- What we'll be doing this evening
is listening to artists, 13 of them,
who were instrumental, major forces
in the history of country music,
and what better guide for those 13 samples
than the man who literally wrote the book
on country music, Country Music USA in 1968
and still going strong, that book
and its various editions.
And is also Professor of History Emeritus
from Tulane University.
He has a show, as you no doubt know,
a country music show on radio station WORT,
and perhaps above all, he's also
a practitioner of the art of country music.
And a pleasure to see you again, Bill Malone.
(audience clapping) - Thank you.
Thank you.
- Well let's start in East Texas, where you started.
And country music is something
that's not just an academic kind of latter-day construct
for you, it's something that comes right out of your bones,
and you were even telling me about hollering earlier.
- Yeah, I always like to tell people that I was a fan
of country music long before I became a student of it.
And I grew up in a household that listened
to the battery radio every morning.
We heard the hillbillies coming out of Dallas
and Forth Worth and Tulsa, Shreveport, and locally.
And before that, my mother sang the old songs.
I don't know where she got them,
because she was singing the old-time songs
before she ever had a radio.
So I grew up in country music culture
and I just was privileged to be able
to write about the subject.
When it came time to do a doctoral dissertation
at the University of Texas, this was back in 1960
after I'd passed the prelim.
I had no idea what I would write on,
but most people I knew
were writing on pretty dull subjects that they hated.
(all laughing)
But I sang all the time, and so my supervisor
knew that I loved the music
and that I knew a lot of songs,
so one day on a trip to Houston to see a football game,
just out of the blue he said,
"You love this music so much,
"why don't you write a history of Nashville publishing?"
That's the way he phrased it, but of course I was delighted,
because I didn't know that anybody
could write a doctoral dissertation
on something they liked.
(all laughing)
- It's the first time I've heard of it.
- So that's the way it happened.
I expanded it well beyond publishing
and wrote the entire history of the music,
and it was published in 1968, and as you said
it celebrated its 50th anniversary just last year.
- That's-- - Thank you.
(audience clapping)
- Worthy of acclaim.
Well now as we all know, it's a big country,
and a lot of the country is in the upper Midwest
or the northwest part of the country or the northeast,
but when we talk about country music,
we're talking about something else.
- Well it was stamped as a southern phenomenon
when it began to develop commercially,
and its most influential performers over the years
have been people like Roy Acuff from Tennessee,
Bob Wills from Texas, Hank Williams from Alabama
and on and on.
And these Southerners who made the first recordings
and first radio broadcasts
sort of stamped their image on the music,
and it's had that image ever since.
Of course, the performers come from everywhere.
And the audience is certainly worldwide,
even when the music was first recorded in the 1920s,
records were being sold in the British Isles,
in New Zealand, Australia, Africa,
so the music has always had a worldwide base.
- You were mentioning a little while ago,
before we went on camera, about Africa and Jimmie Rodgers.
- Yeah, Jimmie Rodgers, as we'll mention
in a few minutes, was the first great commercial performer.
He's now called the Father of Country Music,
because he was so influential
in creating styles and inspiring other musicians.
But his records were made in the late 1920s
by what was then called the Victor Talking Machine Company,
later on RCA Victor.
Those records were distributed around the world,
even in Africa, and there was a group in Africa,
the Kipsigis tribe in eastern Africa, who embraced his music
and they sort of converted Jimmie Rodgers
into a deity, half man, half deity.
(audience laughs)
They loved his yodeling.
It was unlike anything they'd ever heard.
- I'll bet it was.
- And many years later, anthropologists
came through that part of the world
and collected music from them,
and one song they were doing was called "Chemirocha."
(audience laughing)
So the music,
for one thing, it just sort of
gave a romantic picture of America,
a country that was based on rural roots
and still clung to those roots
as it developed into a superpower.
- Now before we get into our first artist
that we'll be sampling,
how would you characterize country music?
- Well nowadays it's hard to characterize,
because it's been so swallowed up by pop styles
that what you hear is virtually indistinguishable,
in my humble opinion.
(audience laughing)
The so-called country music today
is really indistinguishable from other forms of pop rock.
But in its beginnings, say from the early 1920s
until, at least through the '80s,
the music still carried with it
what I think was a distinct working-class edge.
When you heard the music, you thought that that performer,
he knows what he's talking about.
He's lived the life that he's singing about,
and that life was based on rural people
who had moved to town, away from agriculture
into blue collar work and then to industrial work,
and they carried their music with them,
and the music changed as they changed.
And you could still call it country,
although it was far from the rural sound
that we're going to hear in this first record.
- Well this first record, how many of you all
have heard of the Skillet Lickers?
(audience members clap sporadically)
(laughs) Not even as many as I thought,
but they were an important force
in early country music. - The Skillet Lickers,
they were sort of a humorous self-deprecation
of their culture.
How many of you grew up sopping your biscuit
in a pan of gravy
(audience laughing)
or your syrup, you sopped your syrup the same way?
That's where the Skillet Lickers got their name.
But they were a group of country boys
from North Georgia, and they played a brand of music
that had existed in that part of the world
since it was settled by people from Europe,
and the music borrowed heavily from the African sources
that lay around it.
And they played for house parties.
One thing I need to say to maybe set a context
for this first record, because it kind of,
we hear the music making a transition
from its rural roots into something
a little bit more sophisticated, something more urban.
Country music is more recent than one might think.
As far as human history is concerned
it only dates back to the 1920s,
and even then it took a long time
to really evolve into the big business entity
that we know today.
But it was, and ever since the word,
it was a folk phenomenon made by rural people,
working class people, who just made music
for their own consumption, for their own enjoyment.
They played at home, they played in church,
they played in community places
and had local audiences.
I'm sure very few of them, up into the early 1920s,
ever had any idea that this music
could have a larger audience,
that anybody anywhere else might listen to it.
So, listen closely when we hear this record.
This is a Skillet Lickers from around 1928,
playing an old British song called "Soldier's Joy"
that dates from the mid-18th century.
And at the very beginning, Clayton McMichen,
one of the fiddlers, he says, he had a spoken introduction
and he gives you this flavor of what it was like
to make music for your neighbors, just in your own home,
just by clearing out a space for dancers.
So why don't we take a listen to that now.
- "Soldier's Joy."
- [Clayton] Well folks, here we are again,
the Skillet Lickers, red hot and raring to go.
Going to play you another little tune this morning.
Want you to grab that gal and shake a foot and moan.
Don't you let 'em dance on your new carpet,
you make 'em roll it up.
("Soldier's Joy" by the Skillet Lickers)
? Chicken in a bread tray scratchin' out dough ?
? Granny will your dog bite, no child no ?
? Ladies in the center and gents catch air ?
? Hold her Newt, don't let her rare ?
(audience clapping)
- I think we're going to see some toe tapping tonight, Bill.
- Music like that was made all over North America,
but particularly in southern communities,
from the Atlantic coast all the way through East Texas.
- [Norman] And sometimes these were family acts.
- Yeah.
- Like with the-- - like The Carter Family,
The Monroe Brothers, just tradition that's endured.
The Ken Burns people play the song,
which we'll hear at the end of this segment,
called "Will the Circle Be Unbroken"
and they play that repeatedly to show
that's because the music is a family music.
Not only that it unites the musicians
with their audience, who have similar values,
but the music created a tradition
that was handed down from generation to generation,
like Johnny Cash, for example,
married June Carter, who was the daughter
of Maybelle Carter, the trio that we're going
to hear in the next segment.
- What can you tell us about this song?
- As I said, these people who made this music
were just local people, farmers, coal miners,
textile workers, just regular folks.
But the music they made came from everywhere.
A good fiddler wasn't concerned with where a song came from.
He didn't care, it could come from a operatic aria,
or it could come from a minstrel show
or a vaudeville show or a medicine show.
It didn't make any difference.
Or from New York City's Tin Pan Alley.
If they liked the song, they would do it.
They would make it their own.
The Carter Family was made up of A.P. Carter
and his wife Sarah and their sister-in-law Maybelle,
who lived in the little community
of Maces Spring in southwestern Virginia.
And they played just for the home folks,
until one day in August 1927,
a New York talent scout named Ralph Peer
came to Bristol, Tennessee
after having advertised that he was coming.
So people came from all over the southern mountains
to audition for Mr. Peer, hoping that they could record
for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
So in August 1927, the Carter Family
made their first records.
The one we're going to hear was not
in that very first session, that came a little bit later,
but it was an old pop song,
a pop song I think probably first introduced
in New York City and then somehow
it made its way out into the hinterlands
and was taken over by rural people.
It originally was known as "I'll Twine 'Mid the Ringlets,"
but the Carter Family called it the "Wildwood Flower."
("Wildwood Flower" by The Carter Family)
? Oh I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair ?
? With the roses so red and the lilies so fair ?
? And the myrtles so bright with the emerald dew ?
? The pail and the leader and eyes look like blue ?
- That song was composed by a fella from Wisconsin
who died in Elkton, is it Elkhorn?
- Elkhorn.
- J.P. Webster, who wrote "In the Sweet By and By,"
one of the most popular gospel songs.
But that's that style, that instrumental style we heard,
was made by the guitar played by Maybelle.
She played the melody with her thumb
and then provided the rhythm with her fingers,
and there was an autoharp played by Sarah in the background.
But that Carter Family lick, as it was called,
is still endures today, there's still people
who try to emulate it.
- Well of course a guitar, and to some extent, I guess,
the autoharp too, mainstays of country music.
But where's the yodel come in?
(audience laughing)
- Well there's been all kinds of speculation.
Just about every occupational group in America
has some kind of yodel that distinguished them.
We know about the Mexican grito, for example,
the Cajun ah-ee, the cowboy yell,
and my daddy as, I told you before the program
started today, used to go out on the porch every morning
when we lived in the country and just holler
at the top of his voice.
- [Norman] Some nights are like that.
(audience laughing)
- Yeah, just letting off steam,
letting the world know that he was ready to go, you know.
And there are hollering contests in the South.
There's all kinds of them.
But we like to think that the yodel
may have come from some folk source like that,
but I think it's generally accepted
that the yodel came from the Swiss.
Professional Swiss entertainers came to the United States
in the mid 19th century and toured
throughout the nation and popularized the yodel,
and young men began trying to emulate what they'd heard.
Jimmie Rodgers, of course, is the person
who really put it across.
- [Norman] The yodeling brakeman?
- That very same recording session
in Bristol, Tennessee, August 1927,
a young tubercular ex-railroad worker from Mississippi,
he came down from Asheville, North Carolina,
where he'd been living for a while,
he auditioned for Ralph Peer, and he did a couple of songs.
And Peer took the music back up to New York
and began selling a few records,
and then he brought Jimmie up to Camden, New Jersey,
which was the headquarters of the Talking Machine Company,
and then Jimmie began recording the songs
that have endured.
The one we're going to hear gives you a good example
of the influence that Jimmie Rodgers exerted.
We're going to hear a little bit of Dixieland jazz,
we're going to hear a Hawaiian guitar,
we're going to hear Jimmie's Swiss-inspired yodel,
and we're going to the blues,
which was very popular at that time
and which influenced all white country musicians.
And above all, we're going to get a little glimpse
of how important the railroad was
to country musicians and to their fans.
The railroad just symbolized so many great things.
It symbolized escape, for one thing,
escape from farm drudgery and isolation of rural life.
- Yeah, just that freedom of travel around the country,
free if you could get away with it.
- One reason why railroad songs
have continued to be popular to this day.
So why don't we listen to "Waiting for a Train?"
- Jimmie Rodgers. - 1928.
(Jimmie imitates train whistle)
- Imitation train whistle.
(slow jazz music)
Here comes the jazz band.
The Hawaiian guitar.
? All around the water tanks waiting for a train ?
? A thousand miles away from home ?
? Sleeping in the rain ?
? I walked up to a brakeman ?
? To give him a line of talk ?
? He says if you've got money ?
? I'll see that you don't walk ?
? I haven't got a nickel ?
? Not a penny can I show ?
? Get off, get off, you railroad bum ?
? He slammed the boxcar door ?
? Yodel aiee, aiee, oh lay ee ?
(slow jazz music)
He brought all kinds of styles into the music,
and he inspired his listeners.
And as late as the 1970s, with Merle Haggard,
people were still imitating what Jimmie Rodgers
had done many years before.
I think he richly deserves that title
of the Father of Country Music.
- Well, when we get to somebody like Bob Wills,
now we start seeing cowboy hats come out
instead of people just dressing up in their Sunday best.
- Yeah, these musicians, they didn't know
exactly what to call themselves or how to dress
or how to behave.
They were just, as I said, local working-class people
who were trying to make it in show business,
and eventually they hit up on the cowboy
as the most respectable image they could utilize.
Because everybody loves cowboys.
And, you know, we've overcome the blemishes
of the cowboy personality and emphasized only
the freedom, the independence and the courage.
- And the working man. - Yeah.
So Bob Wills, as you mentioned,
was a fiddler from central Texas.
He grew up in a family that had fiddlers
on both sides of the family for many generations back.
But in addition to the rural music,
the rural hoedowns that he grew up with,
he loved pop music.
He particularly loved Bessie Smith.
He loved any kind of jazz, any kind of blues he could hear,
and so he created, along with some other folks,
of course, not by himself, but with some other musicians,
he created a music that was really right for dancing
and he was popular all over the dance halls
of Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma,
particularly the oil areas of those states.
And eventually, well after World War II,
music began to refer to the this style of music
that he had created as Western swing,
because it grew up in the westernmost part of the South,
and it eventually became even more popular in California
with all the Okies who moved there
right before and during World War II.
- Well you had, I guess by 1935 and these records
were going to be broadcast nationwide by then.
By 1935, you had the swing era starting
with Benny Goodman and the big bands,
but I gather Western swing actually
gave the big bands a run for their money
in the '30s. - They did.
Yeah, during the Depression, that was one of the few places
where a musician could find a job.
Bob Wills was very popular working out of Tulsa, Oklahoma
for the most part.
He played dances every night of the week.
He made Columbia Records.
He played over radio station KVOO in Tulsa.
So a young man who loved jazz who wanted a job.
He was happy to get a job with Bob Wills.
And the one thing that made it possible, too,
for these, not only the radio that
exhibited their music everywhere,
it was the fact that electricity was making an impact.
Guitarists were beginning to experiment
with electrification.
- Yeah, the Les Paul phenomenon.
- And so on this next record, we're going to hear
the recording that probably did more than any other
to popularize the electric steel guitar,
and of course that's become central to country music,
to its sound and to its whole image.
- [Norman] The "Steel Guitar Rag?"
- "Steel Guitar Rag."
- [Bob] Look out, friends, here's Leon,
take it away, boys, take it away.
(upbeat guitar music)
Ah, everybody dance now.
(upbeat guitar music)
Ah, swinging, Mr. Leon, swinging.
(upbeat guitar music)
Ya!
(upbeat guitar music)
Ya!
? We got Al Strickland now ?
(upbeat piano music)
- That's very eclectic, isn't it?
(chuckles) There's a lot of things going on there.
That, I don't know what to call it, exactly,
that exuberant commentary from Bob Wills
is kind of unique to him, isn't it?
- Yeah, I think he may have gotten that
from black music, you hear some of that in the earlier bands
but he was the first country musician, as far as I know,
who would shout out at his musicians, you know.
Everything was improvised.
When he wanted the trumpet player to take a break,
he would point at him, and he better be ready.
You better play something a little bit different
than what you played before.
- Now, before these recordings were made
for all this country music,
it wasn't quite so important to have a great voice
or even necessarily to sing on key in some cases.
- I'm offended.
(all laughing)
- But I gather occasionally there were performers who,
without being really strong vocalists artistically speaking,
still were very successful.
- You're leading into Ernest Tubb, aren't you?
- I kind of am, yeah.
Rumor has it he was inclined to sing flat.
- Well Ernest Tubb himself, he was also from Texas,
he often said that the reason that he was so popular
is because when people heard him sing,
they said, "I can do that."
(all laughing)
Right, 'cause I personally think if he was
better than that self-deprecation,
but he did have a distinctive voice,
and I think that one reason why people
like these voices, whether they sang on key or not,
is because they just seemed to be real.
They really reflected the working-class lives
and people who were really singing
about what they knew, what they believed in.
Ernest Tubb is representative today
of the honky-tonk tradition.
In the 1930s, after the repeal of Prohibition,
this music began to move into dance halls
and barrooms all over America,
and of course, obviously, the music had to change
as it moved into this environment.
A lot of the themes would change,
you wouldn't hear as many songs about mama
and the church as you had in the past.
Not as many of the old sentimental love songs,
but you'd hear songs about drinking
and about dancing and about the experiences
that real people had.
And so, when we hear this record,
we'll hear sort of an embryonic version
of the honky-tonk style as it,
of course it became much more full-blown
over the years, as all of the instruments
became electrified, as drums were introduced
and bass and all that sort of thing,
but this is a nice little introduction
to the incipient honky-tonk style.
- This be "Walking the Floor Over You?"
- "Walking the Floor Over You."
(soft country music)
? You left me and you went away ?
? You said that you'd be back in just a day ?
? You've broken your promise and you've left me here alone ?
? I don't why you did, dear,?
? but I do know that you're gone ?
? I'm walking the floor over you ?
? I can't sleep a wink, that is true ?
? I'm hoping and I'm praying?
? as my heart breaks right in two ?
? Walking the floor over you ?
? Ah, pick it out, Smitty ?
(lively steel guitar)
That was his ticket to the Grand Ole Opry.
- Ah, the Grand Ole Opry, and we haven't talked
about the Grand Ole Opry, but that was
one of the real linchpins, wasn't it?
Of establishing a reputation for a country performer.
- Beginning about 1924, first in Chicago at WLS,
and then in Nashville at WSM, 1925,
and Atlanta, other places, radio stations
began to have Saturday night variety shows
which attempted to evoke the spirit of rural America
back in the days when people met in community gatherings.
And they called them barn dances or jamborees
or shindigs, but by 1942, the Grand Ole Opry
in Nashville was already beginning to be
the premier radio country show in America.
- There are also a fair number of brother acts
when you get through the history of country music.
The Louvin Brothers being some that added
some instrumental sounds that I think
were not so often heard before, if at all.
- I've always been partial
to what's called the brother duet sound.
I know that some, I guess growing up as brothers
in the same family, pronouncing words the same way,
maybe having similar vocal timbers,
knowing each other so well,
lent them a particular vocal blend
that very few acts had.
There are people like the Bolick brothers,
known as The Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe brothers,
Bill and Charlie, The Callahan Brothers,
the Shelton Brothers, on and on and on.
And we're going to play two of the great brother acts
of all time tonight.
And some people think the Louvin Brothers,
the real name for Loudermilk.
They grew up in northern Alabama,
and they began making their records
right after World War II,
and they had the great high tenor type of vocal sound,
which is very appealing to many people.
But one thing I also liked about them
was their penchant for old-time songs
at a time when the music was moving
closer and closer to pop music,
beginning to lose its rural distinctiveness,
they clung to that sound and I loved it.
We're going to hear a song called "In the Pines,"
which really shows what they could do.
- And this brings in the mandolin, too, right?
- Ira Louvin played the mandolin.
Charlie Louvin played the guitar,
and sometimes they would join the other instruments,
but that was their basic instrumental sound.
And this is an old song, been recorded many, many times.
And it's been recorded long before the Louvin Brothers
ever did it, but I think it really shows
their sound very well, and I really,
I love the lonesome sound of it.
Back in the pines, where the sun never shines.
And shiver when the cold wind blows.
("In the Pines")
? In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines ?
? And you shiver when the cold wind blows ?
? Little girl, little girl, what have I done ?
? That's made you treat me so ?
? You caused me to weep, you've caused me to moan ?
? You've caused me to leave my home ?
? In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines ?
? And you shiver when the cold wind blows ?
? Ooh hoo, ooh hoo, hoo, woo hoo ?
? Ooh hoo, woo ooh, ooh hoo ?
(steel guitar and mandolin music)
- Fairly well-pronounced waltz rhythm to that one.
You pretty much know what kind of dance
you're expected to dance to that
if it's on the jukebox someplace.
And that was the Louvin Brothers.
That act, like I suppose all brother acts,
sooner or later, did break up, though.
- Well most of these brother groups
made beautiful harmony when they sang,
but they often fought like cats and dogs, you know.
(Norman and audience laughing)
Very few of them ever managed
to go through an entire career
without breaking up violently.
That was true of the Louvins and true of the Monroes
and a lot of other groups.
- Well speaking of the Monroes,
that's that other Bill whose name I've been avoiding
saying all night, (laughs) lest we get confused.
It would be tempting to think of bluegrass
as something, again, that has this long history,
unknown origins and all this,
but in fact, Bill Monroe's credited as inventing bluegrass.
- Yeah, there are not many musicians
that you can point to and say they created particular style,
but in his case, it was true.
Didn't do it by himself, again, but he made
the most important ingredients to it.
- And still very much with us in a very distinctive style
that of course requires a high level of musicianship, too.
- Yeah bluegrass is sometimes thought of as being
a very sort of ancient style of music.
Born in the Appalachians, which it wasn't.
It was born in many different places.
But it didn't really take a shape until a few years
right after World War II.
Bill Monroe had a band in his native state of Kentucky
which he called The Blue Grass Boys.
It was named after his native state.
And it was two words, blue and grass.
But then over the years, as his records circulated
and as he became well-known through the Grand Ole Opry
performances, people began imitating what he did.
They loved his sky-high tenor,
the hard-driving sound of his band,
the bluesy fiddling provided by Chubby Wise
and that first band.
So between say 1945 and 1947,
enough people began to imitate that style
and create bands of their own
that people began to refer to the bluegrass style,
but that was just one word.
But the fella who did most to popularize it
around the world was a young man
from western North Carolina named Earl Scruggs.
- Earl Scruggs, yeah.
- He played the five-string banjo with three fingers,
very syncopated style, and although other people
had done it before, nobody'd ever introduced it
to the public like he did.
So I don't think there's any question,
but in my opinion it was Bill Monroe
with his overall band and Scruggs with the five-string banjo
which made the bluegrass sound distinctive.
- And we'll see the image of Bill Monroe
on the left and his brother Charlie on the right,
and of course they, as you said,
were part of a brother act, but it got a lot bigger
than that, and what would we like to hear
from Bill Monroe and company?
- This song is called "It's Mighty Dark to Travel."
It has just about every ingredient
that one finds in classic bluegrass music.
But one thing, it's done in a hard-driving style.
The instruments take on their own solo passages,
and that way it's sort of like Dixieland jazz.
You'll hear the fiddle, Bill Monroe's mandolin,
and Earl Scruggs' five-string banjo,
and you'll hear this high duet harmony
that you heard with the Louvin Brothers
and other brother acts,
so they brought a lot of ingredients together.
And there's the lonesome imagery in the lyrics, too.
"It's Mighty Dark to Travel," Bill Monroe.
(upbeat bluegrass music)
? It's mighty dark for me to travel ?
? For my sweetheart, she is gone ?
? The road is rough and filled with gravel ?
? But I must journey on and on ?
? Ah, it's mighty dark to travel ?
(upbeat bluegrass music)
? To me she was a little angel ?
? Sent down to me from God above ?
? 'Cause on the day that I first met her ?
? Then I told her of my love ?
? It's mighty dark for me to travel ?
? For my sweetheart, she is gone ?
? The road is rough and filled with gravel ?
? But I must journey on and on ?
- The thing about bluegrass is it's a wonder
none of the instruments catch fire.
(all laughing)
- That's one reason why it attracted
a lot of young musicians, not only in this country
but around the world.
They loved the virtuosity of these musicians.
'Cause some people loved the sort of old-timey
mountain imagery you hear in the music,
so I think it was those two things together.
But bluegrass really became a national phenomenon
in the late 1950s when young musicians
in places like Wisconsin and New York and New Jersey
and California began trying their hand at the music,
and now it's all over the world.
- So there is one man who is, well, maybe a total of three,
depending upon how you would count,
credited with being the King of Country Music.
- Yeah, Roy Acuff was called the king for a long time.
I think Dizzy Dean gave him that title.
- [Norman] Dizzy Dean of all people, okay.
- Dizzy was a baseball commentator
for several years, and sometimes he'd burst out
into the "Wabash Cannonball," and he'd just,
he'd always mention Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music.
But other people, they of course would say
Elvis Presley, all kinds of kings.
- [Norman] There's lots of kings.
- But the one you're referring to,
I think, is Hank Williams.
- [Norman] I would think, yeah, mm-hmm.
- Hank came along right after World War II.
He was a country boy from Alabama,
worked in the shipyards for a while during the war,
and then after the war was over,
started singing in honky-tonks,
blood buckets, they called them,
all over southern Alabama.
And one of the first independent songwriters, too,
that had emerged.
One of the first to write his own songs.
And he had a very astute manager named Fred Rose
who was a great songwriter on his own in Nashville.
And Mr. Rose created a close relationship
with Mitch Miller.
You all remember Mitch, I imagine, on television?
- Mitch Miller gets a lot less credit than he should.
He was actually an important figure in classical music
before he followed the bouncing ball on television.
- Well Fred Rose would take some Hank Williams songs
and songs from other country musicians,
he would give them to Mitch Miller
and Mitch would turn them over to Doris Day
and Joanie Bennett and Guy Mitchell, and,
Tony Bennett, that's what I'm trying
to think of. - Tony Bennett, sure.
- And Tony recorded two or three Hank Williams songs,
so what you see in Hank Williams,
not only a man who could sing traditional country music
probably better than anybody who'd ever sung it,
but he created songs which appealed to pop singers, as well.
So you begin to see what's called the crossover phenomenon.
- Yeah, that's something that I find fascinating,
is the number of songs associated with a certain singer
that were written by another singer
that you wouldn't associate with that song,
and it seems to happen a lot.
And I would never have put Tony Bennett
and Hank Williams in the same universe, actually.
- Hank never, I don't know that Hank would ever
have made it as a pop singer.
He's just such a deep-dyed rural Alabama singer.
- [Norman] He had the twang, yeah.
- But he came up with lyrics that were widely appealing,
and so country music really made
a big jump forward commercially
with his songs and songs that were imitated.
And the one we're going to hear came out
right after he died.
He was found dead on January 1st, 1953.
He had written this song at the end of 1952,
but it didn't really begin hitting the jukeboxes
and the radio stations until shortly after he died.
- At the age of 29.
- 29 years old, the hillbilly Shakespeare.
Here he is doing "Your Cheating Heart."
(melancholy music)
? Your cheating heart will make you weep ?
? You'll cry and cry and try to sleep ?
? But sleep won't come the whole night through ?
? Your cheating heart will tell on you ?
? When tears come down like falling rain ?
? You'll toss around and call my name ?
? You'll walk the floor the way I do ?
? Your cheating heart will tell on you ?
- Far as I'm concerned,
music could've stayed that way forever.
(all laughing)
(audience clapping)
- Now we come to another one of those brother acts
that you mentioned, and well this will take us
all the way up to about 1957 or so, I suppose.
But these brothers, fantastic with the harmonies
and I suspect, as you said earlier, Bill,
that had something to do with the fact,
of course, that they worked very closely together
so they were in a musical family
and raised performing music.
- Yeah, Phil and Don Everly.
They grew up in a country music family.
Their daddy Ike Everly was a highly-respected
finger style guitar player.
He played a little bit like Maybelle Carter
with his thumb and fingers.
But the Everly Brothers themselves
never played that style.
They were attracted by African-American music,
like so many country musicians were.
They particularly were impressed by Bo Diddley.
- [Norman] Bo Diddley!
- And you'll hear a little Bo Diddley lick
in the song that we're going to hear.
But in 1957,
they had a chance for a recording contract
with Cadence Records, owned by Archie Bleyer,
and so they went to Nashville,
they tried out several songs,
and they took a song written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant,
who were becoming the top songwriters
in Nashville at the time,
and nobody had any idea
the import of that recording,
because it introduced them to the world at large.
It was "Bye Bye Love," and they came,
course at the right time, they came
right in the beginning of the great youth revolution
of American music that had been introduced
by Elvis just a few years before.
So there was an audience out there waiting for it.
So you hear the country sound of the Everly Brothers.
It was a duet sound that they learned
from older duet performers,
but they added a sort of a uptempoed
sparkling sound.
- And they crossed over beautifully, right.
I mean pop and country both.
- Very much so, their first songs
landed at the top of all the major charts of that time,
country, rhythm and blues, and pop.
- [Norman] "Bye Bye Love."
(uptempo country music)
? Bye bye love ?
? Bye bye happiness ?
? Hello loneliness ?
? I think I'm going to cry ?
? Bye bye love ?
? Bye bye sweet caress ?
? Hello emptiness ?
? I feel like I could die ?
? Bye bye my love, goodbye ?
? There goes my baby with someone new ?
? She sure looks happy, I sure am blue ?
? She was my baby 'til he stepped in ?
? Goodbye to romance that might have been ?
? Bye bye love ?
? Bye bye happiness ?
? Hello loneliness ?
? I think I'm going to ?
(audience clapping)
- Now there was a British quartet
that referred to themselves as the English Everly Brothers.
- [Bill] The Four Everlys, yeah.
- That's right, the Four Everlys,
and that song that we just heard, "Bye Bye Love"
influenced "Please Please Me," The Beatles.
- And people like Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash,
and of course they tell the story too about Paul Simon.
He heard "Bye Bye Love," he was just about 14 years old,
I think, in Queens, and he drove, not drove,
but he took two or three buses, subways,
all across the city to his favorite record store
and found "Bye Bye Love," took it back home,
sat down, played it over and over and over again,
and broke it.
(audience laughing)
Got back on the bus, went back.
(all laughing)
Got another copy.
So that's really where it all began with him,
so this was a worldwide phenomenon, too.
- We talked a little bit about image,
and these performers kind of deciding
whether they were going to be cowboys or something else,
and you could have tremendous talent, I guess,
and still not be quite sure what niche
you were going to be in,
and therefore what image you would project to--
- You don't know what the audience wants.
You can never predict that. - All of that.
But you'd take a singer who had, for one thing,
these phenomenal low notes.
They just kind of make you shiver.
Could have been a torch singer.
Was a torch singer, as it turned out, eventually,
but started out having her mother
make her cowgirl skirts for her performances,
and there was nobody like Patsy Cline.
- Yeah, born Virginia Patterson Hensley
in Winchester, Virginia,
and as a young aspiring country singer,
she dressed like a cowgirl, and her managers
had to fight pretty hard to get her to abandon that style.
She didn't really realize exactly what she had,
as far as vocal talents were concerned.
But she came along when there was beginning to be
an urge for singers how could sing both country and pop.
That was a reaction against rock and roll
and against rockabilly.
The Nashville music industry felt that,
we're not going to survive this,
that young people are going to go in droves
to other musicians, they're not going to listen
to these old fiddles and steel guitars
and that traditional country sound.
So people like Chet Atkins, a producer for RCA Victor,
began trying to create a sound that would preserve
the ambience of country music,
but nevertheless have a sound that would appeal
to a broad middle class audience.
And of course that meant, in the beginning,
doing away with the steel guitar and the fiddle,
and bringing in background voices and vibes
and just muted guitars, that sort of thing.
And so he and some other producers
created what we now call a country pop sound.
It was incredibly commercial,
but of course traditionalists like me
were a little bit skeptical of what was happening.
But Patsy Cline, I think, is the best example of that sound.
Maybe Jim Reeves, as a male singer,
but Patsy, from the distaff side, she created a sound,
you know, you can hear Patsy Cline's records
everywhere in America now.
Go into a restaurant someplace,
you'll hear Patsy Cline in the background.
And I guess most people don't think of her
as being country, but of course
that's what she thought she was.
- And popular with the Generation Xers and Yers, too.
- And she hit the big time with a lot of songs,
but particularly with the one we're going to hear,
written by a out-of-work Texas singer named Willie Nelson.
- Hearing this, this-- - This is "Crazy."
(slow country music)
? Crazy ?
? I'm crazy for feeling so lonely ?
? I'm crazy ?
? Crazy for feeling so blue ?
? I knew you'd love me as long as you wanted ?
? And then someday ?
? You'd leave me for somebody new ?
(audience clapping)
- Yeah.
- And another of those careers tragically short.
She lived to be just 30 years old.
You know, airplane crash in 1963.
Well on the other hand, there is a star
still very much with us, with considerable longevity
and a phenomenal number of songs written to her credit
and performed, also very stable home life
and a very shrewd businesswoman, too, apparently.
Tell us about Dolly.
(all laughing)
- Patsy Cline made it possible
for singers like Dolly Parton to thrive.
There'd been women performers
from the very beginning of country music history,
but Patsy was the first superstar
who was able to make it on her own.
She didn't necessarily arrange her own music,
but she was out there, her voice alone
was enough for her to make it.
But people like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette
and Dolly Parton I think now saw
that it was possible for women
not only to compete but to actually excel in this music.
Many things about Dolly Parton that I've always loved,
but one thing is her songwriting ability.
I think that's often overlooked.
She's one of the best songwriters in any genre, I think.
- Started out writing songs for other performers
and then decided to start singing them herself.
- And she's funny, highly intelligent,
and just a great singer.
And the song we're going to hear
is a very nostalgic song about growing up very poor
in the mountains of east Tennessee,
in a large family that had to make do with what they had.
And of course it's about the same time
as Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter"
and Merle Haggard's "Mama's Hungry Eyes"
and songs like that.
So that's always been a very important
slice of country music history,
the nostalgic songs about growing up
poor and working class.
But the song I'm referring to is "Coat of Many Colors."
(slow country music)
? Back through the years I go wandering once again ?
? Back to the seasons of my youth ?
? I recall a box of rags that someone gave us ?
? And how my mama put the rags to use ?
? There were rags of many colors ?
? But every piece was small ?
? And I didn't have coat ?
? And it was way down in the fall ?
? Mama sewed the rags together ?
? Sewing every piece with love ?
? She made my coat of many colors ?
? That I was so proud of ?
? As she sewed, she told a story ?
? From the Bible she had read ?
? About a coat of many colors ?
? Joseph wore and then she said ?
? Perhaps this coat will bring you ?
? Good luck and happiness ?
? And I just couldn't wait to wear it ?
? And mama blessed it with a kiss ?
? My coat of many colors that my mama made for me ?
? Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly ?
? Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be ?
? In my coat of many ?
(audience clapping)
- It seems that the superstar age is upon us,
and that we see these superstars sometimes
then combining and doing some great duet work,
and you've selected one that features
a couple of those superstars.
- And I'm glad that we have people like them
who are able to take the materials of the past,
take the music of people that they had idolized
growing up, like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams,
but do something new with it, something different.
The music they performed is not a carbon copy of the past.
It's their own unique creations, their own adaptation,
while using traditional themes.
You're referring to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
- [Norman] "Don't Let Your Babies."
- Yeah, and I chose this song because it shows
the continuing appeal of the cowboy.
Although cowboy this guys is not quite
as respectful as the old one.
- [Norman] This is a warning.
- Yeah, the cowboy that's just a little bit apart
from conventional society.
- Little bit of the outlaw, yeah.
- Good advice, your mamas, don't let your babies
grow up to be cowboys.
(slow country music)
? Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold ?
? They'd rather give you a song than diamonds or gold ?
? Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levi's ?
? And each night begins a new day ?
? If you don't understand him and he don't die young ?
? He'll probably just ride away ?
? Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys ?
? Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks ?
? Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such ?
? Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys ?
? 'Cause they never stay home and they're always alone ?
? Even with someone they love ?
- Well we mentioned early on this great song
"Will the Circle Be Unbroken," and it's appeared
in many guises over the course of time.
It was actually I think quite an old English hymn
from turn of the 20th century.
- It was based on an American hymn
from around the 1890s.
There's a song called "Will the Circle be Unbroken"
has the same chorus but with verses, lyrics
that are very different from the one
we're going to hear tonight.
- And we have chosen a group that's not right away,
I think by most people, thought of as a country group,
but certainly, again, crossed over.
- Yeah I thought this would be an appropriate song
to end with, one thing because it's a gospel song,
which we haven't had yet.
And the gospel tradition has run through this music
from the very beginning.
It's always been a very symbiotic relationship
between gospel music and secular country music.
And the Ken Burns people used this song repeatedly.
I'm not supposed to say what all happens in the film,
but that is one thing that you can look for.
You'll hear "Will the Circle Be Unbroken."
And that's to illustrate their theme
that this music has spun relationships
that have endured over the generations.
But between musicians and their fans
and between musicians and later generations of musicians,
have carried on the tradition.
And the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were one of the first
outside groups, I guess you could call 'em a rock group,
who seized upon country music and performed it
and introduced it to another generation.
So one reason why country music has survived
and it's endured, it's got a bigger audience
because of people like Graham Parsons
and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
So they did this, I think about 1976,
they brought into the studio people like Merle Travis
and Roy Acuff and Earl Scruggs,
and all the old-timers they could find,
and they performed this song called
"Will the Circle Be Unbroken."
(upbeat country music)
? I was standing by my window ?
? On one cold and cloudy day ?
? When I saw the hearse come rolling ?
? For to carry my mother away ?
? Will the circle be unbroken ?
? By and by Lord, by and by ?
? There's a better home a-waiting ?
? In the sky, Lord, in the sky ?
- Well Bill, it's been a great pleasure.
- Thank you, as always.
(audience clapping)
- Thank you all. - I thank everybody
for spending an evening with us.
Thank you.