him to his cab
after the second afternoon,
and he rested for two days
before returning to record two more songs,
propped up by pillows in an easy chair
in front of the microphone.
On may 24th, he felt strong enough to stand
at the microphone and performed four songs,
resting on a cot in the rehearsal room
between each take.
With the session over, Rodgers felt reinvigorated.
He took in coney island the next day,
had hot dogs for lunch,
drank a glass of newly legalized 3.2 beer,
and napped in the sun.
But that night, back at his hotel,
fits of coughing swept through him,
and he began hemorrhaging
bright red spots onto his pillows.
Early in the morning of may 26, 1933,
Jimmie Rodgers died, drowning in his own blood.
He was only 35 years old.
The Southern railway added a special baggage car
to its New Orleans run
to carry the singing brakeman home.
His pearl-gray casket, covered with lilies
rested on a platform in its center,
with a photograph of Rodgers
dressed in his railroad uniform, two thumbs up...
The brakeman's signal that everything was ready to move on.
Big city newspapers in the east
made only passing reference to Rodgers' death,
but in small towns throughout the south and southwest,
it dominated the front pages.
Solemn crowds gathered along the tracks
to pay their respects as the train made its way
toward Meridian, Mississippi.
After a funeral at the central Methodist church,
he was buried in the oak grove cemetery,
beside the daughter who had died in infancy.
His career had lasted less than 6 years,
but in that time,
Jimmie Rodgers had recorded more than 100 songs,
many of which would be re-recorded for generations
by other artists as proof
that they were staying true to the music's roots.
Jimmie Rodgers started it all.
Without Jimmie Rodgers, there would be no Bob Wills.
Without Jimmie Rodgers, there would be no Hank Williams.
Without Jimmie Rodgers, there would... who knows?
He was it.
His songs never go away,
generation after generation.
Bob Dylan has recorded them; Waylon recorded them.
Johnny Cash recorded them...
Dolly Parton.
Everybody that is anybody has recorded a Jimmie Rodgers song.
The songs keep coming at you.
He set the pace for people like Ernest Tubb
and people like Hank Williams,
people like me,
and, just a whole big section
of country music wouldn't be here
if it hadn't been for Jimmie Rodgers.
In the years that followed,
the music that Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family,
and others had made would continue to evolve,
continue to welcome new musicians and styles,
continue to grow as an industry,
and continue to reflect the experiences
of everyday Americans,
especially during the hard times ahead.
Next time on "Country Music"...
I think hard times and country music were born for each other.
A troubled nation turns to the radio...
The music just provided encouragement to people
to gain assurance for a brighter day beyond this world.
Bob Wills shakes up the stage...
Bob Wills was like Elvis Presley. He was outrageous.
And the war brings a new audience to country.
World War II nationalized country music.
When "Country Music" continues.