Country Music's Cultural Journey

Home , At the Ryman, At the Time, Bluebird Records, Buddy Harman, Buddy Killen, Contemporary Country

OUT OF THE BARN AND INTO A HOME: COUNTRY MUSIC’S CULTURAL JOURNEY FROM RUSTIC TO SUBURBAN, 1943-1974

by Jeremy Colin Hill

Bachelor of Arts, English, Grinnell College, 1997 Master of Arts, American Studies, California State University Fullerton, 2002

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 31, 2011

Dissertation directed by

Chad Heap Associate Professor of American Studies

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Jeremy Colin Hill has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 26, 2010. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

OUT OF THE BARN AND INTO A HOME: COUNTRY MUSIC’S CULTURAL JOURNEY FROM RUSTIC TO SUBURBAN, 1943-1974

Jeremy Colin Hill

Dissertation Research Committee:

Chad Heap, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation

Director

Alexander S. Dent, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International

Affairs, Committee Member

Gayle Wald, Professor of English, Committee Member

iii Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I sincerely thank the American Studies department and the Columbian

College of Arts and Sciences at the George Washington University. Their generous funding packages developed the project and kept it going until almost the very end. It was hard enough to finish with this funding, I never could have done it without. As well, I want to thank the George Washington University Seminar in U.S. Urban Studies for a travel grant in the early stages of the project which provided me with the opportunity to kickstart my research.

In order to complete this dissertation, I utilized a wide array of research institutions, and I want to thank their staffs and all those who keep libraries and archives going with their hard work and/or deep pockets. At the Country Music Hall of Fame, I met John Rumble on my first day of research in Nashville and then contacted him for a last minute research question in the final hours of the project. John’s exhaustive knowledge of the library’s archives and endless enthusiasm for the songs of country music greatly enriched the project. I also thank Michael Gray for tracking down numerous sources and helping me navigate the library’s extensive collections. I also wish to thank Brenda Colladay at the

Grand Ole Opry Museum, Marilyn Swing at the Nashville Metropolitan Court Clerk’s

Office, and the staffs of the Special Collections division of the Heard Library at Vanderbilt

University, the Tennessee State Library, and the Metropolitan Archives. For having such a wonderful facility and helpful group of people, the Nashville Public Library deserves a special mention. In Washington, I also want to thank the staff of the Performing Arts and

iv Newspaper and Periodical Rooms at the Library of Congress, and Wendy Shay at the

Archives Center of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

My dissertation committee has been a constant source of both genuine enthusiasm and intellectual rigor. Chad Heap kept my arguments grounded and my writing clear (or tried to anyway); the work is significantly better as a result. Alex Dent, Gayle Wald, and Suleiman

Osman asked provocative questions, listened to rambling answers and generally made the work sharper and more sophisticated. I also wish to thank Elaine Pena for her stimulating defense day questions and insight. My writing group helped shape all the chapters and re- energized my faith in the project numerous times. For that, I affectionately thank Dave

Kieran, Lars Lierow, and Kevin Strait. I’m also extremely grateful for the support of the following group of loyal grad school comrades: Kyle Riismandel, Sandra Heard, Julie

Passanante Elman, Stephanie Ricker Schulte, and Cameron Logan. Throughout this project

(as well as long before and hopefully well after!), my family has provided me with the fullest support imaginable. Emotionally, logistically, intellectually, and financially, they have made this endeavor and my success in it possible. I whole heartedly thank my parents

Mary Loots and Scott Hill, as well as Kathryn Hill, Madelyn Petty, and John and Joan Hill.

Finally, the biggest thank you of all goes to my partner Inge Stockburger. We met in the early stage of graduate careers whose end points seemed so far away, and it gives me the greatest pleasure to know that together we are finally making it to the end of this journey. I thank you for everything you have done to support, enrich, and help me finish this project.

v Abstract of Dissertation

Out of the Barn and Into A Home: Country Music’s Cultural Journey from Rustic to Suburban, 1943-1974

This dissertation examines the country music industry’s presence within the Nashville metropolitan area, in tandem with the music’s production of ideas about the country, the city, and the suburb, between roughly 1943 and 1974. Country music achieved an unprecedented level of commercial success during this time period, in part I argue, by distancing the music from the rural Southern associations of the genre’s past and positioning itself as a modern phenomenon. The story of country music’s emergence as a dominant genre of popular music is, at its heart, a story of space and place, a complicated story in which the country music industry increasingly highlighted and justified its distance from the rural country by foregrounding the urban and suburban migrations undertaken by the music’s millions of fans. In the process, the country music industry shaped the city of Nashville, helping to create an economy driven by the tourism of cosmopolitan country music fans from around the nation and the globe. In light of these demographic changes, country music figures re-worked spatial tropes to fashion a new country “character” by the mid-1970s, drastically different from the backwoods hillbilly figure associated with the genre three decades before. Fans and performers alike suggested they could stay in touch with the rural past through loving memory while still fully participating in the modern world. As the sonic boundaries of the genre loosened and expanded to include more country-pop hybrids, “country” simultaneously came to mean something more intangible, rooted in traditional values rather than in traditional instrumentation, singing style, or a specifically rural way of life. The success of this

vi transformation ultimately depended on a new understanding of country music’s populist language. The industry still aligned with the traditional notion of country as “the music of the people” but subtly shifted the definition of “the people.” When the Grand Ole Opry left the downtown Ryman auditorium for suburban Opryland in 1974, citing the dangers of downtown Nashville’s “slums” for the Opry’s family-oriented fans, country music proved that it understood the stakes of the spatial transformations in postwar American life and produced a mainstream middle-class identity.

vii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………...iv

Abstract of the Dissertation …………………………………………………….vi

Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………..viii

Introduction …...... 1

Chapter 1: “Nothing but Realism:” The Grand Ole Opry’s Savvy Blend of the Rural and the Urban……………………………………………………...23

Chapter 2: “Country Comes to Town:” A New Urban Identity for Country Music in the 1960s …………………………………………………....71

Chapter 3: “You Sound Like Us but You Look Like Them:” The Racial Politics of Country Music in the City of Nashville …………………………...125

Chapter 4: “Country Music is Wherever the Soul of a Country Music Fan Is:” Opryland USA and the Construction of New Country Homes ………173

Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….216

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………..221

viii Introduction

In March of 1974, country music’s most famous and longest running weekly radio program, the Grand Ole Opry, moved out of the nearly century-old Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville (the Opry’s home for over three decades), and into a new theater housed in a newly built theme park in Nashville’s suburbs. The juxtaposition between the two venues was striking, and commentators were quick to use the move as an emblem of country music’s substantial evolution in the preceding decades. On the one hand, critics viewed the multi-million dollar commercial development as the ultimate symbol of modern country music repudiating its humble roots, while in turn country stars and fans defensively celebrated the expensive new complex and its many amenities as a long overdue recognition of country’s enduring connection to millions of ordinary Americans.

The perspective on the move depended both on the view of suburban theme parks (crass and kitschy, or genuine family fun) and the view of “country folk” (simple rubes at home in an old-time setting, or competent modern Americans who possess a unique heritage).

My dissertation demonstrates that this was not the first time the industry’s spatial and economic decisions were bound up in this kind of meta-discourse about the nature of country music and its people. In fact, the construction of Opryland U.S.A. and the Opry’s change of venue came as the culmination of a long period in which various industry players experientially and conceptually tried to negotiate country music’s spatial identities and their consequences.

1 Over the course of the twentieth century, millions of rural Southerners moved out of the country and into the cities and suburbs of the West, North and South. 1 This demographic shift produced and conditioned the landscape on which commercial country music developed over the next fifty years, and in many ways the genre itself mediated these changes and their consequences. The genre, despite its presence in urban commercial economies from its inception, derived much of its cachet from a claim to origins in this authentic but “disappearing” rural past. As many national commentators perceived this demographic shift, too, they looked to country music to represent some simplified version of the older “country.” Well into the 1950s, a potent mythology imagined country music as still organically springing from rustic spaces and lifestyles and obscured the music’s location within the more nuanced set of urban production and consumption circuits. The nascent industry had to balance these two things: stylized performances of rustic lifestyle generated much of the genre’s appeal while simultaneously the specter of the backwoods hillbilly prevented observers from believing the industry could fit into the modern political economy.

Early Opry productions ambivalently addressed urbanization, but beginning in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the expanding country music industry attempted to reconfigure the genre’s broader demographic associations by drawing on and highlighting

1 James Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples,” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995), 111-134. Gregory shows that the number of southern-born persons living elsewhere in the U.S. rose from 2.7 million in 1920 to nearly 10 million in 1960. See Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939-1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 14-15, on the shift within the South from a rural majority to almost fifty percent urban between 1940 and 1950. See also Jack Temple Kirby , Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920- 1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 2 country fans’ migrations out of the country. Industry figures who opened up shop in

Nashville understood (consciously or unconsciously) the region’s spatial zones as an available matrix of discursive tools which they could deploy (along with changes in the sound and marketing of the music) in the formation of a new public presentation and identity. In the late 1950s, independent figures within the industry began to build studios in a neighborhood of older residential homes a mile or so from downtown, eventually leading major national labels to invest in the neighborhood. The neighborhood took on the moniker Music Row and even more publishing and talent outfits opened on the Row and in other parts of the city. These studios spawned a new commercial country sound, referred to as The Nashville Sound, which was closer to urban pop and farther from the genre’s roots in hillbilly music. In the 1960s, these producers of “modern” country music looked in very particular ways to “the city” or urbanity in their efforts to re-configure the dominant cultural associations of the genre and distance themselves from agricultural life and the denigrated hillbilly figure. They openly celebrated their fans’ place in the city and offered a distinct vision of an urban future for the industry’s home base in Nashville.

A mid-sized, upper South city such as Nashville provided a more malleable set of associations than a recognized cosmopolitan center like New York, allowing some country figures to proudly proclaim that new success meant the music had “come to town” without fully aligning with the supposed chaos, greed, and anonymity of a place like New York City (or the outright racism of the Deep South). However, Nashville’s urban zones also become arenas for the social and political struggles for black freedom and equal rights which characterized urban spaces both large and small throughout the nation. Sit-ins and picketing demonstrations occurred mere blocks away from both Music

3 Row and the Opry downtown, riots and rebellions on college campuses spilled over into the neighborhoods of North and West Nashville, and visible resistance to urban renewal put issues of housing equity and racial justice on the front pages of Nashville newspapers.

Country music performers and their lyrics for the most part avoided the civil rights movement and instead focused on the perceived negative associations of the city, including dilapidation, crime, “the slums,” and a lack of moral control. Country music, as the “music of the people,” could have fully endorsed and encouraged the civil rights movement in Nashville and elsewhere. Instead, they defined “the people” quite differently, as the late 1960s invocation of country as the “white man’s blues” indicated.

The use of the phrase “the people” aimed for generic inclusivity but the rest of country music discourse revealed that the genre’s people were emphatically white. Music Row seemed like a viable home for the genre and industry leaders hoped to secure urban renewal funding to renovate the neighborhood. Plans fell through, however, and the industry failed to remake their neighborhood in their own image. Concurrently, the industry started to turn away from urban space, a cultural shift manifested materially in the Opry’s move out of downtown. In 1974, the long-running radio program moved from downtown to suburban Nashville, and many country stars painted the “slums” of downtown as too dangerous and unseemly for the show’s middle-class fans and their families.

Country music achieved an unprecedented level of commercial success between

1943 and 1974 by distancing the music from the rural associations of its past and positioning itself as a modern urban and suburban phenomenon. Industry figures successfully combined believable performances of country character with normative

4 spatial identity markers. To put it simply, country music demonstrated that it understood the spatial stakes of the postwar transformations in American social life. First, they deftly used the city and “uptown” iconography in the 1950s and 1960s to suggest the great geographic and cultural distance which they had traveled from the “hills and hollers” of earlier understandings of the music. Then, as negative urban significations rose in the

1960s, industry figures began to express distaste for the city and suggested that true country identity could remain intact in modern suburban homes. They latched onto a powerful conservative anti-urban discourse which was not inevitable for the genre. In fact, for a period even into the mid 1960s, urban iconography permeated modern country discourse. But by the late 1960s and 1970s, industry figures used their distaste for urban environments to signal their place in the broader American mainstream.

The spatial identity work facilitated an increase in the industry’s commercial, cultural, and political power. Rather than thinking that country music’s appeal has been rooted in its geographic particularity, I argue instead that the music has gained increasing cultural power (measured in terms of both commercial success and political potentiality) as it de-territorialized the space of country and loosened the definitions of categories such as “ordinary folks” and “the people.” Claiming to believe that real “country folk” can be anywhere while simultaneously marking certain particularized groups as outside of the category (poor urban dwellers in downtown Nashville or the backwoods hillbillies which certain members of the industry occasionally disdained as well), country music produced a socio-spatial identity versatile enough for the industry’s own commercial purposes as well as the political aims of conservative politicians.

5 Thus, country music culture played a significant role in re-negotiating who “the people” were and where they could live. Cultural commentators have produced and re- produced a rote assumption that country music is the “music of the people.” Abstract categories such as these are usefully elastic and in fact attain their power by dangling the possibility of inclusion. 2 They are simultaneously structured by exclusion, however, and my project shows that country music’s invocation of “the people” was no different.

Country music has been the music “of the people” for decades, but in the 1960s and

1970s the industry took active control over what that meant and re-fashioned a populist subject position which did not live in the country, was not poor or working-class, and was emphatically white. As Michael Warner has argued, the ability to abstract ones self into such a generic public is not an equally distributed resource, and country music highlighted its whiteness while attempting to shed the particularity, with its “humiliating positivity,” of the hillbilly identity.

The industry increasingly emphasized its distance from the rural past. But as

Music Row and Nashville Sound figures eventually realized, this logic could be taken too far. Some sort of connection to the actual country had to be maintained. Fans, journalists and even some stars pushed back at the direction the industry was moving in, rejecting

2 See Michael Warner on the logic of abstraction in the “bourgeois public sphere:” “the rhetorical strategy of personal abstraction is both the utopian moment of the public sphere and a major source of domination. For the ability to abstract oneself in public discussion has always been an unequally available resource. Individuals have to have specific rhetorics of disincorporation; they are not simply rendered bodiless by exercising reason,” 236. Warner argues that subjects with greatest access to this disincorporation were white, male, literate, and propertied, and that “other features of bodies could only be acknowledged in discourse as the humiliating positivity of the particular.” Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” 234-256 in The Phantom Public Sphere , ed. by Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 6 the distance from the rural and the rustic figure which developed over the 1960s. Many fans did not want to lose these rustic associations, and country’s discursive presentation had to be tweaked in the 1970s. This dynamic is central to my dissertation: how country eventually used space to re- and de-place itself, while still retaining a strong tie to country

“character.” This long cultural transition involved a change in the definition and location of “country,” (a change really in what country could be, and who it could signify) from a notion of the genre and its people rooted in an agricultural economic system in the first half of the century (where country culture celebrated the music’s origins in rural worlds), to a new understanding by the 1970s that “country people” could live anywhere and that intrinsic but indefinable country “character” mattered more than geographic or socio- economic identity. Whereas the rural culture of early “hillbilly” music was structured by associations with a life tied to the land, notions of country identity became more divorced from spatial restrictions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Industry figures discussed the Opry’s move to Opryland, for instance, in terms of an intrinsic country identity which could remain intact regardless of where the Opry performed and where country fans lived. Opry hostess Carolyn Holloran provided a tautological but typical summation of the move’s impact several months after the fact:

“It’s true you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy, and the same goes for Country music. Country music is wherever the soul of a

Country music fan is!” 3 Holloran’s claim contrasted sharply with traditional fans who protested the genre’s changes in the 1960s because of the overproduction and obvious

3 Carolyn Holloran, “A Touch of Sadness: Impressions of the Last Night at the Ryman,” Country Song Roundup , September, 1974, 32. 7 commercial interest. These fans had argued that true country music could not be just anywhere a country fan happened to be, but instead had to be rooted in the country and tied to the land. By the 1970s, these were minority voices however. The widespread ideological support for a declaration such as Holloran’s represented a culmination of the long cultural shift in how the music was presented and understood. Rather than needing to stay in the country to maintain its claim to authenticity, the genre re-worked what authentic country identity meant in the first place.

This trend is not better exemplified than in the quote which provides this dissertation with its title. Attributed to Tom T. Hall and circulated widely on the eve of the Opry’s move to Opryland, the phrase “They’re taking us out of the barn and into a home,” enacted a spatial trajectory from a specific, rustic-rooted but outmoded signifier to a de-spatialized but unequivocally positive trope: home. 4 Hall consciously employed a rustic symbol to represent the Opry’s past. His description of the new complex as “a home,” by contrast, avoided any particular spatial assignation. The fact that this mantra was repeated so frequently reveals the depth of the discourse which suggested that country music’s authentic character came from its people rather than its spatial roots.

A Theory of the Country

Drawing on the work of scholars such as Richard Peterson and Diane Pecknold, in this dissertation I am less concerned with determining what true country music is and

more interested in the historical moments when individuals or groups have drawn lines

4 Bill Hance, “Ryman Opened 82 Years Ago With a Prayer, Closes on Amen,” The Nashville Banner , March 16, 1974, 1. 8 (particularly in regards to trajectories of space and place) to deem certain styles and performances more authentic than others. 5 For example, when leading country figures have defended popular styles by saying “ this is true country music,” or by contrast, when fans who felt marginalized invoked an older notion of “authentic” country music in order to dismiss more contemporary performers and styles as too great a departure from tradition. That being said, I will use the phrase “country music” or the “country music culture” as somewhat stable and coherent referring terms throughout the dissertation, and what I mean by this is stars who self-identify as country, the Opry, the network of record labels, studios, publishing houses (based mostly in Nashville after the early 1950s) which have used the genre label in their marketing, as well as the radio stations around the country which have used the phrase “country music” in this time period.

Much recent country music scholarship has situated the music in some sort of marginal space. Barbara Ching has shown the ways in which commentators have viewed country music as an incorruptible but hopelessly simplistic representation of and product for poor and working-class folk. Aaron Fox’s theoretically engaging ethnographic work on country music positions the genre as the language of a particular working-class subculture. Anthony Harkins, too, sees the early and mid-century country music industry existing on the margins of modernity, serving as a foil for what he refers to as the

“generally non-rural middle class white” mainstream. 6 To be sure, the genre and its fans

5 Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 6 Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. Ching cleverly uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “incurable unease of class distinction,” and further 9 have been and continue to be part of a larger constellation of cultural productions sometimes associated with a negatively signifying form of whiteness, often marked by low socio-economic class and roughly contained by the phrase “white trash.” And anecdotal evidence certainly proves that within academic and other purportedly high- minded circles, the notion of studying country music still elicits a chuckle here or a snicker there. But the commercial sales and political currency of contemporary country music cannot be fully kept on the margins.

In this project I want to see what happens when we put country music squarely in the cultural middle (where I think it often is) instead of the margins, and try to understand how the genre came to be there. My dissertation shows how the genre attained its cultural and commercial power by the middle of the 1970s through successfully managing the music’s spatial journey out of the country. Rather than thinking of country music as an avatar of the past, somehow outside of America’s postwar transformations, the genre increasingly inserted itself into the conversation about how to deal with the nation’s massive changes and cultural imperatives, and increasingly positioned the industry as part of the normative center which it had previously been set against. I argue that mainstream country has been more effective at affiliating itself with the nation’s mainstream than country music scholarship has given it credit for, and that this affiliation sprung from their spatial maneuverings. Between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s the

argues that the subgenre of hard country actively works to render this “incurable unease” visible. Hard country, Ching writes, “notes that although traditional cultural boundaries may well be softening, the right to cross them is not universally bestowed, and the distribution of this right is in fact a particularly postmodern form of distinction between high and low cultures and classes.” Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2004); Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7. 10 industry re-defined the mainstream to include country music and its people, but only as their rusticity was at least partially divorced from actual country spaces. Country music achieved its place in the mainstream by navigating a new relationship with the notion of modernity as well. Country music figures self-consciously played with assumptions about the genre to suggest that modernity’s transformations need not be so wholesale or all- encompassing, that they did not need to result in the obliteration or caricature of the country. Country music was no longer a vanishing mediator which commented on modernity from a distant position but rather more squarely fit within the modern milieu itself. 7

Scholars of spatial identity have identified a tantalizing duality in the hillbilly or rustic figure. Rural space and its inhabitants have been both a revered repository of the values which modernity has trampled and simultaneously a hopelessly backwards milieu which reinforces the superiority of this same modernity. Raymond Williams has even argued that the framing of a stark rural/urban dichotomy is one of the central ways we have come to understand modern society. 8 As Williams points out, the very notion of

“changes wrought by modernity” is structured and produced by a country versus city

divide; the country stands in for the past and the city the future. In this vein, Alexander

Dent argues that “the rural makes the city conceivable, by stipulating the bygone days in

7 The phrase “vanishing mediator” is borrowed from Michael Denning’s reading of the Popular Front in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 27. 8 “Clearly the contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society,” Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 289. 11 terms of which the present may be celebrated or indicted.” 9 The city itself can only be called into being, or understood, by contrast with the country. Williams has astutely reminded us, “Our real social experience is not only of the country and the city, in their most singular forms, but of many kinds of intermediate and new kinds of social and physical organization.” 10 City and country exist as sets of ideas through the lens of which

heterogeneous spaces are made legible and understood as homogenous. Drawing lines to

mark the two spaces as distinct will often divide substantively homogenous spaces while

simultaneously lumping together heterogeneous spaces. The cultural work of labeling

suburban and urban spaces produces these very spaces.

Cultural historian Anthony Harkins, addressing the identity category of

“hillbilly,” has argued, along with Williams and Dent: “thus, ‘the hillbilly’ served the

dual and seemingly contradictory purposes of allowing the ‘mainstream,’ or generally

nonrural, middle-class white, American audience to imagine a romanticized past, while

simultaneously enabling that same audience to recommit itself to modernity by

caricaturing the negative aspects of premodern, uncivilized society.” 11 These scholars view the country through the lens of a duality, and they understand the constructed nature of this binary. The polarity between country and city justifies and mitigates against (while still affirming) the transformations of modernity. The rural figure mediates and comments on the changes wrought by modernity, explains social difference, and justifies large-scale

9 Alexander Sebastian Dent, River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 1. 10 Williams, 289. 11 Harkins, 7. Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed also address this productive duality, what they refer to as “the reversibility of the rural/urban hierarchy that makes the distinction so culturally useful.” Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 17. 12 transformations of the land and its people. But as country music discourse subtly redefined its position vis a vis “generally nonrural middle-class whites,” this framework needs to be re-evaluated. I investigate what happened when country music fans, producers, and performers become part of this broad central category and what strategies they deployed to get to that point. This accomplishment actually turned, as I show, on advancing an ideology of seemingly inclusive ordinariness which actually used spatial and racial categories to mark off “others” that did not fit the category, yoking together ideas about space, class, and character. Country music looked to fully distinguish itself first from the country and then from the city, attempting to throw into sharp relief the distance it had crossed to evade its own past and forge a new identity. A prevalent discourse of ordinariness emerged deepened out of these spatial zigs and zags.

Country Music and the Language of Populism

The hillbilly rube figure has alternately been revered and reviled for much of the

American twentieth century. Country music figures recognized, contested, and negotiated their subject positions along this teeter totter of an axis, ultimately separating authentic country values from geographic restrictions and achieving a balance which allowed them to still partially resist modernity while more fully participating in it. Whereas Harkins has suggested that the hillbilly figure was always kept outside of modernity, at a remove, by transcending the limits of the hillbilly stereotype the commercial country music industry did find a “modern” home and place in the contemporary political economy. As such, conservative politicians and ideologues championed the music’s virtues beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, and continue into the present day.

13 When asked by a reporter from the Chicago Tribune whether Opryland’s distance from downtown and the increased ticket price would make the show more inaccessible,

Nashville mayor Beverly Briley responded, “The music will still sell itself due to its tradition as music of the people. I don’t think the move or increased cost will affect the

Opry. I don’t think that poorer people were ever the support of the Opry; so attendance will not change.” 12 Briley’s assertion that the new complex could thrive on the patronage

of “the people” while still excluding the “poorer people” was jarring, given that many

figures within and without the country music industry had for several decades been

invoking different visions of the “people” as the authentic backbone of country music.

Clearly, the category had multiple valences but Briley’s comment recognized something

new about the assumed class position of the country audience: that somebody was

definitively below them.

Briley’s dismissive invocation of the “poorer people” who could not afford to get

themselves out to less accessible Opryland resonated with a larger longitudinal shift in

country culture, one which attempted to maintain the music’s affiliation with a valorized

form of “ordinary folks” while distancing the genre and its folks from those on the lower

end of the cultural and economic hierarchy, be they the poor underclass of the city or the

stereotypical hillbillies farther out from the city. My dissertation shows how Briley’s

comment made perfect sense in 1974, when it would have made much less sense at the

end of World War II, a time when “hillbilly” music enjoyed increasing commercially

12 C.D. Jaco, “A change of address, a change of image for country music’s Mecca,” The Chicago Tribune , March 10, 1974, 6. 14 success but was still often associated with foolish and earthy hillbilly rubes outside the margins of the modern urban economy.

By the 1970s, country music figures generally conceptualized their inherent country nature in terms of honesty, simplicity and hard work (or the willingness to work), none of which were confined geographically to the country. Conservative discourse employed these same values in reference to an anti-urban and anti-welfare Silent

Majority. Journalists and politicians linked country music with this demographic both cynically and enthusiastically, and in the 1968 presidential election George Wallace and

Richard Nixon fought over the various country stars’ endorsements. The phrase “Silent

Majority” itself invoked tropes of invisibility, passivity, and stoicism; not asking for special treatment and not complaining about unfair treatment. To use Michael Warner’s language, the phrase invoked an abstracted public of white ordinary folks.

The industry emphasized the music’s inherent whiteness through the phrase

“white man’s blues,” and also through aggressively marking the rare African-American performers such as Charlie Pride as anomalous (a pleasant anomaly, but still not anywhere close to the norm). 13 Furthermore, despite the general messiness of spatial categorizations, the Opry’s move from downtown to Opryland neatly mapped on to a broader narrative of what has generally been referred to as “white flight.” The Opry left an older structure within the Central Business District and moved into a newly built complex on the suburban fringe. The recent trend in histories of the urban/suburban

13 On the antiracist influence of Southern California’s urban spaces on migrant and western country music culture, see Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley: U of California Press, 2007), 76-110. 15 dichotomy in post-war American life has been to complicate the understandings of “white flight” which have posited that millions of white Americans, with the help of, among other things, federally subsidized discriminatory lending practices, poured out of decaying urban areas and into the suburbs. Not only were urban white residents moving out of cities, they were also moving to particular suburban places which had particular allure and which had to be politically, economically, and culturally constructed and articulated. Eric Avila has demonstrated that a matrix of suburban cultural ideas ordered

American social life, privileging popular culture productions and elements of the built environment which were structured around abstract ideals of privatization, regulation and order, which were all tied up in homogeneity and exclusion. This suburban trope became the bedrock of conservative political movements which emerged out of the suburbs and which were rooted in the importance of race and class homogeneity. 14

Recent scholarship has further elucidated these deep connections between

material space and electoral politics. Suburban spaces became the bastion of the new

conservatism primarily because the new ideology was structured around a defense of the

suburban lifestyle against the perceived threats of federal government attacks, African-

American complaint, and urban intellectuals and presumed cultural elites. It was

structured by an insidious ideology of ordinariness which claimed to include anyone who

worked hard and “played by the rules,” but in fact only included those whom the rules

14 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004). See also Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 16 themselves benefited. 15 Contemporary scholarship on spatial components of the conservative political ascendancy of the 1960s and 1970s has recognized that the process has been more complicated than an explicitly racist Deep South-driven “southern strategy.” Instead, these scholars have focused on what Matthew Lassiter refers to as the

“political culture of middle-class entitlement,” a broader discourse centered on property rights, schools, and taxes. 16 Crucial to the accomplishment of this kind of space was a

new kind of identity position, the white suburban homeowner . The conservative

movement claimed race-blind rhetoric but the rights which these homeowners

vociferously defended were in fact those that had been distributed unequally based on

race before, during and after World War II. The irony of the white conservative backlash

was that whites who complained of the unjust “federal meddling” of the government’s

busing and affirmative action programs did not realize or acknowledge that the federal

15 Michael Kazin has argued that the language of populism was “captured” by conservatives in the second half of the twentieth century. The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 248. 16 Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8. Also see Mike Davis’ chapter on the taxpayer revolt, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) These historians have complicated a top-down model of the attendant rise of conservative ideology, pointing to the more quotidian and local work done by middle-class white suburban communities to preserve the racial exclusivity of the suburbs. David Freund, however, has shown how federal housing and lending agencies created a situation where property values became tied to race, thus creating the conditions for racial exclusion based on supposedly non-racist reasoning. 17 government itself had created the very thing they believed the government was taking away. 17

In line with this discourse in defense of naturalized homeownership, country music placed the notion of “home” at the center of their universe in the 1970s, letting the idea of home trump any particular place designation or spatial heritage. Past homes were to be remembered and present homes were to be celebrated, but country values were

more important than either. The new conservatism of the late 1960s and 1970s was

rooted in the same sense of abstract value and was more ideological (in the sense that it

had to be couched in more abstract terms such as rights, freedom, individualism, rather

than just an outright defense of the race and class status quo). My project works to

explain how this ideology was culturally ratified through country music (and how country

music in turn drew on it for cultural and commercial power).

Chapter Outlines

Over the course of the 1940s, the popularity of hillbilly music grew throughout

the nation. However, the association of the genre with the backwoods hillbilly permeated

the national discourse on the hillbilly musical phenomenon. Performers and fans were

figured as simple in both their desires and musical ability, childlike in terms of

17 Lassiter describes “a ‘color-blind’ discourse of suburban innocence that depicted residential segregation as the class-based outcome of meritocratic individualism rather than the unconstitutional product of structural racism …Millions of white homeowners who had achieved a residentially segregated and federally subsidized version of the American Dream forcefully rejected race-conscious liberalism as an unconstitutional exercise in social engineering and an unprecedented violation of free- market meritocracy,” 1-2. Also see Freund on the role the federal government played in downplaying its own influence on the housing market. 18 responsibility and intellect, and particularly alien to urban America. Chapter One demonstrates the reach and depth of this prejudicial discourse in dialogue with Opry performers’ own more nuanced self-presentations. The Grand Ole Opry, which played a key role in the birth of country music as a genre itself, was from its inception part of an urban economy and consumed by urbanizing audiences. The industry’s development within the city of Nashville facilitated a public presentation which blended the urban and the rural. Opry stars and personalities like Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl settled in

Nashville, and advanced a public presentation which fully blended rustic roots and contemporary urban competence. They used the “middle” space of Nashville to believably make these claims.

Chapter Two analyzes a substantial shift in the marketing of country music: the embrace of the urban. Starting in the mid to late 1950s, rather than thinking of the typical country music fan as a poor hillbilly located far outside the modern consumer economy, the Country Music Association and other industry boosters argued that their listening audience was comprised primarily of rural-to-urban migrants who not only lived more modern lives but also constituted a new group of middle-income urban consumers. In tandem with this shift in marketing and ideas, the new “Nashville Sound” created a purportedly more palatable country style, rooted in orchestrated string sections, smoother lead vocals, and innocuous background choral groups. Key figures in the industry embraced the prevalent journalistic conceit of "country coming to town" (often used to describe country’s increasing commercial success) and emphasized the urban location of

Nashville’s emerging Music Row as well as the presence of country music fans in urban spaces all across America. In response, traditionalist fans and performers argued that the

19 new sound was too “urban” and that city people with their greed and commercialism had ruined the inherently pastoral music, a shift emblematized for many by the transition from fiddles to violins on country records.

The close-knit collection of recording studios and publishing houses which came to be known as Music Row developed about two miles from downtown. Bradley bought cheap land in an older residential neighborhood and built a recording studio; a string of hits and a growing awareness of the importance of Nashville’s highly skilled session musicians soon led national labels to set up shop in Nashville, very near Bradley’s original studio. The industry hoped that the proposed urban renewal plans to create Music

City Boulevard could establish a clean, modern urban neighborhood which would highlight country music’s commercial success and “countrypolitan” sound. In so doing, country figures borrowed the prevalent language and ideology of urban renewal, arguing that their neighborhood was surrounded by “blight” and slums. The funding did not come through and the industry blamed what they saw as persistent anti-hillbilly prejudice and disdain for country music on the part of city government and prominent Nashvillians.

Country music’s attempt, then, to create an urban home for Music Row was not as successful as the construction of the Opry’s suburban home would be a few years later.

Country music’s larger celebratory discourse of “coming to town” was

continually complicated by the story of their particular home town of Nashville. The third

chapter positions the neighborhood of Music Row as part of a larger landscape which did

not match the cosmopolitan and conflict-free vision of urbanity contained in the urban

iconography associated with the Nashville Sound. African-American activists picketed

the segregationist policies of a grocery store on Music Row and the uprising after the

20 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. cancelled the Opry for the first time ever. While

Music Row was trying to secure urban renewal funds for renovating its own neighborhood, the Nashville metropolitan government was executing a very different kind of urban renewal only a few blocks away. The neighboring Edgehill Urban Renewal

Project razed several blocks of dilapidated homes and constructed public housing, displacing African-American homeowners and intensifying the segregation and isolation of the neighborhood. Country music’s repeated claims that their own neighborhood resembled the “slums” or “Shantytown” were weakened but also most likely suggested by the proximity of Edgehill’s more extreme urban poverty. The shadow of Edgehill consistently fell over the industry’s efforts to secure urban renewal funds to more clearly distinguish Music Row from Edgehill. Despite repeated claims on the part of country music to represent the true experience of “ordinary Americans,” country music ignored or elided the travails of the African-American civil rights movement, both nationally and within the city of Nashville itself. Charley Pride, the first prominent black country star, was generally discussed as the exception that proved the rule, someone who “sounds like us but looks like them.” Around the time of Pride’s emergence within country music, the discourse constructed the music as the “white man’s blues,” envisioning a parallel but clearly distinct lineage which obfuscated the long history of interracial cultural borrowing, influence and interest shared by rural and working-class Southerners. This ethos replicated and reinforced a conservative social politics and country music’s emphasis on white ordinariness increasingly aligned with the conservative politics of law and order and the idea of the “silent majority.”

21 My fourth chapter shows that, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the Opry prepared to leave downtown for the new Opryland complex, the industry’s efforts to normalize country music fandom and situate its listeners in the mainstream of American life had shifted once again – this time employing suburban rather than urban iconography. The discussion (and mild controversy) over the Opry’s move to Opryland speculated on what the move meant, and the Opry’s leading figures responded by positioning the suburbs of Nashville as a safer alternative to the downtown space which they marked as dangerous, unpredictable, and not enjoyable or safe for families. This argument resonated with that found in the broader country music discourse which suggested that the “ordinary folk” were now in new kinds of country home outside of the actual country. Country stars and leaders argued that the Opry’s new home was analogous to those found by many country fans who had moved from their rural homestead into urban and then suburban homes over the previous decades. The phrase often repeated around the time of the Opry’s move, “out of the barn and into a home,” signified this transition . Industry leaders, writers, performers and fans argued that the category of “country folk” was highly salient, and that country people could retain their unique country character regardless of which American spaces they inhabited. In song lyrics, essays, interviews, and other public proclamations, country stars and fans collectively argued that wherever you happened to live you could retain country values, thus creating a potent blend of unmarked spatial identity and authentic country character.

“Nothing But Realism:” The Grand Ole Opry’s Savvy Blend of the Rural and the

Urban

Chapter One

Country music’s oldest and most famous institution got its name on a Saturday afternoon in late 1927. Solemn Old Judge George Hay’s old time music variety show was set to follow the NBC network’s Music Appreciation Hour on Nashville radio station

WSM. Towards the end of the classical show, noted conductor Walter Damrosch declared there was “no place in the classics for realism.” When Hay’s program came on the air he responded to Damrosch by declaring, “for the last hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from grand opera and the classics, and heard Dr. Damrosch tell us there is no place for realism in that kind of music. In respectful contrast to Dr.

Damrosch’s presentation, for the next three hours we are going to present nothing but realism.” Later in the program, Hay continued to play off the contrast between his own show and the preceding classical program when he followed a performance by African-

American harmonica player DeFord Bailey by referencing the Grand Opera of the previous show and triumphantly claimed “from now on we will present the Grand Ole

Opry.” 1 At the moment of its christening, George Hay publicly advocated for “nothing

1 Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 21-2. The story comes from Hay’s own memoir, but Wolfe argues, based on an analysis of program listings and the early Opry culture, that there is no reason to doubt its general 23 but realism,” but as the show’s trajectory over the following decades showed, “realism” turned out to be an elastic concept.

Hay’s Grand Ole Opry never existed as an actual barn dance in the country, but only as an urban re-presentation of a rustic barn dance (produced by a radio station owned by an insurance company); but even with this commonly available knowledge the

Opry still resonated with millions of fans because of its ability to capture the spirit of rural culture, a quality that was crucial to the genre’s eventual success over several decades and throughout myriad stylistic and spatial shifts. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, various Grand Ole Opry figures self-consciously highlighted country’s rustic roots, donning hillbilly costumes, tailoring names of instrumental and singing groups to an old-fashioned idea of rural life, and inhabiting country characters on stage and in films. 2 These self-conscious performances of hillbilly generated much of the Opry’s wide appeal, yet this chapter shows that they did not tell the whole story.

From the show’s beginning, many Opry performers lived in the city and had urban jobs (though many had been raised on farms or in smaller towns). Furthermore, as a function of the program’s tremendous success within its first two decades, the Opry produced a collection of veritable stars who did not fit the benighted hillbilly stereotype,

accuracy. George Hay, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: Privately published, 1953). 2 Louis Kyriakoudes has argued that the show gave audiences a way to cling to and express their affection for a rural past even while participating in modernization: “The program's musicians often addressed the ambivalence rural southerners held towards modernization, alternately praising and damning the changes sweeping the countryside. In doing so, the Opry performers stood at the forefront of a larger trend of creating a new southern music that had roots in the region's rural past but spoke to the concerns and anxieties of a present undergoing rapid change.” Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South,” Southern Cultures 10, no. 1 (2004): 75. 24 businessmen like Roy Acuff, Nashville blue bloods like Sarah Colley (Cousin Minnie

Pearl on the Opry), and international performers such as Little Jimmy Dickens. By the

1940s, these “hillbilly” music figures did not attempt to elide their urban and cosmopolitan involvements but instead suggested that one could remain true to hillbilly roots while traveling the world, acquiring wealth, and even running for governor. Figures such as Acuff and Pearl successfully claimed that they understood hillbilly, without having to fully inhabit the stereotypical subject positions.

In order to create this modern-oriented figure, Opry figures like Colley and Acuff still played at rural from a relatively well-understood urban location, using the city of

Nashville and their place within it as another layer to their construction of a more urbane hillbilly subject position. As a mid-sized, upper South city, Nashville provided a more malleable set of associations than a recognized cosmopolitan center like New York or a

Deep South urban center like Atlanta or Birmingham, allowing country to usefully operate within the modern space of Nashville’s “middle-ness” without being fully affiliated with the chaos, anonymity, or depravity of the larger cities. In their Nashville- based public presentations, country businessmen and women blended rural character with an urban cultural production and created an image which resonated with fans precisely because of this yoking of the rural and the urban. Successfully pulling off this performance depended on making a believable claim to authentic rural roots while also making a believable claim to their comfortable place within Nashville’s urban professional classes.

Despite the circulation of an urban self-presentation alongside the more familiar rustic stylings of country music performers, national commentators repeatedly focused on

25 only one half of the equation, imagining a musical style which could only have emerged from the nation’s backwoods and hill country, entirely alien to urban Americans and urbanity itself. The convenient signifiers of hillbilly rusticity overwhelmed the more complex realities of the hillbilly business. Eliding the fact that country performers had been professional performers for decades, national magazines drew a distinctive spatial journey and set of assumptions about hillbilly music’s commercial ascendance --- suggesting that the music literally came down from or out of the woods, hills, farms, to reach the urban centers of America. 3 Commentators attributed hillbilly’s popularity to its simplicity and homespun nature, celebrating, in a way, its resistance to modernity, but also played on historically powerful stereotypes which emphasized hillbillies’ ignorance, childlike irresponsibility, and an irrepressible fecund earthiness. The discourse continually highlighted their spatial distance from urbanity as well. 4

3 See “Hillbilly Bash in Carnegie Perks Stem Interest,” Billboard , September 27, 1947, 1, for an example of an article which refers to the music as “country music” but the performers and their style as “hillbilly” and “cornbilly.” Half a decade later, on the occasion of Jimmy Rodgers’ death, Billboard still used the moniker “hillbilly” to describe the culture if not the music: see “Jimmie Rodgers: Hillbilly World to Honor His Memory,” Billboard , May 16, 1953, 16. Variety continued to refer to the music and its practitioners in derogatory slang well into the 1950s as well. See “Cornseed Crooners Reap B.O. Bonanza as City Slickers Lap Cider-Jug Tunes,” June 27, 1951, 1, and “Jazz Plays Second Fiddle to Corn as Hillbillies Make Abroad,” November 25, 1953, 1. The list of places in which these “hillbillies” performed was not limited to the South, and in fact journalists often used northern and Midwestern locales as the best examples of the genre’s surprisingly wide appeal. 4 As early as 1943, though, a few commentators were aware of a high number of country fans in urban areas, though this connection was not always teased out or emphasized in the language of the articles. “The value of hillbilly acts cannot be measured by ‘theatrical’ standards. To the purveyor of the usual theatrical fare, hillbillies are a deep mystery. But to millions in the small towns and rural districts, as well as goodly numbers in the cities, the folk music and rural rhythm of the hillbilly artists are tops in entertainment. They have a homespun quality that appeals to the masses, and it is an appeal not likely to wane.” Nat S. Green, “King Korn Klondike: Hillbilly Troupes 26 The chapter first analyzes Nashville itself as a middle space which facilitated a rural and urban blend. Roy Acuff, one of the most popular Opry stars in the early 1940s, launched several key business enterprises and eventually ran for governor in 1948. Acuff relied on a self-presentation that emphasized both his homespun common sense and genuine affection for the “little guy,” while using his business savvy to prove that he would be a good administrator. Throughout, however, he maintained allegiance to his

“hillbilly” roots while consistently presenting himself as a successful modern businessman. On stage at the Opry rube characters such as Cousin Minnie Pearl and Rod

Brasfield addressed contemporary middle-class topics from a country angle (for example voicing sensible apprehension at their upcoming intercontinental air travel), but also clearly positioned themselves within that modern world. Finally, the chapter ends with

Pickin’ and Singin’ News, an industry journal based out of Nashville which also represented country figures as adept both in the urban world of business and in authentically drawing on rural past to perform genuine country music.

The Opry and the Urban Marketing of Rustic Performances

The rise of radio provided a format for mass broadcasting barn dance variety programs which featured a blend of “old-time” musical styles, broad comedy, and rustic stage play. These programs appeared throughout the Southeast and in Northern cities such as Chicago as well. Historian Richard Peterson refers to the early Opry as a kind of

Roll Up Dizzy Box Office Scores in One-Day and Repeat Stands,” Billboard , March 6, 1943, 1. 27 “rustic variety show,” influenced more by vaudeville than an agrarian barn dance. 5

Beginning in the 1920s, these barn dances of the air, in tandem with individual string band performances on local radio stations, sparked the long institutional and cultural process which yoked various strands of traditional folk music into one relatively coherent genre of commercial country music. The live radio programs widened the audience for the music and drove up demand for recordings of hillbilly music, generally sold through record labels’ “race” divisions along with the blues. The preeminent “hillbilly” radio program was Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. 6

In the first part of the twentieth century, Nashville had developed as a central

location in the insurance industry of the Southeast. Two major companies, National Life

and Casualty, and National Life and Accident, developed in Nashville, selling industrial

policies to the working classes of the rural and urbanizing South in addition to the other

range of policies offered by major national companies. 7 National Life and Accident’s founder’s son, Edwin Craig, suggested developing a radio station, mostly for promotional and advertising purposes. Beginning in 1925, this station, WSM (the call letters

5 Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 70. 6 Wolfe, 37; Bill Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 40. 7 Nashville provided fertile ground for the two major insurance companies (National Life and Casualty as well as National Life and Accident) to market to African- Americans, because of the city’s stable group of affluent (relatively) African-Americans, due to the presence of black colleges and a growing black publishing industry. National Life’s later self-promotion efforts shifted the focus to the “industrial classes” and noted their innovative use of industrial insurance policies to open up a new market in the first decade of the twentieth century. Bill Carey, Fortunes, Fiddles and Fried Chicken: A Nashville Business History (Franklin, TN: Hillsboro Press, 2000), 66-7; Powell Stamper, National Life Story: A History of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company of Nashville, Tennessee (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968). 28 themselves advertised the mission of the insurance company, “We Shield Millions”), hosted a live variety show every Saturday night whose audience extended across much of the Southeast and even farther, due to WSM’s clear channel signal. The company’s salesmen in small towns and rural communities attempted to target WSM listeners as possible new customers and one of the most important programs for executing this strategy was the Opry. Thus, the Opry itself developed within a network of modern urban commercial interests, as part of the insurance company’s larger marketing campaign, and was suffused with advertisements for mass produced commercial products. Variants of this radio-based combination of old-time music and live comedy were performed and produced as far west as California; Chicago’s National Barn Dance on WLS was nearly as popular as the Opry, for instance. But the Opry attracted a live audience almost immediately, first in the in-house WSM studios and then in larger venues around

Nashville. 8

The Opry’s musical acts included old-time string bands, multiple instrumentalists

(banjoists, fiddlers, harmonica players) and, beginning in the late 1930s, close-harmony vocal groups. The weekly show started in 1925, but did not get its name until two years later, when host George Hay introduced his talented harmonica player DeFord Bailey through an explicit contrast with the preceding hour of classical music: “we now present our own Grand Ole Opry!” 9 Hay’s act of naming depended on a kind of wordplay, changing Opera to Opry, which he also engineered in string band names during the rest of the 1920s and 1930s. Hay’s wordplay exhibited a tension between mocking the hillbilly

8 Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 9 Wolfe, 21-2. 29 genre and undercutting purportedly more sophisticated genres. 10 For instance, the Skillet

Licker Orchestra’s name both mocked the bands’ aspirations to urban culture forms while

taking those very culture forms down a notch. In addition to playfully highlighting rustic-

specific traits like skillet licking, the band name also questioned the elite status of higher-

class art forms (as in, even skillet lickers can perform in an orchestra!) while also

simultaneously validating rural music’s artistry by comparing it to that of an orchestra.

The band names contained both of these trajectories and performers and fans could derive

pleasure and realize shame from both.

Even as they performed in bands with names such as the Skillet Licker Orchestra,

the Gully Jumpers or the Fruit Jar Drinkers, most of the early Opry performers had other

professions within the city of Nashville. These string band performers, when they weren’t

fiddling or singing for WSM on Saturday nights, were auto mechanics, wood workers,

barbers, cigar makers, and often times insurance salesmen for the parent company itself. 11

In the interest of projecting a particular rustic image for the Opry’s cast, the Opry’s

10 Barbara Ching has similarly understood the use of “hillbilly Shakespeare” to describe Hank Williams. She refers to a “mixture of praise and condescension” and argues that the moniker “insisted upon a contrast between European high art and inbred American low life, between the sublime and the ridiculous.” Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 53. 11 Peterson, 75. Wolfe, 53-5. Wolfe has shown that the marketing strategy took time to develop: photos of the Opry cast in 1928 show them in suits and dresses while in 1933 the cast is dressed in overalls in a cornfield, 15. See also George Hay, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: Privately published, 1953), 2. Opry star Uncle Dave Macon grew up in Nashville and his father owned a hotel, but he played a rustic figure on stage, often performing old minstrel songs which he had learned from Vaudevillian performers who had stayed at the family’s hotel while traveling through Nashville. Tony Russell, Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 12. Sam McGee had been a farmer but in the early 1920s gave it up and opened a blacksmith shop. He met Uncle Dave Macon in Franklin in mid-1920s and began playing with him, Russell, 32. See also Havighurst, Air Castle of the South , 74. 30 managers (most notably George Hay) encouraged these urban musicians to eschew their usual formal dress in favor of hillbilly costume and changed some of the group names to make them sound more rustic than urban. Dr Bate’s Augmented Orchestra, for instance, became Dr. Bate’s Possum Hunters under Opry founder Judge Hay’s direction. 12 The phrase, “augmented orchestra” suggested urban associations while the Possum Hunters unequivocally signified rural life. Hay also personally named the Fruit Jar Drinkers and the Gully Jumpers, two other prominent groups in the Opry’s first decades. The Gully

Jumpers were comprised of two garage mechanics, a National Life employee, and one farmer. The Fruit Jar Drinkers also featured two mechanics and one barber. 13

Despite the humorously exaggerated rusticity of the band names and costumes,

the musicians’ urban connections were hardly a complete secret. Opry fans apprehended

the performance of possum hunting, gully jumping, and fruit jar drinking that the group

names and their members’ stage play enacted. Fans who understood that barbers were

playing rustic figures also presumably understood that not just any barber could play a

gully jumper, that these particular Opry performers had something unique in their

character and life experiences (expertise) which allowed them to function in both worlds,

or to at least enact appropriate performances of each. A figure like Dr. Bate, born in the

country but living in the city, played both a possum hunter and an orchestra leader (and a

doctor). His hillbilly identity remained relatively intact, even within an urban political

12 Richard Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, “The Early Opry: Its Hillbilly Image in Fact and Fancy,” Journal of Country Music (Summer 1973), 39-51. Bate and Herman Crook, cigar maker by day, both performed on the Opry but did not want a full-time musical career which would have taken them away from their families and home. 13 William R. McDaniel and Harold Seligman, Grand Ole Opry (New York: Greenberg, 1952), 45-6. 31 economy. The Opry stars’ country roots (perceived or otherwise), were crucial to their ability to play hillbilly and function in the urban economy of the hillbilly music industry.

World War II and the Growth of Country’s Commercial Viability

The Opry and WSM’s abilities to believably wrap an urban production in rustic packaging played a key role in establishing Nashville as the center for the developing country music industry. The initial success of WSM and the Opry, combined with the presence of many prominent hillbilly musicians and songwriters in the Tennessee area, produced the first roots which would eventually make Nashville the most sensible location for existing record labels as well as entrepenuers to build a studio, publish sheet music, or operate a talent agency. Country music historian Jeffrey Lange refers to the

“centripetal forces of the Opry and the Nashville industry” which gradually brought more and more stars and session musicians into their orbit. 14

On the eve of World War II, country music had already proven its commercial

potential, led by the Opry and its network status. The Opry acquired network status on

NBC radio stations for a thirty minute portion of the show every Saturday night,

beginning in 1939. The Opry maintained its lineup of traditional string band, folk, and

novelty performers, but in other parts of the country, diverse styles with hillbilly

associations but new musical innovations further elevated the genre’s visibility. For

instance, Western Swing emerged in Texas and California in the 1930s, combining jazz,

14 Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939-1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 253. 32 European, and Latino styles and producing music with roots in southern rural performance styles but which also reached a wider audience through hybridization, amplification and electrification, and a danceable beat. 15 Western Swing developed first

in Texas because of early urbanization there; performers like Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb,

and Hank Thompson all went electric because they were playing urban barrooms and

needed amplification to be heard. 16 Most of these stars considered their own styles to be

distinct from those of the Opry, but Western Swing and electric Texas honky tonk

performers made guest star appearances on the Opry after releasing hit singles, further

proving the Opry’s position as the program with the widest scope and audience. 17

15 Lange, Smile When You Call Me , 89-91. The music industry in California saw a great deal of overlap between cowboy and hillbilly songs. This was best exemplified by the Hill and Range publishing company, which operated out of Hollywood. In 1947, Hill and Range published folios for Western Swing artists such as Bob Wills and Spade Cooley, Kentucky performers Karl Davis and Harty Taylor, and Texas Jim Lewis, who was said to appeal to “all lovers of Western and Hillbilly music.” Similarly, Hollywood’s West’rn Music Publishing Company published a Hillbilly Hit Kit in 1945, featuring (and lumping together) songs by California cowboys Gene Autry and Zeke Clements as well as Opry star Roy Acuff and Texas troubadour Ernest Tubb. The Sam DeVincent Collection of Illustrated American Sheet Music, ca. 1790-1980, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Box 60, Series 16, Country, Western and Folk Music. 16 The Opry only tentatively accepted electric instrumentation, however, creating a tension between popular national and western performers and the traditional stewards of the Opry and hillbilly music. Ernest Tubb, one of the most popular country singers in the 1940s, featured electric guitar on his recordings beginning in 1941 and “Walking the Floor Over You,” became his ticket to the Opry. Facing resistance from the Opry’s managers, Tubbs told a disapproving Judge Hay, “Judge, this I how I make my records.” Hay relented and the Opry became electrified for the first time, in 1943, the same year the show moved into the Ryman Auditorium. Lange, 85. 17 Bob Wills, the most visible western swing star, declared, “Please don’t anybody confuse us with none of them hillbilly outfits.” But he always maintained his southern allegiance, if not his hillbilly identification, in song lyrics and his retention of certain instrumentation like the fiddle. “Strictly by Ear,” Time , February 11, 1946, 48-50. Time magazine declared that Wills’ innovation was bringing “ranch-house music nearer to the city.” Despite Wills’ request for clarification, the article still used the phrase, 33 In addition to the concurrent changes in the sound and style of the music itself, several other social and economic factors facilitated the rise of commercial country music. The advent of World War II spurred a new wave of internal migrations, bringing rural and southern consumers and workers to urban areas, along with intermingling servicemen with different musical backgrounds and interests in a variety of military spaces. The rural South lost 20 percent of its population during the war, with rural migrants heading either North or West, or, in a migration much less discussed, to cities and coastal towns of the South itself. 18 Even as the migrations were represented as a shift

from southern rural spaces to northern urban spaces, Southern cities also urbanized

rapidly during this period.

The presence of portions of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and Chicago’s National

Barn Dance on national network radio expanded the geographic awareness and

appreciation of the variety of musical styles played on these two shows. Several radio

barn dance programs throughout the nation (including Chicago’s National Barn Dance,

Renfro Valley, Louisiana’s Hayride) featured musicians and stage performers, but only

the Opry lasted past 1960. One of the key reasons for this was WSM management’s early

decision (1934) to form the Artists Service Bureau. The bureau aggressively booked

package shows, large-capacity venues for their artists and maintained an extensive

network of business contacts. As a result of the aggressive marketing and booking efforts

“Backwoods Lombardo,” in a sub-heading to describe Wills. Wills’ biographer in 1938 prefigured much of the later defense of country’s new urban direction by arguing that the star “is a superb showman who has not gone ‘big town’ on the people. He is still a country boy.” Ruth Sheldon, Hubbin’ It: The Life of Bob Wills (Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press, 1938). 18 Lange, 67-70. See also “Hillbilly Music is Big Favorite with Baltimore Patrons,” Billboard , July 3, 1943, 62. 34 of WSM’s Artists Service Bureau, many Opry stars achieved national reputations and toured the region and nation constantly, while still performing on the Opry most every

Saturday night. 19

One of the most important structural factors in the emergence of a strong viable country music industry, though, was a dispute between broadcasters and the licensing agency, ASCAP, that created a window of opportunity for the proliferation of new country songs and songwriters. ASCAP demanded that radio stations pay fees for each song broadcast over the radio (charging that by playing licensed recordings they were unfairly acquiring free content), and stations argued that their broadcasts to mass audiences provided enough free advertising for the publishers’ product to justify skipping the licensing fee. In order to protest ASCAP’s policy, broadcasters engineered a mass boycott of ASCAP songs beginning January 1, 1941. Simultaneously, broadcasters astutely formed their own licensing organization, BMI, whose compensation structures and less restrictive membership requirements opened the doors to many new and already established hillbilly artists. 20

The broadcasters’ boycott of ASCAP and the creation of the new BMI licensing

company increased demand for new songs, and “hillbilly” songwriters who had been

excluded from ASCAP had new songs ready to go. This helped raise the visibility of the

music while also creating new compensation structures for its performers and writers.

19 Lange, Ibid, 190. 20 See Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 54-7, on the structural shifts and “Gold in Them Thar Hillbillies: B’way Pubs Hungry for Corn as Rural Rhythms Skyrocket in Disk and Music Sales,” Billboard , August 21, 1943, 12, for awareness of the importance of the licensing struggle in the trade press. 35 The licensing organization battles played out in New York City, mostly, but the consequences were felt around the country and Nashville-based businessmen involved in the country music industry were some of the first to capitalize on the openings generated by the corporate wars in New York. BMI recognized the centrality of Nashville early in its existence and located a branch office in Nashville well before ASCAP. Although in recognition of the greatly increased power of the country industry, ASCAP did eventually cater to and woo country artists with their own Music Row presence.

The creation of BMI in the 1940s inspired Nashville publisher Fred Rose to

partner with Grand Ole Opry performer Roy Acuff, and their publishing company, Acuff-

Rose, profited off of country songs heard over the Opry and sold throughout the nation

beginning in the mid-1940s. The partnership between Rose and Acuff, one of the most

popular Opry stars, solidified the importance of Nashville within the newly consolidating

field of country music, providing yet another anchor to the city and simultaneously

lending credence to the notion that “hillbilly” musicians were in fact professional. Acuff-

Rose, in the very beginning, outsourced the actual sheet music publishing to a Chicago

firm, but very quickly moved production to Nashville and began renting larger offices

from National Life. 21

Much of the Opry’s sway over popular hillbilly artists came from the knowledge, as Acuff found in 1946 when he briefly left the Opry, that a star’s power was constituted in tandem with the Opry, at least for the mid-century decades. The stars were the most popular when they appeared weekly on the Opry. Even though WSM paid Opry

21 John Rumble, “Fred Rose and the Development of the Nashville Music Industry, 1942-1954,” PhD. Diss., Vanderbilt University, 1980. 36 performers a very small wage for their actual appearances on the radio show, their powerful ability to book lucrative appearances for their stars elsewhere made the appearance requirements tenable to many stars. 22 As such, as the 1930s came to a close, the Opry, and by extension Nashville, were already poised to become the center of the hillbilly music world. The next section argues that Nashville’s position as a country city resonated with the Opry’s public presentations and facilitated the brick-and-mortar development of the industry itself.

Nashville’s Accessible Urbanity

Hillbilly music’s moderate urbanization matched that of the city of Nashville.

Both blended elements of an older ethos with a tempered embrace of modernity.

Nashville positioned itself as a welcoming combination of southern hospitality and northern advancement in the same period that the Opry similarly blended a modern business sensibility that increasingly contrasted with its fabled agrarian and “hillbilly” past. Chamber of Commerce promotional materials in the 1940s in fact emphasized

Nashville’s “middle-ness” in virtually every way, including size, climate, topography, and relation to the rest of the country: “midway between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of

Mexico, and approximately half way between the Atlantic Coast and the plains states of the Middle West.” 23

22 Lange, 188-190. 23 Polk’s Nashville (Davidson County, Tenn.) City Directory , (St. Louis: R.L. Polk and Co., Publishers, 1943), 13. 37 Even as white collar industries like state government and insurance drove its economy, Nashville’s self-promotion efforts preserved and incorporated various elements of the rural past. In the 1940s and 1950s, the city’s boosters argued that Nashville could blend the rural and the urban by modernizing the economy and built environment without losing an essential “down home” character. In describing why so many people chose to live in Nashville, one promotional writer declared:

Many are impressed with the tempo of the modern city, with its thousands of

people engaged in trade, the students and teachers in its many colleges, and its

artisans who work in busy factories turning out hundreds of products for national

defense and domestic purposes. To others, colorful scenes of the Old South,

faithfully preserved throughout the Nashville area, call to mind the days and

deeds of an era resplendent with charm and romance, that is linked inseparably

with the story of America. 24

Here the Chamber of Commerce implicitly endorsed the South’s racist past (“colorful

scenes of the Old South”), but also positioned the city as part of a modern industrial

economy. They attempted to have it both ways. 25

24 Polk’s Nashville (Davidson County, Tenn.) City Directory , (St. Louis: R.L. Polk and Co., Publishers, 1953), 15. 25 New South boosters worked against powerful cultural stereotypes of the benighted south. In the 1930s, as the Depression shifted the lens through with the country understood poverty, much of the nation’s imagination of poverty located it in the Southeast and the Dust Bowl. Widespread coverage of the Dust Bowl migrants to California often emphasized their extreme poverty and closeness to the land as both features inherent to the region and its people. In tandem with novels like Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road series, the effect was, according to social historian James Gregory, that “images of social maladjustment that formerly had been associated with 38 The city’s desire to have such a dual appeal required a delicate balance in the their approach to the Opry. The program contributed to the city’s gentle nostalgia but also appeared to threaten to overrun the city with unseemly (and un-modern) “hillbillies.” 26

Nashville billed itself as “The Athens of the South,” and in fact funded the construction

of a life size replica of the Parthenon at the turn of the century, first as a temporary

structure for the centennial exposition in 1897 and then restored and made permanent in

the 1920s. 27 The nickname referenced the city’s self-positioning as a center of erudition

relatively small numbers of poor Southerners began to be loosely applied to the whole class of Southern tenant farmers.” During the Depression, in other words, the popular circulation of images of the poorest of the Dust Bowl refugees caused the image of the poorest southern tenant farmer to signify for most of the South. James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), 103-113. 26 During the heady economic times of the 20s, journalist H.L. Mencken, in particular, wrote a series of articles depicting a South hopelessly populated with debased and degraded residents, unable and unwilling to keep up with the modernity of the rest of the country. Historian George Tindall described this larger matrix of ideas as the “Benighted South” narrative. Anthony Harkins has deftly shown that 1930s cartoons and comic strips were a crucial space in which this cultural prejudice further gestated and developed. His description of Paul Webb’s The Mountain Boys outlines the exaggerated negative characteristics of Webb’s benighted mountain characters: “social isolation, physical torpor and laziness, unrefined sexuality, filth and animality, comical violence, and utter ignorance of modernity.” Harkins has deftly demonstrated the shift over time in the characterization of hillbilly, arguing that the emergence and success of hillbilly music from the 20s through the 40s played a large role in tempering the menace of the earlier figure by substituting instead a genial, harmless, more nostalgic avatar of America’s agrarian past. Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 105. George B. Tindall, “The Benighted South: Origins of a Modern Image,” Virginia Quarterly Review 40 (Spring 1964), 281-94. See also, Malone, 17-8. 27 Many Southern civic and business leaders agreed that they needed to modernize their economies, and municipalities across the South embarked upon aggressive campaigns to bring industry and much needed capital to their communities. Often, this meant offering plentiful natural resources and/or cheap labor to already existing northern companies, generally either by enticing independent operations or branches of northern corporations with the prospect of tax breaks, cheap unorganized labor, and state- sponsored infrastructure. This civic embrace of modernity also led to support for New 39 and sophistication, the “interest in the arts, education, and many buildings of classic design,” according to the Nashville chamber of commerce. 28 Chamber of Commerce publicity materials mentioned, but did not foreground, the presence of the Opry, although in the early 1950s this began to change and local businesses began to recognize the economic potential of the industry. 29 The industry’s increasing contributions to the

Deal era programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration, which conservative pro-business southern officials and industrialists supported as necessary for luring industry. The acceptance of the increased role of the federal government and the welcome of northern capital and business did not match the national narrative of the Benighted South, and in fact did not appear in national cultural discussions of the South until well after World War II. David L. Carlton, “Smokestack- Chasing and Its Discontents: Southern Development Strategy in the Twentieth Century,” in The American South in the Twentieth Century , eds Craig S. Pascoe, Karen Trahan Leathem, and Andy Ambrose (Athens, GA: U of Georgia Press, 2005), 106-126. See also, Norman Carlisle, “Is Dixie Leaving the North Behind?” Coronet, July, 1952, 38-42. 28 Polk’s Nashville (Davidson County, Tenn.) City Directory , (St. Louis: R.L. Polk and Co., Publishers, 1943). See also Convention and Tourist Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, “You’ll Enjoy Nashville, Tennessee,” 1953, Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce Publications and Reports, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library. This publication also mentions the Opry and the Ryman as one among many of Nashville’s possible attractions. The explicit invocation of and contrast with the rest of the South within the nickname “Athens of the South” was intentional, and consistent with Nashville’s self-promotion and presentation throughout the century. Not surprisingly, considering the importance of civil rights to the region’s history and culture, Nashville’s self-distancing from the rest of the South often involved race and efforts to show that race relations were more benign and humane in Nashville than other parts of the South. The conservative Nashville Banner ran a six-part series in 1946 entitled, “The Negro in Nashville: An Asset or a Liability?” believing the series to be a modern progressive attempt to truly understand the social and economic situation of Nashville’s black community. The answer positioned the paper and the city in a kind of middle space, not as blatantly exclusionary as other southern municipalities but also not endorsing equal rights. See Dr. Roy Garis, “The Negro in Nashville: An Asset or a Liability?” Nashville Banner , September 30 through October 5, 1946. 29 “Nashville – The Heart of American Folk Music,” Nashville Real Estate Board 1953 Yearbook, 56, suggested the boost to the local economy which the Opry and the industry could provide and pointed out that hillbilly music was big business for the city of Nashville because people who came to see the Opry also spent significant sums of money at restaurants, shops, and motels. Series 1, Nashville Board of Realtors, Greater 40 region’s service economy over time convinced the city’s political and business leaders of the industry’s value to the region.

Within Nashville, the Opry and its players carved out a middle space, halfway between the rural Southern hills and backwoods (which were still haunted by images of degraded hillbillies), and the Northern urbanites who had disseminated these powerful images. The size of the metropolitan area distinguished the region from spaces such as

New York and Chicago. Opry stars operated in or near downtown, the city offered urban amenities and associations while still offering accessible rural spaces of residence, easy mobility, and spatial versatility. 30 The size of the downtown and the distribution of access routes allowed most country music figures to live outside of the city, or in unincorporated areas on the edge of the city limits.31 In choosing to own homes in these edge spaces,

Opry stars like Red Foley, Acuff, and Pearl enacted membership in a white-collar commuting class. The scale of Nashville’s geography also facilitated a far-flung network

Nashville Association of Realtors Records, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library. 30 After World War II, like many other American cities, Nashville became increasingly car-dependent; vehicle registrations in Davidson County jumped from under 50,000 in 1938 to 155,000 in 1960, while the number of yearly revenue passengers on Nashville’s mass transit declined from 60 million in 1945 to 18 million in 1959. See Tennessee Department of Highways, Nashville Metropolitan Area Transportation Study , by Wilbur Smith and Associates, New Haven, 1961, 2-3. 31 In the early 1950s, stars like Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl (Sarah Colley), Red Foley, and Ernest Tubb all lived on the edge of town in residential neighborhoods which were, even at peak time, within fifteen to twenty minute drives of downtown. See Nashville Metropolitan Area Transportation Study, 21, and Polk’s Nashville (Davidson County, Tenn.) City Directory , (St. Louis: R.L. Polk and Co., Publishers, 1953). See also “Eddy Arnold: The Tennessee Plowboy,” Country Song Roundup , 1 (March 1955), 8-9; Mrs. Eddy Arnold, “The Arnolds at Home,” Ibid , 10, for discussions of Arnold’s domestic life which emphasize his home’s location on the suburban edge of the city. 41 of industry locations and sites within its boundaries, with publishing houses Acuff-Rose and Cedarwood opening up shop on the main arteries leading out of town. 32

In 1943, after being asked to leave the War Memorial Auditorium, the Opry

moved into the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. 33 Tom Ryman built the

auditorium in the 1890s and ceded the venue to the city of Nashville, expressly stating

that the auditorium was to be used for the enjoyment of all citizens of Nashville.

Originally more like a church, with a rostrum in the middle surrounded by circular rows

of pews, the building had been converted into a performance venue by cutting the stage in

half to create a backstage space. The Ryman loomed just North of Lower Broad,

strikingly dominating the skyline of a strip of two story buildings housing furniture

stores, corner liquor stores and eateries. Lower Broad served as a line of demarcation in

Nashville’s cultural imaginary between the downtown Central Business District area and

the less desirable area south of Broad. Hotels, restaurants, and office buildings existed

North of Broad (but no residences), whereas the blocks south of Lower Broad, adjacent to

where the Ryman Auditorium sat five long blocks south of the Capitol, consisted of

service and filling stations, used car lots, body shops and parts and tire stores (downtown

Nashville’s parking problems were legendary, and presumably this neighborhood catered

to downtown commuters). As such, the Ryman existed in a kind of liminal downtown

32 Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham: Duke UP, 1996). Tubb bought a home for his family in August of 1943 on Cedar Crest Road off Anderson Lane, just off Gallatin Road north of Madison, 87. Tubb bought a home for his family at 331 Lawndale in Glenncliff estates, four and a half miles from the Ryman downtown, in 1951, 162. 33 Havighurst, 121-22. The Dixie Tabernacle on Fatherland Street in East Nashville was the Opry venue (its home only from 1936 to 19399) most like a barn, with a sawdust floor, unpainted rafters, and side walls which rolled up. See also Wolfe, 242. 42 space. The Ryman sat only two blocks north of the Greyhound bus station, generally a sign of a neighborhood on the slim edge of respectability, but then again perfect to catch the arrival of guitar-toting dreamers. 34

By the end of the 1940s, Nashville looked to re-make its urban spaces through

urban renewal and present their region as a mid-sized city equally amenable to Northern

capital, national tourism, and southern rural migrants. WSM and the Opry hoped to

benefit from the city’s drive for modernity and the “improvement” of downtown and the

Ryman’s surrounding neighborhood. Nashville’s planners put forth rhetoric which

promised to clear the entire central business district of “blight” and “slums” leaving the

Ryman in a prime downtown location. However, the renewal plans for the blocks closer

to Lower Broad never made it off of the planning books and into concrete Housing

Authority plans. 35

34 Polk’s Nashville (Davidson County, Tenn.) City Directory , (St. Louis: R.L. Polk and Co., Publishers, 1943). The bus station was 230 5 th Avenue South and the Ryman 116 5 th Avenue North. As well, the blocks further south of Broad contained a higher preponderance of African-American group housing in substandard dwellings. Eli S. Marks, “Housing Survey: Low Income Housing Areas of Nashville, Tennessee, 1940” (Nashville: NHA, 1940). 35 The City Council created the Nashville Housing Authority in 1938, one of the earliest in the country. Despite strong opposition from anti-New Deal conservatives, advocates of public housing as the best way to prevent the spread of slums and blight won out. When, a decade later, federal urban renewal legislation was passed, the Nashville Housing Authority was well positioned to take early advantage of federal dollars for the razing of “blighted” housing and the construction of new roads, green spaces, and retail/office/housing mixes. The first major renewal project in Nashville was the Capitol Hill Redevelopment Project, which razed dilapidated housing on the hillsides northwest of the Capitol building to create a highway bypass, more parking, and office space, all designed to support the downtown businesses and promote the city center as a retail and business destination. They then looked forward to removing the perceived “blight” ringing the Central Business District. Robert G. Spinney, World War II in Nashville: Transformation of the Homefront (Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1998), 100-2. 43 Despite this perilous proximity, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Opry and its fans (as well as adept downtown business owners) began to fully cultivate a home for the show in the downtown space of Nashville, enlarging the scope of a typical Opry visit and intricately locating the Opry within a network of country music establishments downtown. The Ryman’s location just off of Lower Broad, enmeshed in a denser network of hotels, restaurants, transportation hubs, and retail shops, facilitated this development.

Opry star Ernest Tubb moved his record shop to Broad in 1951, half a block and around the corner from the Ryman. 36 In addition to actually selling disks over the counter (as

opposed to the previous shop’s reliance on placement of orders), the new venue sold

Opry-related souvenirs and included a performance space in the back. With these new

additions, Tubb’s new shop and its second performance space (and Tubb’s midnight

radio show which he also broadcast from his shop directly after the Opry) greatly

increased the level of Opry-oriented traffic on Lower Broad. 37 Around the same time,

local restaurants and hotels began advertising to country fans in newspapers and country

journals, marking the space of Lower Broad and the surrounding blocks as an enlarged

space of Opry related tourism, a significant development in the history of the Opry’s

presence within Nashville. 38

36 Tubb’s Record Shop first opened at 720 Commerce Street in 1947 and then moved to 417 Broadway in August of 1951, Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 122. 37 “Over the Cracker Barrel,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , August 1953, 3. 38 WSM’s own survey, in the early 1950s, found that 88 percent of Opry attendees came to Nashville solely to see the show and that the average visitor traveled 485 miles. The leading states, in order of Opry attendance, were Alabama, Illinois, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Georgia and Kentucky. Tennessee ranked only third despite its residents obviously having the shortest distance to travel. Nashville newspapers rarely mentioned the Opry until the 1950s, and generally the Opry only appeared in the listing 44

Most Opry visitors had traveled from out of state, many of them from rural spaces or small towns, and thus the Opry as a live music event produced a particular spatial encounter. Country fans traveled to downtown Nashville to watch rustic performances which were in turn broadcast by clear channel radio across the nation. Before the show they shopped in souvenir and record shops, stayed in hotels located in varied Nashville neighborhoods, and mingled with other fans in the taverns and restaurants of downtown

Nashville. On stage, Opry personalities enacted a vision of this same country rube in the big city encounter through their performances, even though many fans traveled from urban areas and clearly understood that the performers themselves were urban businessmen and women off stage.

Opry Stars and the Public Professionalization of Hillbilly Music

Mid-1940s coverage of the Opry and hillbilly music strongly associated the genre with inherent rusticity, and the phrase “rural rhythm” was often used to describe the style up through the end of the decade. A phrase such as “rural rhythm” indicated that the most elemental component of the songs, the beat itself, was somehow intrinsically rural, a

of the featured performers in the nightly schedules for Nashville’s three main radio stations (which did not even use the word “Opry”). WSM itself spent little money on print advertising within Nashville. William R. McDaniel and Harold Seligman, Grand Ole Opry (New York: Greenberg, 1952), 3-5. See also “Response is Good to ‘Audition’ Issue of Pickin’ & Singin’ News; Artists, Fans Give Encouragement,” Pickin’ & Singin’ News, May 23, 1953, 6, for the same poll results. 45 product of the space itself. 39 National journalists also commonly used metaphors of the

music emerging directly from the land, as in, “The general practice is to take a recording

outfit into the territory where such songs grow .”40 A 1944 Saturday Evening Post article

referred to Grand Ole Opry performers as “bucolic singers and bands.” The same article

broadly declared, “all hillbilly music sounds monotonously alike to the urban eardrum.” 41

These journalists routinely assumed that such a thing as “the urban eardrum” existed and that hillbilly music itself was entirely antithetical to urban ears.

These commentators mapped wholesale spatial assumptions onto the music. The persistent belief in an “urban eardrum” which could not tolerate a “rural rhythm” played out in particular descriptions of the sound of hillbilly music too. Initially, trade magazines rarely described the music itself in much detail, except as a series of trimmed gerunds evoking a chaotic country party, as in “pickin’,” “twangin,’” and “wailin’,” eliding artistic and creative efforts and positing more natural sounds and expressions as the source of the music. A 1946 Collier’s writer described the music as something country people had previously “been doing mostly for fun,” until the commercial success of a

39 Nat S. Green, “King Korn Klondike: Hillbilly Troupes Roll Up Dizzy Box Office Scores in One-Day and Repeat Stands,” Billboard , March 6, 1943, 1. As Pierre Bourdieu has provocatively argued, music is the art form most understood as spiritual, or interior: “As the countless variations on the soul of music and the music of the soul bear witness, music is bound up with ‘interiority’ (‘inner music’) of the ‘deepest’ sort.” In this sense, attaching a naturalized sense of musical taste and production to the music perpetuated hillbilly stereotypes which “made sense” in a way that other popular entertainment forms perhaps would not. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), 19. 40 Kyle Crichton, “Thar’s GOLD in them Hillbillies,” Collier’s , April 30, 1938, 24-7. 41 Maurice Zolotow, “Hillbilly Boom,” The Saturday Evening Post , February 12, 1944, 36. 46 couple of hillbilly tunes had convinced them to try to sell their product. 42 Into the 1950s, journalists conceptualized country stars as “great, natural musicians,” emphasizing their general lack of classical training but also suggesting, again, that the music emerged unmediated from hillbilly culture and the agrarian lifestyle. 43

Billboard covered hillbilly music as a commercial phenomenon, although not as a

musical style worthy of much respect. An article from early 1946 argued that hillbillies

had become more savvy and had recently learned the commercial value of their music

(such as it was): “Reports are coming in from more and more waxers that the boys from

the hills have been wised up. They’re not hillbillies anymore; they don’t come cheap or

naïve; they know the value of their product and they’re collecting for every nasal twang

or corn-jug burp.” 44 Suggesting that hillbillies just make the sounds and collect the

42 Doron K. Antrim, “Whoop-and-Holler Opera,” Collier’s , January 26, 1946, 18. 43 Bill Davidson, “Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Hillbilly Tunes,” Collier’s , July 28, 1951, 34. See also Zolotow, “But, above all, sincerity, even if it is awkward unpolished sincerity, is the criterion used to judge the performer,” 36. 44 Joe Carlton, “Today’s Platter Pilgrimages Show Folk Fellahs Plenty Hep,” Billboard , February 16, 1946, 20. Carlton’s reference to “the boys from the hills” was also typical of the time, most importantly in the spatial map which it drew, on which the musicians and singers originated from a separate geographical place from everyone else in the industry. See Hal Webman, “Gold in Them Hillbills!: Folk Grosses Give Bookers New ($) Look,” Billboard , December 27, 1947, 3, for another article which marveled at the commercial capacity of folk or hillbilly music by using an oft-repeated titular metaphor of “gold in the hills.” See also “Gold in Them Thar Hillbillies” Billboard, August 21, 1943, 12, “Unprecedented success of hillbilly music is prompting Broadway music publishers to don their overalls for a whirl at the corn field.” “Field” here takes on a double meaning, as both an agricultural space and the business or genre designation of hillbilly music. See also, Robert Scherman, “Hillbilly Phenomenon,” Christian Science Monitor , March 13, 1948, “When the hillbilly singer makes his appearance before the public he can do no wrong. They who have paid their admission have proclaimed him as their idol. They whoop, stomp, jump, and generally raise the roof. Of course, the singer has the support of the boys in the band and the instruments upon which they play, usually an ill-tuned fiddle, a couple of raspy guitars, perhaps a bass fiddle, and a delicate little instrument known as the steel guitar, from which there can be coaxed anything from the 47 checks, the reference to nasal twang and “corn-jug burps” implied that hillbilly music was simply the collection of natural sounds of the hillbillies themselves and their agrarian lifestyle, erasing any sense of original creative artistry on their part. 45 The author marveled at the fact that making corn-jug burps could return a profit. A 1953 article in

Nation’s Business , on the European appeal of what the article refers to as “hillbilly and

western,” still emphasized the lack of musical training and the raw expression of genuine

emotion and experience: “Some of them do not know a note of music, but their great

appeal as entertainers is in the rawness of their emotions and their sincerity in conveying

them.” 46

These descriptions completely missed the professional nature of the industry and elided the fact that Acuff-Rose, a hillbilly publishing company, had been publishing sheet music for a decade. Cleary, Acuff and Rose found plenty of country songs created with notation in mind and fully believed that hillbilly fans would buy and utilize the sheet music. Instead of focusing on this aspect of the music industry and culture, the writers

croak of a bullfrog to the clang of the cowbell.” The bullfrog sounds signify an unadulterated natural world and the cowbell a more traditional agrarian past, both clearly outside of urban spaces. 45 See also “September Records,” Time, September 2, 1940, 45, for a description of the variety of hillbilly performers as “blues singers, hillbilly fiddlers, guitar- strummers, jug-players, washboard-slappers.” 46 Rufus Jarman, “Country Music Goes to Town,” Nation’s Business , February, 1953, 51. See also Broadcast Music, Inc., Meet the Artist (New York: BMI, 1957) which portrays Acuff as a “natural” singer, “although he is unable to read a note of music, those who know rate him the most enduring and successful of all singers of folk songs. Roy is an authentic folk artist, a man who came by his talent ‘natural,’ as the folks in Coon Run would say,” A-1. See also Eddy Arnold’s bio in the same publication: “Eddy and his Tennessee Playboys give their songs the warm sincerity and earnest appeal of the simple farm country from which they all come. Their artistry has helped a great deal to lift folk music out of the fields and hills and valleys into urban areas across the entire nation,” A- 10. 48 instead emphasized those who “do not know a note of music.” The reality of hillbilly music making was much different. Acuff’s publishing house presented a professionalized, transmittable vision of the songs and songcraft (and which they assumed they could sell to many many “hillbilly” consumers!), countering the stereotype found in the national media, of untutored hillbillies making “natural” sounds, which only later get turned into profitable music. 47 But Acuff’s publishing house was only one part

of his larger self presentation.

In addition to his highly profitable publishing operation, Roy Acuff embarked on

a series of ventures which ultimately worked to counter the stereotype of hillbillies as

country rubes stumbling across profits by selling their “natural” music making.

Capitalizing on his name recognition and goodwill with fans, Acuff also developed

Dunbar Cave, a dilapidated 200-acre resort owned by the town of Clarksville which he

bought in the late 1940s. Acuff constructed a multi-faceted entertainment space: the cave

itself was an attraction, as well as fishing and boating on the lake, regular live music

performances, and an old hotel which gave way to cabins for lodging. Acuff successfully

47 Acuff-Rose’s first office opened in Fred Rose’s home at 2403 Kirkman Avenue, in 1943. Sheet music printed and sold out of Chicago by another firm then. Then, still in 1943, they rented an office at 220 Capitol Boulevard from National Life itself. Shortly thereafter they pulled out of Chicago and did all printing and distribution from Nashville. In 1948, having outgrown their offices downtown, they rented out a storefront in a single-story strip mall on Franklin Road. Alongside a hardware store, a tobacco store, a vacuum cleaner shop, and a beauty salon. Gradually they rented more and more of the lots until they eventually bought the whole building for $85,000. Then in 1967 they constructed a new building on the same lot, a multimillion dollar structure which opened on July 10, 1967. Elizabeth Schlappi, Roy Acuff, the Smoky Mountain Boy (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1978), 153-6. The new building had its own studio, too, so they didn’t have to use other Nashville locations. Acuff had had $25,000 in the bank when Acuff-Rose began, but initial sales of their first songs did so well that they never had to dip into it. Acuff lent his name to Cherokee Mills for Roy Acuff Flour in the early 1940s and was fully on the path of commercial country star by this point. 49 charged a ten to twenty cent admission fee and then individual fees for each activity on top of that. 48 Acuff also opened up a museum exhibit of his own collection of hillbilly artifacts.

Acuff’s supporters nominated him in the Democratic gubernatorial primaries in

1944 (he withdrew his name shortly thereafter) and in 1946 on the Republican side, but he decided not to run either year and eventually discouraged voters from voting for him while acknowledging that he appreciated the sentiment. In 1948, however, when friends and supporters once again nominated him, Acuff told the party that he would avoid actively campaigning in the primaries but that, if nominated, he would run in the general election, seeing it as the will of the people in that case. Acuff did win the Republican primary and between the end of August and the first of November in 1948, crisscrossed the state with Republican candidate for Senate Carroll Reece. Acuff and Reece’s campaign featured much music, and in the slightly condescending words of Reece himself at their first joint campaign appearance, “You have heard some delightful entertainment by Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain boys. Also he has spoken to you briefly about his desire to serve you as the Governor of this great state.” 49 Treating Acuff

as his campaign’s musical entertainment and Acuff’s own campaign as an afterthought,

Reece clearly saw the stage as his own. However, Acuff presented himself as a serious

campaigner well qualified to govern the state.

48 Ibid. See also “Dunbar Cave Re-opening Further Proof that Acuff Makes His Money Work for Him After He Makes it Before Nation-Wide Microphones,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , Audition Issue, May 1953, 5, for a celebratory discussion of Acuff’s riches and unparalleled popularity around the nation. 49 “Text of Reece Address,” Nashville Banner , August 31, 1948, 12. 50 Acuff’s political ambitions received a great deal of press, some of which re- narrativized his initial interest in the governorship. Beginning with a claim made in a

1944 article in the Saturday Evening Post , Acuff’s gubernatorial aspirations were repeatedly mis-construed as a reaction to then Governor Prentice Cooper decision to refuse to attend an Opry celebration in 1943, and his pointedly singling Acuff out for turning Nashville into the hillbilly capital of the world. 50 The slight, if it in fact actually

happened (though the rumor of the slight was probably enough), may have played some

role in Acuff’s eventual decision, but in none of the election years did he actively put

himself on the ballot. Instead, friends and supporters, and in one case Nashville

Tennessean journalists, placed him on the ballot to shake things up. However, by the end of the 1948 campaign Acuff did feel that he had encountered anti-hillbilly prejudice and responded with a passionate defense of being a hillbilly singer, pointing out that incumbent Governor Browning had “tried to make fun of me by calling me a hillbilly fiddler and sideshow performer. I am a hillbilly singer and fiddler, and if that is a crime,

I’ll have to plead guilty to it. I’ll even go further than that and tell you that I am proud of it.” 51

Acuff then went on to point to his own success as a businessman, pointedly referring to the fact that he paid more in taxes each year than those who presumably poked fun at him made all year: “The fact is, friends, that the taxes I pay to the Federal

Government and to the state … taxes on my business operations which I run myself …

50 Zolotow, 37. Also see “Reece and Acuff Draw 7,500 at Memphis Rally,” Nashville Banner , October 25, 1948, 2, for a summary of Acuff’s political career which mentions Acuff’s indignation without mentioning Cooper’s slight. 51 Leslie T. Hart, “Thousands Hear Reece, Acuff End Campaign,” Nashville Banner, November 2, 1948, 1 51 are enough to support some of the people who have been writing this kind of ridicule since the campaign started.” 52 His assertion that he paid more in taxes than his critics

grossed revealed Acuff’s confidence that he could campaign as a hillbilly with money.

Acuff continually emphasized his competence as a businessman as qualification for the

governorship, refusing to be pigeonholed as a hillbilly singer and fiddler. Instead, Acuff

presented himself as a singer who could still retain authentic hillbilly character while

making impressive sums of money and competently managing several business

operations. Acuff referred to himself as the “man with the fiddle” who spoke for the

“poor man” against the “fat politician” while simultaneously trumpeting his acute

business acumen and hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual income as adequate

qualifications for the job. 53 Acuff could speak for the “poor man” without being one.

Probably the second most popular Opry performer, perpetually lovesick small town gossip Minnie Pearl, was widely known to be played by Sarah Colley, a well-heeled

Belmont Conservatory attendee and daughter of one of Tennessee’s wealthiest lumbermen. Like Acuff, Minnie Pearl repeatedly used publicity materials and interviews with country journals to highlight the distance between her onstage performance as a goofy and perpetually lovesick country girl and her offstage life as a well-educated

Nashville socialite. On stage, Colley played the exaggerated rustic role of Minnie Pearl, but off stage repeatedly made clear in journal and magazine articles that she was an urban-educated woman playing the shy small town country girl. Her invented name itself

52 Hart, Ibid. 53 See also Schlappi’s chapter on Acuff’s political campaigns, 182-205, for further excerpts of Acuff’s stump speeches and interviews culled from Acuff’s personal collections. 52 (and fans’ awareness of the stage name as frequently found in feature articles on “Pearl”) called into the question the pure veracity of the performance, allowing readers of country music journals to understand her stage work as a performance so strikingly different as to require a different name. In articles, Colley claimed that some of her rich relatives stopped talking to her when she started “being a hillbilly.” 54 The notion of starting to be a

hillbilly cemented Colley’s dual identity. Colley elaborated that she went to college for

two years but did not think it “marked her too much.”

The title of a long article on Pearl in the first issue of Pickin’ and Singin’ News

unequivocally claimed that Colley “mimicks the country ladies.” 55 However, rather than

believing that she unfairly portrays small town country girls, the article highlighted

Colley’s roots in a small town, ostensibly the background necessary for her to

successfully mimic the country ladies. Media coverage referred to her clothes as her

“costume” and Colley alluded to the construction of Pearl, referring to the fact that she

“plays” hillbilly and foregrounding those biographical details of her own life which sharply jarred with Pearl’s life story. In so doing, she created a space for fans to apprehend both her personae simultaneously. Colley’s own small town childhood provided the authenticity in her portrayal of Pearl; presumably she knew small town

country girls in her hometown of Centerville and was able to draw on her interactions

54 Don Eddy, “Hillbilly Heaven,” American Magazine, March 1952, 122. Sarah Ophelia Colley is her name until she marries Henry Cannon. 55 Red O’Donnell, “Merry, Rollicking Minnie Pearl Gathers Many Interesting Experiences While Mimicking the Country Ladies … And Making Them Like It,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , May 1953, 7. See also, William R. McDaniel and Harold Seligman, Grand Ole Opry (New York: Greenberg, 1952); Martha Fergerson, “Cousin Minnie Pearl Taught Youngsters the Simple Way,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , December 30, 1954, 3; and Broadcast Music, Inc., Meet the Artist (New York: BMI, 1957), P-4. 53 with them in constructing the character (for those who apprehend the “reality” of the

Pearl character at any rate).

Like the barbers and mechanics who “played” gully jumpers and possum hunters,

Acuff and Pearl created a dual presentation which the audience could certainly apprehend as such, but the reception outside of the Opry community was not always so nuanced.

One national journalist recognized this dichotomy but came away with a drastically different interpretation than that presumably favored by the “hillbilly” performers.

“Opryites are extremely sensitive. They can stand being called hillbillies on the stage, but in real life they consider the term derisive. Some of them only have a childlike sense of responsibility, don’t understand the difference between business and personal affairs, and can’t stand being scolded.” 56 The leap between the second and third sentence in the passage, from performers who resist the hillbilly label off stage to “hillbillies” with a

“childlike sense of responsibility,” encapsulates much of the national discourse on the music, in essence chastising the hillbillies for an unfounded desire to be taken seriously as urban professionals. The article explicitly posited the performers as children, implicitly arguing against the bifurcation and arguing that they were still hillbillies in temperament off stage as well. 57

56 Don Eddy, “Hillbilly Heaven,” American Magazine , March 1952, 121. 57 Aaron Fox sees a more complex relation between country fans and the hillbilly figure; drawing on ethnographic research in a contemporary small town community in Texas, he argues, “the figure of the ‘rube’ is more sympathetically portrayed, more multidimensional, more self-consciously apprehended as a confusion of the textual and the real. It is interpreted as both an unfair stereotype and a funny exaggeration, as a trope of explanation for actual, known people and for highly performative assumptions of the ‘hillbilly’ identity. It invites subtle and partial identifications.” These “subtle and partial” identifications are especially important for understanding hillbilly performances in the early years of country music, as many individuals enacted a performance without 54 Opry dialogue and comedy which traded on rustic stereotypes served as a way to define country figures in contradistinction with the earlier, more caricatured versions of themselves. 58 The Opry’s frequent and popular comedy bits further revealed a stance or

persona split between two worlds. Host Red Foley bantered with various Opry

personalities in between songs, including Minnie Pearl, Rod Brasfield, and Opry

announcer Grant Turner. On the eve of an Opry troupe’s visit to Europe, in 1949, the

banter revolved around Pearl and Brasfield’s confusion and lack of knowledge about

French language and customs, as they conceptualized or tried to understand the language

through a decidedly rural lens. Brasfield asked Pearl what “a la carte” means, and she

responded, “Ala Carte? It means on the wagon!” 59

The following exchange also traded on the notion that international travel was entirely alien to Pearl and Brasfield’s personae. [The transcription was from the WSM script and does not necessarily represent the actual sounds produced by Pearl and

Brasfield.]

unequivocally identifying with it, or wholly “taking it on” and hillbilly fans knew this. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 97. 58 Pamela Fox points out that while most historical and contemporary narratives of the Opry and other barn dance programs highlight the presence of a white rube caricature such as Cousin Minnie Pearl, very few also relate the antics of the blackface minstrelsy which each of these shows also presented. Fox argues, drawing on scholars such as Robert Cantwell and Charles Wolfe, that blackface minstrelsy was in fact central to the Opry’s foundational era. Combining blackface and hillbilly served as a way to articulate the homologies between blackness and hillbilly, while still using minstrelsy to demarcate a permanent difference between the two. Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). Also see Hay, 18, for a tribute to the “great minstrel men” of the Opry’s earlier years. 59 “WSM’s Grand Ole Opry Prince Albert Show,” November 12, 1949, WSM Vertical File, Country Music Hall of Fame and Library, Nashville, 12. 55 R: Say Minnie, ain’t you excited about goin’ over the Europe?

M: I sure am, Rodney .. But I’m a little bit skeered about goin’ over the ocean in a

airyplane

R: Shucks, Minnie – It’s jes’ like settin’ in a rockin’ chair.

M: Mebbe so, Rod … But I ain’t never heerd o’ anybody havin’ to bail out of a

rockin’ chair! 60

Even as Minnie Pearl played the rube character, it was not one of total abjection. She

astutely questioned the viability and safety of trans-oceanic jets and her assertion that no

one ever had to bail out of a rocking chair resonated with and endorsed those who chose

(or had no choice) to remain outside of the international tourist economy. 61 The humor is

gentle rather than biting, but the assumptions permeating the performance are still firmly

rustic.

The performers’ more grounded awareness of the realities of the modern world

came in the form of Opry host, Red Foley, who concluded the network portion of the

program by describing the trip without idiomatic country expressions: “Well, we’ve got

to say so long for now … as we mentioned before, we’re goin’ a few thousand miles

60 Ibid, 10. Pearl also used a conversation with her “Uncle Nabob” to further present rustic mis-understandings of international travel, “Uncle Nabob got the idea I was gonna join up with one o’ them burlesque shows because I’d told him we had to take off on a runway and come in on a strip!” The network portion of the Opry program was the only portion for which there was a script and rehearsal, providing a rare written record. Also see Hank Williams, Live at the Opry (Mercury Nasvhille, 1999) for recorded examples of Pearl’s stage humor. 61 As Kryiakoudes has argued, the Opry audience was most likely able to revere the rural past while still willingly and happily participating in the modern consumer capitalist economy. 56 overseas for two weeks.” 62 Foley performed as “himself,” Pearl and Brasfield were

characters produced on stage. Foley was the “straight” foil for figures like Pearl and

Brasfield, and in fact had been hand-picked (because of this cross over appeal) by NBC

network executives to host the Opry when Acuff left in 1946. Foley was from Chicago

and more in the country-pop crooner mold, though he did emphasize gospel tunes

appreciated by traditional audiences (whereas Acuff’s own singing style leaned more

heavily towards old-time string band). 63

Opry singers’ song lyrics as well strengthened this awareness that country people

would retain their country character even as they traveled the world, made large sums of

money, and further lost daily interaction with the farms and hills of the past. Jimmie

Dickens exemplified this stance in his 1949 song “Country Boy.” The song opens with an

expression of class position, “Now, I'm just a simple guy/But there's one thing sure as

shootin'/I hate those folks that think that they're/So doggone high fa lutin.” Dickens then

continued by asserting that, though his nature may have been developed through

specifically country raising, his inherent resistance to “high falutin’” folks stays with him

no matter where he goes, including Hollywood: “I'd be the same in Hollywood/Or right

in my own kitchen.” Through this verse, Dickens claims authentic country identity even

as he foregrounds his stardom and jet-setting travel, setting up a spatial continuum

between Hollywood and his own kitchen back home, over the course of which he retains

his country boy nature throughout. The second verse again emphasizes the role his poor rural upbringing played in his everyman disposition, while firmly locating his country

62 “WSM’s Grand Ole Opry Prince Albert Show.” 63 Around 1945, after appearing with Lawrence Welk and his orchestra, Foley earned the nickname “Sweet Singer of Songs of the Hills and Plains,” Lange, 215. 57 days in the past with references to diapers made from old feed sacks and suspenders fashioned from plow lines. The feed sacks and plow lines unambiguous signifiers of the rural childhood which formed Dickens’ narrator’s sensibility; Dickens’ song focused on his upbringing and his inherent character, while slyly nodding to his current globetrotting ways.64

The Hillbilly in the Cultural Imaginary and the Particular Spatial Assumptions

Affixed to Country Music

During and after World War II, as coverage of hillbilly music and its commercial successes made many stars wealthy and famous, national discourse still firmly located the performers in the hills, backwoods, or mountains, and as a result of this geographic isolation still unfamiliar with even the smaller towns and the cities of the South. The coverage elided the deep connections between urban and rural economies, reductively describing hillbilly musicians bringing their music out of the hills and into the cities for

64 Little Jimmy Dickens, “Country Boy,” Raisin’ the Dickens , Columbia CL 1047, 1957. Dickens, according to country historian Bill Malone, more so than many other performers of the time, addressed rural life (mostly celebratory but also occasionally critical, or realistic). After World War II and the intensive urban migrations of many southerners, country music began to rely less and less on lyrical invocations of the country and focused more on adapting, often times uncomfortably, to new urban rhythms. Dickens, then, was actually rare in his direct analysis of country life, although he adopted a stance both nostalgic and realistic on the practicalities of rural living. The popular subgenre of “honky tonk” referenced rural living more in its absence: mourning the narrators’ migration to urban areas in search of employment and lamenting their contemporary distance from the country itself. Malone, 177-8. Hank Williams was wildly popular for a stretch in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but his version of sad, tragic honky tonk could not sustain itself after his death. Honky tonk moved more in the direction of lighter novelty songs and when the rockabilly boom hit in 1956, the twangy western-attired honky tonk stars seemed suddenly but already long passé. 58 the very first time. 65 Instead, national journalists promoted a specific vision of hill or mountain life rooted more in early twentieth century stereotypes, and understood hill people themselves as either still degraded or previously degraded but now modernizing

(learning about money and manners).

These articles responded to and perpetuated persistent assumptions that the music was natural and wild, untamed and uncorrupted by modern urban hands. They maintained a spatial distance or hierarchy, leaving the music degraded and ridiculous in a way, but also served productively to help the industry market the music as natural, wild, untamed but uncorrupted by modern urban hands, authentic in its “capture” at the authentic genesis point. A 1944 Saturday Evening Post article on talent scout Art Satherly described the process of finding the hidden talents of hillbilly music, “When Satherly is told that there is somebody in an out-of-the-way place who has a very original ballad and that this native artist is too shy to come to town, he will pack his recording equipment into suitcases and head into regions where no city shoes have ever trod before.” 66 The

comment envisioned a music produced in the hidden corners of the country,

incomprehensible to urban eyes, whose inhabitants emerged like children, intimidated by

65 As Billboard’s premier country writer explained it in 1949, “A paramount factor in maintaining the steady climb of folk music, when all other branches of the music business are declining over the postwar years, has been the consistency of the farmers’ incomes. As the federal program for subsidy payments to farmers has and will continue, rustic music has had a strong basis upon which to base its expansion in all fields.” Johnny Sippel, “Rustic Rhythm Reaps $$ Reward,” Billboard , October 22, 1949, 97 (disc jockey supplement). 66 Zolotow, 36. See also Carlton, “Back in 1940 it was a simple task to pack a load of portable recording equipment into a truck, hook on a cowcatcher, and head for the watermelon patches of Carolina and Georgia,” which also understood the migrations of World War II to make “hillbillies” more business savvy (even when they returned to their traditional spaces of the watermelon patches and hills of the South). 59 the clamor of the “town” and shyly willing to perform for Satherly only if he journeys to their virgin territory. The marked depth of the woods through which the information traveled to reach the “folksters” implied a distance not just spatial but cultural as well. 67

Further positioning hillbilly music production at a remove from the city, the article described the lengths to which Satherly would go to find his talent, “And on foot where there are no passable roads.” 68 Despite the fact that “hillbilly” performers like Jimmy

Dickens and Minnie Pearl repeatedly referenced their presence in world capitals like

Paris and Hollywood, these articles still focused mainly on an originary narrative in which raw talent percolated deep in the woods and had to be sought out or seized upon in those rare instances when the wild-eyed primitives stumbled out from the woods.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Billboard used the term “country music” to describe the music, and used “hillbilly” much more sparingly, but a series of articles in other national lifestyle magazines about the new hillbilly phenomenon retained the older terminology. In fact, these articles repeatedly took pains to highlight the distinctiveness of the genre’s culture and participants through the use of the older term, “hillbilly.” Just at the moment when country music moved closer to the mainstream of the pop music

67 See also, “Country Music is Big Business, and Nashville is Its Detroit,” Newsweek , August 11, 1952, 84, for the persistence of the spatializing metaphor to describe the discovery of “true” country talent: “They travel, listen to local radio stations, and ferret out talent – from the plains of Texas, the bayous of Louisiana, or the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.” Nowhere in this list of musical origin spaces (plains, bayous and mountains) is there room for the discovery of talent in the urban South. 68 This suggestion that he had gone places where there were no passable road resonated with another common space-phrase, “deep into the woods,” as in the subheading from a 1947 Billboard article, “Reaches Deep into Woods:” “Educational process started by h.b.’s [hillbillies] and handlers has already reached deep into the woods and has chilled many folksters from signing royalty waivers, blanket disk-pub papers …” “Hillbillies are Hepping to Dollar Sign, Dotted Line and Biz of ‘Yours is Mine,’” Billboard, January 18, 1947, 13. 60 industry, these articles returned to an exaggeraetd rustic cliché. In magazines like

American Magazine , Nation’s Business , and Collier’s , self-identified city writers conjured images of “funny little men chasing each other with pitchforks and banjos” to describe and marvel at the hillbilly phenomenon. 69

Journalists often used the industry’s commercial success to humorously figure

hillbilly’s rusticity. For instance, a hyperbolically titled article, “Thar’s Gold in Them

Thar Hillbilly Tunes,” expressed surprise that the industry “has its own big hillbilly stars

who individually make up to $300,000 a year, its own hillbilly music publishing

companies, even its own handsome young hillbilly singing stars who set hillbilly bobby-

soxers to squealing.” 70 The author repeatedly used the older term to describe the various aspects of country music culture, thus constructing a parallel hillbilly world which contained the same generic features as the normal world of the 1950s. The coverage also frequently played the commercial success of country rubes in this parallel hillbilly world for humorous effect. For instance, one author juxtaposed the hillbilly performers’ extensive performance revenues with their hopelessly simple tastes and desires, suggesting that “some stars, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will eat the same meal three times a day – fried potatoes, fried eggs, and fried pork chops.” 71 Another

author spelled out the precise sums hillbilly stars made through personal appearances,

records, and publishing rights, and opined, “For guys who were skinning mules not too

69 Eddy, 29. 70 Davidson, “Thar’s Gold,” 34. See also “Country Music is Big Business, and Nashville is its Detroit,” Newsweek , August 11, 1952, 82-85, whose author acknowledges that the genre’s practitioners prefer the term “country music” but then repeatedly uses “hillbilly” throughout. 71 Rufus Jarman, “Country Music Goes to Town,” Nation’s Business , February, 1953, 51. 61 long ago, this is a lovely bale of hay.” 72 The purportedly humorous possibilities of the country stereotype were too much for these urban writers to resist.

Even when they understand the performers as more sophisticated, descriptions of the Opry’s fan base allowed for no such sophistication. Articles also depended heavily on the comedic juxtaposition of Opry fans as country rubes entirely out of the place even in a city like Nashville: “In Nashville hotels, they often bed down eight to a room, and bring along their own food. They clean their hotel rooms, never having heard of maid service.

Many of them never heard of tipping either. Bellboys and elevator operators, when the management isn’t looking, may make up for this oversight by charging ten cents per elevator ride.” 73 Positioning Opry fans as distinct from more urban savvy Nashville hotel employees, and assuming a readership well versed in hotel etiquette in explicit contrast with the Opry fans (isn’t it funny they’ve never heard of maid service!), the article described the fans’ devotion to the Opry (“bed down eight to a room”) and poverty simultaneously.

The Opry existed in a bustling downtown space, to which it contributed tourist dollars and some small amount of prestige, but much of the iconography of the Opry and hillbilly culture told a different story. A 1952 article in American Magazine (whose front

72 Eddy, 119. 73 Jarman, 44. See also Jarman’s earlier article on Nashville in the Saturday Evening Post , in which he similarly describes Opry visitors. The article’s subheading mocks Nashville’s pretension to being culturally significant. “Proud of its forebears, its schools and its gracious way of life, Nashville styles itself the Athens of the South. Yet this is the city where a monument was erected to a horse thief, where some citizens have to be warned not to ride escalators barefoot.” Rufus Jarman, ‘The Cities of America: Nashville,” The Saturday Evening Post, October 27, 1951, 22. See also, Doron K. Antrim, “Whoop-and-Holler Opera,” Collier’s , January 26, 1946, “Lines form at the ticket windows in the morning, and the customers, many of them in overalls, pack their own food and drinks,” 18. 62 page image came from a highly celebratory book on the Grand Ole Opry from the same year, seemingly endorsed by WSM and the Opry) strikingly featured a barn with an attached Grand Ole Opry banner amidst a series of pastoral hills (without any other building around) and a flock of country people incongruously carrying individual lanterns to the building/dance. 74 The image represented the Opry as a true country barn dance, not

the urban phenomenon it truly was. The caption, “from the hills and hollers” they come,

suggested a country-to-city journey but the image firmly located the Opry itself in the

country. The article also described the Opry’s early growth as “other natural entertainers

drifted in from the hills and hollers on succeeding Saturday nights.” 75

Many national magazine articles distorted the nuanced self-presentations of Opry country stars, and they did so through a spatial lens, locating difference specifically in non-urban spaces. One writer positioned WSM personnel as “city folks” creating order out of the chaos of a sea of country rubes on the Opry’s stage: “Several city fellers kept weaving purposefully through all the turmoil and bedlam, apparently looking for lost actors or propelling tardy ones to the mike.” 76 Again, the article positioned the

performers as childlike, in need of a push from WSM personnel to keep them on task.

The radio station personnel and station managers were the city folks (collecting the gate

receipts presumably too) while the articles figured Opry perfomers as rural, even though

74 Eddy, “Hillbilly Heaven,” 28. This, despite the fact that most of the first Opry performers were in fact already living and working in Nashville before their Opry premieres. The author also described the Carter Family emerging from the hills “wide- eyed.” An extra hyperbolic degree of spatial distance is discursively inserted here between hillbilly performers and fans and urbane media writers and readers. 75 Eddy, Ibid . 76 Eddy, 34. 63 many of the Opry’s stars were themselves residents of the city, if not actual “city folks.” 77

Despite the fact that Opry performers had lived in Nashville and maintained urban

employment for decades (even those Gully Jumpers and Fruit Jar Drinkers from the

1930s), national discourse still drew on a city/country divide and assumed WSM

personnel were city folks while hillbilly performers had to then be entirely rustic.

In tandem with the paternalization in this discourse, national media coverage

often used subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) animalistic imagery to describe the

musicians, as in “Mr. Pellettieri … looks like he should be conducting a symphony

instead of herding hillbillies,” and “the stage swarms with some 125 singers, guitar

players, fiddlers, comedians and the like.” 78 The author represented the Opry performers

as creatures who swarm across a stage, in need of herding and thus blatantly juxtaposed

with members of orchestra symphony who need no paternalistic maintenance. This was

part of a larger characterization of hillbilly music industry which missed the mark: the

performers were not children or animals uncontrollably swarming across the stage and in

need of paternalistic control from WSM. Instead, they were savvy performers who are

blending urban and rural elements: the “chaos” on stage was part of the appeal of the

show which drew fans in the first place. The author’s misapprehension (willful or not)

speaks to the discursive positioning of hillbillies which the magazine articles enacted.

Hillbilly readers would presumably understand the nature of the chaos on the Opry’s

stage (enjoyable in part because of the stance the performers take) as something more

performative than an expression of their inherent inability to follow orders. As with the

77 George Hay, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: Privately published, 1953). 78 Davidson, “Thar’s Gold,” 42. 64 references to bales of hay and simple tastes in food, country figures undoubtedly played a role in the production of these images and roles.

The Industry’s Own Uneasy Tension Between Rusticity and Modernity

The misapprehension on the part of some writers for national urban publications matched or mirrored some of the industry’s own shifting self-presentations. In the 1950s, especially, industry discourse, too, evinced a tension between drawing on rustic imagery and promoting the genre’s urbanization and modernization. WSM promotional materials consistently relied on rural imagery to envision the Opry performers and fans, although there was a significant overlap between farmer, hillbilly, western, and cowboy.

Advertising brochures selling the station’s wide audience depicted cartoon country performers wearing overalls, workclothes, cowboy hats and bandannas, and riding horses while playing banjoes and guitars. The few figures in suits were ostensible stand-ins for the WSM personnel, shepherding the talent and delivering the tunes (and their fans) to advertisers. 79

79 One particular pamphlet from September of 1953 depicted a tuxedoed man holding (but not singing into) a microphone, driving a tractor around a map of the South imagined as a field. The caption reads “McDonald has a farm which covers the Central South!” See Special Collections of Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, WSM Vertical folders. Figures other than Opry stars are shown out of farm and work clothes, but Opry performers were always depicted in rustic costume and, in the McDonald’s farm metaphor, the music is understood as something like a crop which just grows naturally in the region. This resonated with earlier national discourse which envisioned the tunes “growing” naturally out of the Southern and mountain soil. In addition to deploying promotional materials which drew on earlier ideas about country music “growing” out of the Southern landscape, WSM’s farm director John McDonald himself was cautioning station programmers to avoid playing music that was “too hot” 65 This tension manifested in industry trade journals too, most notably in the early issues of Pickin’ and Singin’ News , whose trimmed verbs recall the country but whose overall presentation aimed for a modern treatment of the genre as an urban industry.

Pickin’ and Singin’ News , started in 1953 and published in Nashville, was the first publication to cover the country music industry specifically from an insider perspective

(but still with claims to impartiality). Similar to the blend of the rural and the urban embodied by figures such as Acuff and Pearl, the pages of the journal contained an uneasy tension between celebrating the music as appealing across geography, and recognizing or perpetuating assumptions about its innate rusticity. However, culturally, at least in its early issues, the journal still aligned itself with a particular “down-home” milieu and style. It featured regular columns with corny rustic titles, such as “Lowdown on the Hoedown” which provided small bits of information on country performers’ musical happenings and “Over the Cracker Barrel” which provided more gossipy bits on the performers personal lives as well as information on other country personnel such as disc jockeys from around the country. However, these features disappeared in the second year of the publication’s tenure, seeming to suggest that the anti-hillbilly bent had won out.

for farmers and a rural audience. Stating that modern musicians in the “hot” styles tend to play complicated, original stuff just to impress each other, McDonald argued “the farmer don’t even know what they’re talking about. He can’t whistle it, he can’t hum it, he can’t even recognize the tune maybe until they’re half through.” Instead, McDonald argued, a farm audience wanted something familiar and reassuring. McDonald perpetuated the notion that farmers did not have the knowledge of or musical ability to replicate jazz tunes, but were instead familiar with a larger corpus of traditional tunes. John McDonald, “Farm Audience,” Nashville, Tennessee, June 25, 1951,BMI Program Clinic Collection, Library of American Broadcasting, College Park, Maryland. 66 The journal adopted a stance somewhere between identifying with a rustic resistance to modernity and fully embracing an urban milieu. 80 The journal’s rural

imagery (the hoedown and cracker barrel) was consistent, even as the journal

editorialized against the dominant usage of the term “hillbilly.” The same issue of PSN

editorialized, in the “Lowdown on the Hoedown” column, in regards to Governor

Clement’s desire (very different from preceding governors) to have a National Hillbilly

Day, “This column suggests that our editors get the festival renamed National

COUNTRY MUSIC Day. Some of us who love country music ain’t from the hills. Love

it just the same.” 81 Not only did the editorial suggest that country music fans no longer lived in the hills, but that they were not even from the hills.

The journal emphasized the necessity of its location in Nashville (as the center of the industry) but took pains to also emphasize that its audience and the world of country

fandom in general were not confined to any of the usual geographic boundaries. “while

Nashville was chosen as the center of Country Music activities, the publishers of

PICKIN’ & SINGIN’ made it entirely clear that the new newspaper would not confine

itself to the Grand Ole Opry, to Music City, U.S.A., nor to the rural South.” 82 Clearly

80 The journal referred to the impressive “impact of the rural pickers and singers.” This phrase mirrored rustic-specific descriptions of the genre produced by national publications. “Amazing Advance of Country Music Stirs Entertainment World: Music People Turn More and More to ‘Country Style,’” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , October 10, 1953, 1. See also Diane Pecknold, on the journal’s confused stance towards the “hillbilly” moniker. 81 Bud Ballad, “Lowdown on the Hoedown,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , June 13, 1953, 5. 82 “Response,” 6. As well, the editors also emphasized the WSM polls that found that Opry visitors came from as many as 39 states on any given night. See also “Nashville is Center of Country Music Art,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , July, 1953, 9, for further defense of their location in Nashville: “Putting out a Country Music publication away 67 responding to traditional spatial assumptions about the locations of the genre (Nashville and the “rural South”), the editors instead envisioned Nashville as the center of a wide- ranging network of country music activities, which encompassed urban and Northern sites.

The journal also situated itself in urban Nashville relationally, by publicizing local rural Tennessee events happening outside of the city. The journal heavily publicized

Maryville, Tennessee’s “Hillbilly Homecoming Week” in the summer of 1953. The magazine, in collaboration with the festival organizers, presented the Festival as more of a celebration of the heritage, rather than the present condition, of hillbilly life. As one article’s opening lines indicated, the preservation of hillbilly culture was important, even as the genre of music became more sophisticated and modern. “Dedicated to the preservation of American folklore as found in the hills of Tennessee, the celebration will feature some of the biggest names in country music today and will be held during the week proclaimed by Gov. Frank Clement as ‘Hillbilly Homecoming Week’” 83 Organizers

expected the festival to bring thousands of tourists “eager for a taste of mountain folklore,

an important part of American heritage.” 84 The use of “homecoming” was key to this

discursive move, as it suggested that the hillbillies, or those with hillbilly heritage, were

no longer in Maryville, but that the town would serve as a perfect place for far-flung

from Nashville would be like publishing a movie magazine from Des Moines, or somewhere like that.” 83 “Maryville, Near Smokies, Plans ‘Homecoming,’” Pickin’ & Singin’ News , June 13, 1953, 1. 84 Ibid. 68 former residents (to follow the conceit to its logical end) to reunite, in the process asserting their modernity and distance from the hills themselves. 85

Conclusion

Roy Acuff claimed you had to be a “country boy” to sing or write country music,

but as his own example proved, Acuff understood that “country boys” no longer had to

live in the country, as long as the music still “came from the heart” and drew on rural

experience. 86 Hank Williams famously said that in order to write country songs you had

to have spent some time rolling around in the manure. The quote may very well be

apocryphal, but the fact that it has circulated so forcefully in his name points to the

central place the idea of lowly origins has in the mythology of country music. The lowly

origins were crucial to the music’s identity as music of the people. The Opry presented a

dichotomy whose nuance many commentators missed, in the process perpetuating some

of the unsavory aspects of the hillbilly stereotype. In the late 1950s and 1960s, a new

wing of the country music industry would more forcefully split open this blend of the

rustic and the urban, and the next chapter examines this development.

85 In 1954 the Nashville commuter suburb of Madison was home to many Opry stars. Madison’s civic clubs, chamber of commerce, and PTA together organized a Madison Hillbilly Day in which residents dressed “country” and for which many townsmen had been growing beards for two days. Opry stars who lived in the town encouraged and supported the festivities. Like the notion of “homecoming” the fact that residents had to grow their beards out and “dress country” special for this day signified that they were not hillbillies on a normal day. “Home of Stars Ready for Big Hillbilly Day,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , October 8, 1954, 1. 86 Carlisle, 38-42 Also see BMI Meet the Artist , wherein almost all the biographies of country stars reference their youth on farms. 69 The country community, which was really only just beginning to coalesce and consolidate in the 1940s, began to more aggressively shape its socio-spatial markers in the late 1950s. The consolidation and coalescence of the industry in Nashville, beyond the scope of the Opry, led to a more homogenized sound caused by the shared use of the same producers and session musicians (facilitated by Nashville’s size and accessibility), and the ease of centralized production and distribution led to a reduction of regional styles or subgenres, and the primacy of country-pop. 87 A major shift was underway

institutionally as well; at the WSM DJ festival of 1958, a group of disc jockeys,

entertainers, producers and record label executives formed the Country Music

Association to further enhance the genre’s reputation and commercial viability. One of

their first goals was shifting the common assumption that a country fan was actually from

the country, and to suggest instead that country fans were now middle class urban

consumers, far removed from their hillbilly past. Chapter Two is the story of a split

within country culture, as the CMA and the record labels of Music Row aggressively

looked to modernize country’s image through a spatial lens, while the Opry remained

insistent on preserving certain attachments to a rustic past.

87 Lange, 209-11. 70

“Country Comes to Town”: A New Urban Identity for Country Music in the 1960s

Chapter Two

The first chapter argued that in the 1940s, the managers and stars of the Grand

Ole Opry presented hillbilly music as a blend of rural and urban components. They believably combined modern urban business dealings with self-conscious crowd-pleasing performances of rusticity. Roy Acuff ran for governor on the credentials of his business acumen while still emphasizing his hillbilly persona, country girl “Minnie Pearl” pulled back the curtain repeatedly to reveal her Opry character to be a performance by well- educated Nashville socialite Sarah Colley, and Opry comedy routines played with country bumpkin stereotypes while simultaneously acknowledging (and celebrating) the fact that Opry stars were quickly becoming wealthy international stars. At the same time, the Opry itself operated in the Central Business District within one of Nashville’s most important industries, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. Thus, the myriad operations of Opry stars fully inhabited Nashville’s economy. These early country stars showcased rustic performative styles, rooted in connections to their own rural past, alongside savvy (but not elitist) maneuverings within an urban economy. Chapter two, in turn, describes a shift within country culture and the emergence of new players who produced new ideas about space and new spatial deployments within Nashville which

71 more forcefully embraced urbanity and, in stark contrast with the Opry (and not without controversy), minimized connections to the rural past.

The new industry players emerged out of an emerging constellation of recording studios and creative offices located on what came to be called Music Row. Music Row grew out of a decision made by local producer and jack of all musical trades Owen

Bradley, who purchased a duplex in a mostly residential neighborhood near but not in downtown, and built a new studio in the basement. Bradley and a group of other producers and musicians who followed in his footsteps recorded a string of hits in the new studios. The success of these tunes moved the genre in the direction of “country- pop” and led it away from the twangy steel guitar and fiddles of earlier styles of country music such as “honky tonk.” Instead, these artists and producers used orchestrated strings and choral groups to create a lush soundscape for lead vocals which also featured less twang and smoother crooning. 1 This new country-pop sound came to be known as the

Nashville Sound and the name revealed a substantive difference between the recordings

made on Music Row and the live performances associated with the Opry.

While the Opry had functioned (both materially and conceptually) as a destination

point for “native” musicians from around the South (even as many of its performers were

from Nashville itself), the new songs were clearly a product of the studios, publishing

houses, and talent agencies of the space and economy of Nashville proper. The moniker

Nashville Sound referred very specifically to the urban neighborhood of Music Row, not

1 Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation Press; Vanderbilt UP, 1998), 3-5 and Bill Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 80.

72 of the downtown Opry or other Nashville spaces. As the neighborhood of Music Row grew and consolidated, the phrase “Nashville Sound” gained even more traction from this easy spatial assignation associated with the congregation of recording sites within

Nashville. The Sound and the neighborhood co-constituted each other between the mid

1950s and the late 1960s, when the Row was fully developed and the Sound had become ubiquitous. Music Row developed simultaneously with country’s distillation of the new pop-country sound and the attendant commercial success.2

While industry stewards trumpeted the genre’s unprecedented level of success, traditional country fans and even some country artists expressed their unease with the new sound and its perilous over-borrowing from “pop music.” By the mid 1960s, the new

Nashville Sound sounded too “urban” to many traditional fans, who argued that the music belonged to rural and working people. Given the geographic nature of this traditionalist critique, industry leaders could easily have deployed a strategic evasion of country’s urban elements; instead they chose to play up the genre’s increasing urban presence.

Unlike the Opry, this new wing of country music culture was not nearly as invested in maintaining either material or performative roots in the country , and instead emphasized that country (as a musical genre and a culture of rural individuals) had “come to town” and was now entirely at home in America’s urban spaces. Rather than allowing country to be pigeonholed as merely the music of an imagined group of “backward” rural folk, the

2 By 1963 nearly one half of all music recordings in America came from Nashville, and most of that from the studios on Music Row. See “A Big New Sound Blows Out of Nashville,” Broadcasting , January 28, 1963, 67. See Elton Whisenhunt, “Nashville Scene,” Billboard, September 18, 1965, 44, and “Neal Wilburn Readies Studio in Nashville,” Billboard, October 2, 1965, 20, for articles which refer to “Record Row” rather than Music Row. 73 Country Music Association (CMA) argued that country belonged to a wide spectrum of

Americans, cutting across class and geography, but principally focused on urban middle and working class folk. The association argued, along with other industry voices, that country music and its fans deserved, at long last, national visibility and respect.

“The Row” consisted not just of studios but also offices belonging to record labels, publishing houses, talent agencies, and journals. The CMA and other industry boosters argued in the late 1960s that, as a result of their national and international success, Music Row and its stretch of older rooming houses and duplexes deserved better infrastructure, newer buildings, and greater visibility. They latched onto Nashville urban renewal plans which proposed a central boulevard (the industry intended to name it

Music City Boulevard) running through the heart of Music Row, which the industry believed could anchor and showcase its presence in Nashville while paving the way for further investment and renovation. The industry threw their full support behind the project but it eventually failed, as the project was driven by Vanderbilt University’s expansion and federal planners eventually pared down its scope to exclude the piece which affected Music Row.

Music Row leaders adopted a strategy which mirrored the marketing strategies of the CMA. Rather than being reluctant to play up country music’s new urban location, industry investors on Music Row instead wanted to convert the neighborhood’s purportedly dilapidated blocks into a different kind of urban space, more modern and tourist-friendly. In fact, through the city’s potential use of federal urban renewal funds, the industry hoped to further distance itself from the rural iconography and stereotypes which emerged even in representations of the urban Music Row neighborhood. The

74 discursive attempts to portray modern country music as fully urban were part of a new direction which the CMA and Music Row producers attempted to engineer within the industry, attempting to use urban iconography and the material urban space of Nashville to counter the perception that country music was only for poor, rural hillbillies and instead arguing that as the music changed country fans were becoming more middle-class and urban. They were concrete efforts to envision a compatible urban home for the industry and create a new identity for country music, distinct from the previously dominant image of the rural hillbilly. 3

Nashville, Rock and Roll, and Country’s Consolidation

The honky tonk style of stars like Hank Williams had brought country music

much of its fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but the advent of rock and roll along

with the development of a top 40 radio format caused country’s share of the radio and

sales market to decline in the mid-1950s. After a brief existential crisis, though, country

artists heeded calls to stick with country’s roots in producing simple songs which

connected with the audience. In tandem with this return to earnest and simple songs,

country music found a new sonic style which was generally deemed more palatable to an

3 Anthony Harkins has done a superb job of outlining the persistent dual associations of the hillbilly figure in the 20 th century; as he sums it up in his introduction, “Thus, 'the hillbilly' served the dual and seemingly contradictory purposes of allowing the 'mainstream,' or generally nonrural, middle-class white, American audience to imagine a romanticized past, while simultaneously enabling that same audience to recommit itself to modernity by caricaturing the negative aspects of premodern, uncivilized society," Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 7. 75 adult audience. As a result, country re-emerged as a powerful force on the broader pop music landscape in the late 1950s and into the 1960s.

Over the course of the 1940s, hillbilly music was commercially ascendant across the nation, due to several factors: the internal migrations of World War II which brought together servicemen and women from differing regions, the creation of a new licensing organization, BMI, which broke into genres untapped by the previously dominant

ASCAP, and the continuing savvy of the Grand Ole Opry’s managers and performers.

This enlarged range of commercial success also led to a concerted effort to change the name of the genre, from hillbilly to country and western, to finally just country (albeit with some continued overlap and residual usage of the older terms). Billboard proclaimed that hillbilly was the genre to watch after the War and national media exposure for the

Opry and its stars, sheet music sales, and, in particular, personal appearance revenues certainly bore this out. 4

Shifts within the sonic landscape of country music also dovetailed with those of the larger pop music scene. Over the course of the 1940s, the careers of crooners like

Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Tony Bennett boomed while the big band era waned, and the trend toward coherent lyrics and the primacy of the lead vocal pushed country songs towards the center of the pop music zeitgeist. As a result, the early 1950s were boon years for country music, and the 1950s saw country songs and the pop charts in serious dialogue with each other for the first time. Beginning particularly with the songs of country icon Hank Williams, pop stars such as Tony Bennett and Patti Page covered

4 Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007), 58-63. 76 straight country songs for the pop charts, lending the songs a degree of respect in popular music that they had not had before and indicating the commercial potential of these combinations of melody and lyrics with the smoother instrumental sound.5 The lyrics and

melodies of country songs seemed to fit squarely within the mainstream of pop music,

and Hank Williams’ in particular resonated with millions of Americans. But many other

hillbilly artists performed highly successful concert tours during this time. In fact, as

country historian Jeffrey Lange has demonstrated, strains of country-pop already existed

and had for over a decade. Despite the cachet of postwar honky tonk artists such as Hank

Williams and Ernest Tubb, other singers like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold, and even Hank

Snow were offering up smoother sounds as early as the late 1940s. 6

Industry leaders believed these successes would last, but two different developments dealt country music setbacks just as the genre was fully coming into its own. Most famously, rock and roll shook up the entire pop music landscape. But the proliferation of the Top 40 format within the radio industry also impacted country artists’ profits. Radio stations looked to capitalize as much as possible on the emerging emphasis on recording-driven, chart-measured hits, as recordings were cheaper than live performances. Standardized playlists made the collection and selection of songs easier while making the stations prepackaged sets more attractive to advertisers. 7 This shift dramatically reduced the number of country-only radio stations. However, the shift also

5Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation Press & Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 73. Also see “Pop and Nets Grab Country Talent,” The Music Reporter , March 16, 1957, 8. 6 Jeffrey Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939-1954 (Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2004), 200-1. 7 Jensen, 41-3. 77 accommodated a new emphasis within country music at large, a new emphasis on recordings over live performance which gave the studios on Music Row and the labels and performers a venue for making money and reputation without the Opry itself.

In part because of the successful urban operations of early “hillbilly” artists from the Opry, Nashville solidified its position as the central location of country music culture by the mid-1950s.8 With the success of the Opry leading way, along with early publishing

houses such as Acuff-Rose (and in no small part because of the large concentration of

sessions musicians and experienced engineers and producers affiliated with WSM),

Nashville became the logical place for national labels to invest in new studio

construction. 9 In addition to the Opry, WSM organized Disc Jockey Festivals in

Nashville beginning in the early 1950s, and their Artists Service Bureau had supported

(and generated) its impressive roster of performers since 1934. The force WSM exerted brought more musical capital to Nashville, but also led to the divide within the industry and the Opry’s own drift from the “center” of the country music industry. WSM’s contributions were strong, but the increase in recording studios outside of WSM’s purview also generated the growing constellation of musicians, songwriters, publishing houses, and A&R men which became Music Row. The Row, along with the Opry, consolidated the industry in Nashville by the end of the decade.

8 Nashville was central to country music in large part because of the presence of The Grand Ole Opry, but even in the 1950s the city was not the only home to country music. Southern California, in particular, had a rich and diverse country music culture found in live dance hall performances, television and radio broadcasts, and the records produced by Los Angeles-based Capitol Records. Lange, 221-4. 9 John Rumble, “Fred Rose and the Development of the Nashville Music Industry, 1942-1954,” PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1980. 78 But Nashville’s place at the center of the country industry also played a role in the emergence of rock and roll. The 1950s were a time of great crossover within the larger music landscape but also, eventually, a time in which generic lines solidified and hardened. Rock and roll emerged out of both Tennessee music capitals, Nashville and

Memphis, despite Memphis’ place in the historical imagination as the location of Sun

Studios and Phillips’ first Presley recordings. In the early 1950s, black R&B artists began covering what they referred to as “hillbilly” songs and white artists with some country connections began covering R&B songs. 10 Other early rock artists recorded in Nashville and Presley himself performed on the Opry and recorded with the Jordainaires, the background vocalists who also appeared on numerous Nashville Sound recordings later in the decade and into the 1960s. 11 Elvis toured with Opry legend Hank Snow and was

referred to as a “hillbilly” singer in the mid-1950s, but by the end of the decade

Nashville’s country music establishment wanted no part of him. 12 Rockabilly’s instant popularity had caused many previously honky tonk and country-pop artists to release rockabilly songs but ultimately triggered a retrenchment within the industry and led

10 Michael Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 11 See Lange 210-11 on the industry’s consolidation in Nashville facilitating a move in the direction of country-pop and Pecknold, Selling Sound , 90-4 on the importance of rockabilly to the rock and roll boom and the way in which that connection actually gave Nashville the clout to bring more recording and publishing operations to town. 12 See “Hillbilly on a Pedestal,” Newsweek, May 14, 1956, 82, for a description of Presley as a hillbilly singer. 79 industry figures to position country music as adult, dignified, and (given rock’s Southern associations), national. 13

In 1955 and 1956, country disc jockeys began to argue that country stars and fans

need not panic over the possible death of country music at the hands of rock: instead,

they argued that country artists should sing country songs and not try to imitate other

styles or be something they were not. 14 They chastised country artists for trying to record rock records and instead advocated remaining true to “country,” but what that meant exactly was still up for grabs and subject to much contestation. Quality, simple songs sung in a genuine style with some minor pop instrumentation changes would, in these jockeys’ minds, retain the true country audience. And indeed, as rock began to fade slightly and shift direction (rhythm and blues solidifies as its own genre and white rock

13 See “Country Music is Here to Stay,” Country Music Reporter , November 17, 1958, 1, for the belief that country artists had failed miserably in their attempts to join the rock bandwagon. Also see “Music Biz Now R&B Punchy: Even Hillbillies Are Doing It,” Variety, February 9, 1955, 51. 14 Joli Jensen has found a rock-almost-killed-country narrative in a series of oral histories conducted in the 1970s, but this was perhaps more a function of the workings of collective memory than the actual reality at the time, Jensen, 38-40. Rather than seeing rock and roll as a clear-cut enemy, for instance, Country Music Reporter , a new trade journal based in Nashville (and with an unashamed emphasis on the country music industry), argued that rock and roll was closer in spirit to country music than any other genre, and that rock and roll’s success was actually good for country. The magazine’s staff editorialized, “Rock ‘n roll is considered Pop, yet it comes about as close as any type of music has ever come to being based upon the same principle upon which C&W is based.” The article further suggested that what the two genres shared was also what led both to such high levels of success: “That principle is raw simplicity in musical technique, with no inhibitions, a strong beat, and lots of ‘heart.’ It is this same principle which is responsible for C&W music’s ‘catching on’ and its skyrocket-climb into the popularity picture.” The journal did not demonize rock and roll but instead understood that country music was back on the rise, in part because of the changes rock brought to the pop music landscape. “Music Trade Paper Snobbery for Birds’: Sales Show Difference,” Country Music Reporter , August 3, 1957, 1. See also “Will Rock ‘N Roll Merge With Ballad Form in ’58,” The Music Reporter , December 9, 1957, 1, for further discussion of the fruitful relationship between rock and country. 80 has some of the rougher edges smoothed off), country stars rebounded with successful country-pop singles and the pessimistic outlook shifted slightly. Nashville record producers operating in the country genre found success with the national adult market because of a conscious attempt to “modernize” the sound of the genre (an effort that had been incrementally underway since the mid-1940s at least). 15

The tantalizing appeal of crossover success hinged on the “down home” appeal of

country artists harnessed with a smoother vocal and instrumental sound which could

appeal to those possibly turned off by the sounds of hillbilly. Connie Gay explained the

marketing idea fairly transparently in 1957 when he used the past tense to describe

“hillbilly music” to a journalist, “Hillbilly music was banjos, guitars, fiddles. We’ve

added a sweet touch to it and taken out the twang. You don’t get the raucous plink, plank,

plunk of a couple of decades ago.” 16 Gay used the notion of a switch from hillbilly to country not just in name but truly in style too, conceptualizing hillbilly music as something substantively distinct from country in sound and bearing. He claimed, “Can’t can’t be can’t in hillbilly music – it’s cain’t. But can’t can be can’t in country music.”

Gay and others used language difference in this fashion to delineate the differences

15 “Columbia Modernizes CW,” Country Music Reporter , December 22, 1956, 1. The article’s opening line summarized the change which was underway: “A modernized approach to country music is being followed by Columbia Records in the conviction that the country music of a few years ago with its repetitious style of performance cannot compete to advantage with listeners exposed to other entertainment.” The article then detailed the comprehensive study undertaken by Columbia to discover exactly who constituted the country audience and how best to maximize its potential. Hal Cook, vice- president in charge of sales for Columbia, noted that “people who liked country music were being exposed to the same entertainment as other people.” The divide between “people who like country music’ and “other people” seems to mark country music fans off from the normative middle. 16 McCandlish Phillips, “Country Stylist: Connie B. Gay Discusses Lucrative Formula,” The New York Times , September 8, 1957, 17. 81 within country culture, or to compare country culture to other genres and popular forms.

As with the headlines of magazine articles described in chapter one, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, markedly non-standard English was still a marker or signifier of backwards and outmoded hillbilly-ness.

But the change was more than just linguistic. Pop singers had covered country

songs in the early 1950s, bringing attention to the originals, but by the mid 1950s more

country stars looked to cross over into the pop markets themselves. Eddy Arnold left the

Grand Ole Opry in 1948 to capitalize on his early glimmers of crossover potential and

make movies and television shows for a broader audience. Arnold’s career had already

straddled the line between hillbilly and pop, but in 1948 his singles still dominated the

country side of the charts. That year, the top four country singles were all Eddy Arnold

songs, but even so, in September Arnold left the Opry. 17 Roy Acuff, with his more traditional high lonesome sound, had also left the Opry a couple of years before but had returned shortly thereafter finding it harder to make a go without the regular Opry performances. But Eddy Arnold never came back. He recorded mostly in New York from

1945 through 1955, until the construction of the new RCA Victor studio on Music Row brought him back to Nashville full time, though he never rejoined the Opry. 18 Arnold

represented a new breed of country star who could exist without the Opry, and in 1955 he

returned to Nashville to record in a brand new studio on what would become Music Row.

17 Michael Streissguth, Voices of the Country: Interviews with Classic Country Perfomers (New York: Routledge, 2004), 103-107. 18 Michael Freda, Eddy Arnold Discography, 1944-1996 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). 82 The Studios of Music Row and the Development of the Nashville Sound

In 1955, Eddy Arnold recorded an album with the Hugo Winterthaler Orchestra in

New York City’s Webster Hall. His version of “Cattle Call” from this recording session sold 500,000 copies. 19 The orchestrated string section, and the commercially successful sound it created when melded with Arnold’s smoother vocal, became a model for later

Nashville Sound production techniques. Arnold recorded his orchestral single in New

York City, but a new wave of studio construction in Nashville itself was about to springboard these kinds of country pop fusions into the mainstream of the industry. Yet the new sonic direction for country music could not really be The Nashville Sound without the development of the network of studios on Music Row.

Music Row, for all intents and purposes the home of the Nashville Sound, was born in 1954 when Owen Bradley purchased a duplex less than two miles from downtown in an older middle income residential neighborhood recently zoned commercial. Bradley wanted to find a site slightly away from downtown (where WSM and the Opry dominated), with easier parking and cheaper real estate. 20 The demand for

recording Nashville performers had exceeded the availability of quality recording space

19 Streissguth, 30. Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn’s Country Annual, 1944-1997 (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1998). 20 Music City, U.S.A. … The New Frontier of Sound,” The Music Reporter , June 29, 1963; “Nashville’s Music Row,” Billboard’s 1967-8 World of Country Music , 44. See also Frances Preston interview by Douglas Green, April 24, 1974, Country Music Foundation Oral History Collection (County Music Foundation Library and Media Center) for further discussion of the convenience of parking on Music Row as compared to downtown. “The Center of Music City: Nashville’s Music Row,” by John Lomax III, in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, 385-9. Bradley bought a house at 804 16 th Ave S, in 1954, for $7,500. The area had been rezoned and land was much cheaper than downtown. 83 at that time, but major labels were still reluctant to invest their own capital in new recording space in town. Bradley saw an opening and struck a deal with Paul Cohen, the head of the Decca record label, wrangling a guarantee of at least 100 recording sessions a year from Decca artists in exchange for the quality production site. 21 The deal was central to the initial investment in Music Row, and the studios’ success bred more success.

Bradley converted the residential duplex into a recording studio by knocking out the first floor and turning the basement into a studio with an 18-foot ceiling. He famously hung burlap bags and blankets on the wall of his studio, creating a studio whose acoustics quickly became very appealing to a wide range of performers and producers.

Other combinations of country and pop had emerged and flourished for several years before Owen Bradley purchased his duplex on Sixteenth Avenue in 1954. But the syncretic blend of country and pop, and its particular Nashville flavor, came from the session musicians hired for the early Music Row sessions. These musicians in essence created what came to be known as the Nashville Sound. Most notably, Bradley’s “A

Team” of session musicians who, along with backing vocal group The Jordainaires, played on many of the top recordings coming out of the Row. The remarkable efficiency of the Music Row studios and the availability of these session musicians meant that the sounds which they together created appeared on hundreds of country records, across performer, label, and even genre sometimes. 22

21 Harold Bradley. Interview by Douglas Green. 17 Jan. 1974. Country Music Foundation Oral History Collection (Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center). 22 See Jensen, 76-83, for an extended discussion of the instrumentation of the Nashville Sound. 84 Each of these musicians or groups of singers made a distinctive contribution to the Sound itself. Floyd Cramer, for instance, experimented with and then honed a “slip note” style, which he later said was like “making an intentional mistake, then recovering.” 23 Cramer pointed out that this was quite similar to how steel guitar players

“found” their notes as well. This distinctive style of piano playing often stood in for the

steel guitar which producers and A&R men increasingly left off of country records. In

this way, the new Sound preserved a form of continuity with country’s “hillbilly” past.

The Sound also depended on the close harmonies of the Anita Kerr Singers and the

“oohs” and “aahs” of these singers along with the Jordanaires, the other prominent

background vocal group of the Nashville Sound era. In tandem with a common use of

echo chambers improvised in the original studios and later built into the new Music Row

studios, this new vocal style which surrounded the singer’s lead vocal definitively

marked a Nashville Sound record.

In 1957, Ferlin Husky’s softer, lusher, version of the country song “Gone” was

the number one country single, and spent ten weeks at the top of the country charts.

Husky’s recording, made in Bradley’s studio on Music Row, gained attention for its more

ethereal sound (what background singer Millie Kirkham referred to as “kind of a soprano

floating around in the clouds”), achieved through use of the background choir of voices

and the echo chamber in which they were recorded. 24 These became defining features of

23 “Floyd Cramer Interview,” in Judie Eremo, ed. Country Musicians (Cupertino, CA: Grove, 1987), 30. 24 For the success of Husky’s “Gone,” see Robert Price, “Ken Nelson: Bakersfield Bonanza,” Journal of Country Music 19.3 (1998): 32-5. Husky himself later said, “I’ll swear by it: It’s the one that started the trend. The first one that had an echo chamber, and the first one that put background (vocals) on music the ways songs before had used 85 the country records produced at Bradley’s studio. Along with the larger developments within country pop (including Arnold’s use of a full orchestra), numerous imitations of

Husky’s sound eventually crystallized into a recognizable new style which came to be known as the “The Nashville Sound.” The general musical components of the Sound were the use of background choir groups and orchestrated strings instead of steel guitar and fiddle, and a smoother lead vocal which consciously avoided the nasal twang of earlier country singing. 25

A wide range of figures began using the phrase, both to describe the new country- pop direction put forth by the studios of Music Row and the general sense of rising commercial success which the recordings generated for the genre. 26 The phrase was used as early as 1958, and was common enough to be referenced with little expository

strings. It was the Nashville Sound, the one that started it all,” 35. Also see Charles Portis, “That New Sound from Nashville,” Saturday Evening Post , February 12, 1966, 31, for a quote from Buddy Killen claiming that “Gone” was the first song to feature the Nashville Sound. 25 See Owen Bradley’s quote, “I believe in continual evolution of styles. Now we’ve cut out the fiddle and steel guitar and added choruses to country music,” in “Owen Bradley Seeking the New; Views the Old,” Billboard Music Week , August 7, 1961, 4, as well as Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 57-8. 26 Country music scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s were more likely to portray the Sound in terms of shifts in instrumentation and vocal styling rather than as the product of the relaxed atmosphere in the recording studio. For instance, historian Joli Jensen opened her monograph on the Sound with a succinct summary of its key sonic features: “By the early ‘60s, country music was represented by a more lush, orchestrated style, with background vocals and violins replacing the steel guitar and fiddles that had come to symbolize ‘hard’ or ‘traditional’ country music.” Jensen, 3-5. For similar descriptions of the Sound as strings and background vocals taking the place of fiddles and steel guitars, see Bill Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 2002), 80, and John Lomax III, Nashville: Music City, USA (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1985), 90 86 description by 1963. 27 Pinning down an exact definition, though, would prove difficult. In

a seminal 1963 article in Broadcasting on the “new sound blowing out of Nashville,”

Chet Atkins (who along with A&R man Owen Bradley was one of the admitted architects

of the Sound) ambiguously described it as a “state of mind reflected in the spontaneous

enthusiasm of the product.” 28 The definition was slippery, but seemed positive enough

without implicating itself in any of the changes which, as I will show later in the chapter,

enraged so many traditional fans. Over time, the Nashville Sound came to take on

negative connotations, though the tradition of referring to the Sound in terms of a vague

“feeling” continued into the 1970s. Paul Hemphill, in his 1970 journalistic tract on the

phenomenon of the Sound, portrayed it as “the loose, relaxed, improvised feeling found

on almost anything recorded out of Nashville today.” 29

The Country Music Association and “Country Comes to Town”

Before 1958, the beginnings of the Nashville Sound germinated out of a

combination of individual experimentation in the studio and a kind of free floating

dialogue about the future of country music transpiring on the pages of trade journals and

27 “Nashville Booms as Music Mecca,” The Music Reporter, November 17, 1958, 1. 28 “A Big New Sound Blows Out of Nashville,” Broadcasting , January 28, 1963, 78. For other descriptions which invoke an ambiguous “feel” of the music, see “World of Music Finds New Frontier in ‘Magical Nashville Sound,’” The Music Reporter, June 23, 1962, 2; or “The Nashville Sound,” Time , November 7, 1964. 29 Hemphill, 50. In 1974, journalist John Egerton described the Sound with an all- encompassing but still vague enough definition: “an indefinable quality that derives from unexcelled recording studios, superb backup musicians, a cadre of highly professional songwriters and producers and publishers, and an atmosphere that is relaxed and unhurried,” John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 204. 87 in the larger music industry press. Producers experimented with adding certain instruments or flourishes to their records, and journals editorialized or more indirectly commented on the relative value of these changes. But the Country Music Association, formed in the mid-1950s, began to outline a strategy to take these shifts in the nature of the music and use them to enlarge country’s audience and reach. The CMA formed out of the meetings of various concerned individuals within the network of country music institutions. The organization specifically sought out members from every corner of the industry; the original board of directors contained two slots each for the following nine categories, publisher, artists, management, disc jockey, radio, records, trade journals, composers, and non-affiliated. 30

As I showed in chapter one, the industry had only very recently coalesced around certain generic features as well as institutional sites within Nashville – the industry and the city were linked but not entirely coterminous (Nashville played a central role in the industry’s processes of becoming but did not entirely contain or generate the industry, it was not wholly generative), and so the industry still lacked a formal leadership organization previous to the CMA. The Opry itself and WSM had previously charted the course for the industry by virtue of the show’s unmatched audience and the gravitational force which the institution of the Opry exerted on most hillbilly musicians and singers.

The CMA of course recognized the importance of the Opry but did not necessarily assign the program more importance than any other radio program. The Association’s Executive

30 See Pecknold, 135-41, on the founding and organization of the CMA. Also see Harry Stone, “The Country Music Association” Country Music Who’s Who 1960 (Nashville: 1960), 79. Stone foregrounded the commercial nature of country music and argued that it was thus perfectly natural that the industry had a trade organization “for the purpose of improving it, marketing it, and publicizing it.” 88 Director Harry Stone, in his 1960 published summary of the evolution of the industry, pointed to the many different cities each with their own live country program, rather than singling out WSM and Nashville. In fact, nowhere in his fairly detailed summary of the genre’s history did the word “Opry” appear. 31

But in reality the CMA emerged from the synergy between the two wings: the

Association’s development was actually facilitated by structures in place because of the

Opry. One example was the WSM Disc Jockey Festival, which in 1958 became the site for the CMA’s first public pronouncements on their public relations strategy.32 The

convention’s keynote speaker (and former program manager at WSM) publisher Jack

Stapp set national exposure for country music as the organization’s prime goal: “If

country music does not become more accepted nationally… if we do not saturate the

country with good publicity, if we do not educate the public, we must be prepared to

suffer the consequences.” 33 The recent decline in the number of country stations across the nation (a product of both the rock and roll boom and the trend towards Top 40 formats) figured prominently in the CMA’s vision of a genre in struggle. In 1953, 65 percent of the nation’s radio station played country music at some point in the day; by

1961 the CMA estimated that only 36 percent were playing any country at all. 34 The

organization had recently formed its charter only months before and was still struggling

with fundraising by the time of the 1958 convention.

31 Stone, 79-81. 32 Pecknold, 135-6. 33 Ibid, 136. Original in CMA papers at Country Music Hall of Fame. 34 Diane Pecknold, “The Selling Sound of Country Music: Class, Culture, and Early Radio Marketing Strategy of the Country Music Association,” in Charles Wolfe and James Akenson, eds. Country Music Annual 2002 (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002), 62. 89 Stapp and the other founders chartered the CMA to begin the “fostering, publicizing and promoting of country music, by bringing the commercial possibilities of country music to the attention of advertisers, advertising agencies, station managers, and radio and TV networks.” 35 Stapp and his colleagues saw inherent commercial potential in the sonic transformations which had already begun (“the commercial possibilities of country music”), and, as the quote indicates, the CMA’s prime concern would be convincing key players in the broader national music landscape of this possibility.

Broadcasting still relied on older stereotypically comical notions of the music; a 1959

article on Connie Gay’s uncanny ability to sell country music to city people scornfully

described the music as “a deafening mixture of scraping fiddles, wheezing accordions

and the wails of a love-struck mountain maiden singing through her nose.” 36 Such a description would have been commonplace fifteen years previously, but with the changes of the Nashville Sound already well underway, the language was jarring.

The CMA resented the persistent assumptions about the intelligence, taste, and even hygiene of the musicians and their fans which came to the fore at a series of congressional hearings in the late 1950s. 37 The CMA believed (quite often correctly) that

35 Pecknold, 138. 36 “Our Respects to … Connie Barriot Gay,” Broadcasting , February 2, 1959, 81. 37 Diane Pecknold has shown the effect the hearings and the proclamations they contained had on the industry’s self-image, and that much of the CMA’s initial public relations work stemmed from Congressional hearings and expert testimony which characterized hillbilly music as trashy and lamentably forced upon an innocent public, Selling Sound , 107-111. Even country music’s defenders often made outdated assumptions about the music’s appeal and its audience. Multiple station managers testified that their stations programmed a variety of styles for a variety of audiences, and that country served the “rural” or farm audience. James Howe, president of the Florida Association of Broadcasters, argued that his affiliation with BMI did not influence him to play more BMI recordings, claiming, “in any given listening area, you have one station 90 even as country stars moved ever closer to pop (both in terms of sound and commercial reach), these outdated ideas about “hillbilly” music still held sway with national journalists, politicians, station managers, and, importantly, advertising agencies. They set out to further persuade networks and advertisers to overcome their misguided assumptions about the income, intelligence, and geographic location of country’s fans in order to make the genre a truly national phenomenon. They circulated numerous mailings and press releases, gave presentations at agency meetings, and corresponded directly with disc jockeys as well. The CMA looked to emphasize that country fans were no longer rural hillbillies but were in fact modern urban middle class consumers, and because of this country stations could be profitable for their sponsors.

As part of this central strategic decision, then, the CMA endorsed the musical

changes already afoot on Music Row. The CMA’s 1960 mailing to advertising agencies

in fact carried an implicit endorsement of the stylistic changes associated with the

emerging Nashville Sound and explicitly connected the new sound to reaching new urban

audiences. “No longer the toe-tappin’, fiddle-twanging music of the backwoods, country

music has emerged from the darkness to become a highly commercial format for local

radio. This modern ‘folk’ music can be programmed to a vast consuming audience in any

specializing in rock and roll for that particular listening group; one in western and hillbilly music for the rural listening audience; another in adult-type music; and still another in what is, again, broadly termed ‘good’ music, and so forth,” 437. Also see the testimony of John Jacobs, Jr., president of the Georgia Association of Broadcasters, “The area we serve is commonly referred to as the Bible Belt, as well as rural areas. For this reason, most music heard throughout the State represents the greater portion of the current hits in hillbilly, Gospel, and popular music,” 780. Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Amendment to Communications Act of 1934: Hearing on S. 2834 , 85th Cong., 2 nd sess., 1958. 91 metropolitan city.” 38 The mailing explicitly rejected two of the key elements of the traditional country sound with one hyphenated phrase (“fiddle-twanging”), locating the older style of country music temporally in the past and spatially in the backwoods. In this construction, it was not just that the audience for the traditional music had expanded, bringing the music of the backwoods to the city, but that the music itself had in fact been transformed. Their understanding of this transformation was underscored as well by the modifier “modern” before “folk” music. The CMA acknowledged the historic prejudice against backwoods “hillbilly” music while at the same time distancing contemporary country music from the oft-maligned music of the past.

The CMA endorsed the new Sound while at the same time persuading country disc jockeys on the best way to sell the music. The CMA approached the disc jockeys to ensure that country shows and country stations did not devolve into corny schlock which drew on and in turn perpetuated hillbilly stereotypes. Rather, they sternly encouraged stations to treat country music with sincerity and sophistication. These exhortations invoked the dominant national hillbilly stereotype which had so exaggerated the Opry’s rusticity a decade previously. 39 The CMA explicitly invoked the older set of hillbilly stereotypes as part of their argument for the need to re-evaluate country performers and their fans. A CMA letter, specifically lecturing disc jockeys and radio station managers

38 “CMA” 40. 39 See McCandlish Phillips, “Country Stylist: Connie B. Gay Discusses Lucrative Formula,” The New York Times , September 8, 1957, 17. See also “Hillbilly on a Pedestal,” for a description of “hillbilly” singer Elvis Presley at a fancy Las Vegas show as “somewhat like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party.” Even Broadcasting’s seminal 1963 article recognizing Nashville as an established commercial music center still relied on older ideas about the music similar to the ones described in chapter one, “Big New Sound,” 78. 92 on the importance of country radio show titles, made this perceived prejudice against which they were fighting explicit: “There may be some frankly ashamed to admit that they listen to ‘Corncob Hoedown.’ The industry has come a long way in recent years and no one can deny that Country & Western has grown up. We are not a group of raggedy, country boys and girls with missing front teeth. We have acquired status. In choosing a title for your show, make it one that a listener would not hesitate to tell a friend about.” 40

Clearly worried about the specifically rustic associations conjured by a title like Corncob

Hoedown, the letter emphasized country’s new class distinction, in the form of the

“status” that Country & Western had acquired. The CMA saw a serious respectful presentation of the music as the best way to approach the adult market. 41

Four years later, Tex Ritter told an audience of sales and marketing executives:

“But the Country and Western entertainer has grown up. To think of today’s Country

artist as an illiterate rube with a long beard, bare feet, and a crock jug would be as big a

mistake as comparing a quiet country lane to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He is a big time

40 “Sincerity No. 1 ‘Must’ for C&W Show, Says CMA,” The Music Reporter, October 31, 1960, 26. See also a September 1965 news release for a new country station, “Country Music Comes to Town: 24 Hours a Day on WJRZ Radio,” that quotes Joe Allison, “when you mention country music, people immediately picture an illiterate, overall-clad hill billy picking away on a one string guitar and plucking a washtub bass fiddle. This is not the case at all.” Country Music Hall of Fame Vertical Files, Papers of Joe Allison. See also “Country Music Goes Uptown in Classy Carnegie Hall Show,” CMA Close-Up , December, 1961, 2, “The Grand Ole Opry troupe opened the door to a brand new culture to some of the ‘big city folk’ who expected barefooted hillbillies with barnyard manners.” 41 See Dal Stallard, “The KCKN Country Music Story,” CMA Close-Up , June 1961, 3, and Charles Bernard, “The Madison Avenue Report,” CMA Close-Up , July 1961, 3, for articles which stress the connection between taking country music seriously and without caricature in order to connect with the adult record buying market. 93 entertainer.” 42 The references to missing front teeth, corncobs and hoedowns, bare feet and drinking liquor from jugs drew on a caricature of hillbilly which the CMA still envisioned as the dominant associations with its music. The CMA’s direction to radio station personnel, in some ways, ideologically disagreed with the ethos behind the Opry’s stage presentations of the 1940s and 1950s (like the exaggerated rustic stylings of the

Minnie Pearl character for instance), arguing that clinging to comical or idyllic visions of the genre’s rural past were holding the genre back commercially.

In order to counter these persistent hillbilly stereotypes, the CMA aggressively highlighted the urbanity of both country fans and stars. The Country Music Association’s

efforts to convince advertising agencies of the commercial viability of country radio

stations centered on highlighting the fans’ residence within metropolitan areas around the

nation and not just the farms of the Southeast or the hills of Appalachia. Unlike some

traditionalist country fans, the CMA did not buy in to the notion that country belonged in

the country, that rural Americans had any kind of exclusive claim to country music; in

fact, they repeatedly argued the reverse. As with the CMA’s official declaration that the

music was no longer the fiddle-twanging music of the backwoods, the organization’s

vision of country fans firmly located them in the metropolitan areas of the nation. In the

42 Joe Allison, “The Sound of Country Music,” Presented for the Sales-Marketing Executives of Chicago (June 7, 1965), 5. See also a presentation of the same title presented for the Adcraft Club of Detroit, April 17, 1964, 4, “The singer who once gathered the eggs and milked the cow has become a big butter and egg man from Nashville … The songwriter who once tended stock on his daddy’s farm … is now consulting his broker regarding another kind of stock … The Nashville musician knows that Dow Jones is not old Farmer Jones’ city cousin … And the disc jockey knows that Capital Gains does not mean beating the other pickers to the end of a cotton row,” for an example of an argument rooted in rich wordplay which positioned the modern country performers explicitly in the city and not on the farm. Country Music Hall of Fame Vertical Files, Papers of the Country Music Association. 94 1960s they began to claim more forcefully that country music fans were the backbone not just of America’s rural spaces but more crucially of the urban areas. As a 1960 CMA mailing to 300 advertising agency executives and time-buyers proclaimed, the country music audience was composed of “the every-day working people of any city large or small – the housewife, mill worker, fisherman, truck driver – in short, the people the advertiser wants to reach.” 43 The mailing kept the idea of “everyday working people” (the

very much still beating heart of country’s identity) but removed any trace of the rural.

The jobs were still blue collar, but did not involve working the land. The geographic

locale of this imagined audience was decidedly urban in this formulation, and national as

well – the “every-day working people of any city .”

These promotional endeavors and geographic cultural positioning of the CMA worked . Country had of course been “coming to town” since the beginning of its commercial career. But the early 1960s witnessed a large-scale awareness of that fact, and the rhetoric most often chosen to represent or express this awareness invoked the

43 “CMA Committee Works on Second Sponsor Mailing,” The Music Reporter, October 31, 1960, 40. See also WD Kilpatrick, manager of Grand Ole Orpy, Letter to “Music Vendor,” November 8, 1958, for evidence of the Opry also using the notion of country fans as a unique group of consumers to sell advertising time (though in this case with no mention of their urban locations). WSM Radio & TV, Box 1, Folder 3, Vanderbilt Special Collections. A special country music issue of Sponsor in 1966 basically agreed, with multiple articles about the sweeping changes within the industry as well as the fan base which positively described the marketability of the genre. One article claimed, "demographics have shown, in market after market, that the Country listener is not a hick, but a money-making, two-car-driving, profit-buying adult, particularly in the all-important 18-49-year-old audience group,” “’Country Hits Audience Paydirt,” Sponsor , August 8, 1966, 38. 95 spatial trajectory of country to city. 44 The conceit of country “coming to town” was often openly used to celebrate (in later years it was also used to critique the new sound) country’s commercial success, in journal articles, advertisements, and album liner notes. 45 The phrase was ubiquitous, but the geographic journey that it imagined missed the mark slightly; country music had been imbricated in urban spaces since its beginnings as a commercial genre in the 1920s. 46 But the phrase did accurately point to a new level of commercial success for the genre and in this way signified something more than just a rural to urban migration.

A series of album titles in the first half of the 1960s, for instance, played with a mildly ironic city-country pairing, including Nashville Sound pianist Floyd Cramer’s

44 Phrases such as “countrypolitan” and “town and country” also circulated and caught fire to describe the new direction (out of the country!) of country music. The phrase “countrypolitan” indicated both the sense of where country was going (urban friendly pop with broad geographic reach) and where it was assumed to have been (at the opposite end of the spectrum from cosmopolitan, an art form limited by its regional and provincial ties). The phrase derived its cachet from its shock value: “country” as cosmopolitan was incongruous enough to note attention but also plausible enough in the 1950s to register as something real. 45 For use of the “coming to town” rhetoric, see “Editor’s Report: Country Music Goes to Town,” Sponsor , August 8, 1966, 10; “Seems Like Country Music’s Gone to Town: Some Reflection on Today’s Country Music,” Country News and Views: Past and Present in Country Music , January 1967, 13-4; Mrs. W. L. Tallman, Letter, Music City News , April 1967, 3; Paul Dickson, “Singing to Silent America,” The Nation , February 23, 1970, 213; “There’s New Life in an Old Radio Art Form: Country Radio Has Come to Town in a Big Way,” Broadcasting , September 18, 1972, 30-44; and Biff Collie, “Inside Nashville,” Radio and Records , January 17, 1975, 30. 46 See Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 12-25, on the centrality of Atlanta to the birth of commercial country music in the 1920s; Charles Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation Press, 1999), 166-170 for a description of Ralph Peer’s first Nashville recordings for Victor in the late 1920s; and Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), for the important contributions to country music’s development made by textile mill workers in North Carolina’s Piedmont. 96 Country Piano, City Strings , Roberta Sherwood’s Country Songs for City People , and

Slim Whitman’s Country Songs, City Hits . Whitman’s 1960 album title in particular suggested that the songs could become a “hit” only in the city, that they were purely (and merely) songs out in the country. The back cover essay began:

To paraphrase an old saying: ‘You can take the song out of the Country, but you

can’t take the Country out of the song.’ Actually, nobody wants to ; Country songs

are too good as is and, besides, they’re doing too well in the city! This album is

proof of that statement; every one of these songs came from the Country, and

every one was a big hit in the city – all cities, to be exact. 47

The essay fully endorsed the notion of a discrete city/country divide, repeating the easy assumption that the country was a place distinct from the city. But the essay tracked an explicit geographic journey (“these songs came from the Country”) that emphasized both the songs’ origins in the country and their successful penetration of the city. The emphatic declaration that the country songs had become hits in all cities paralleled the inclusive wording in the CMA’s mailing to ad agencies: “the everyday working people of any city.” The essay contained no trace of regional difference or particularity. The essay pridefully announced the success Whitman’s songs had with urban listeners while simultaneously making an argument (with the tried and true “you can take the boy out of the country” formula), that they remained, at heart, true country songs.

47 Slim Whitman, Country Songs, City Hits (Imperial, LP-9268). 97 Whitman’s formulation, with its use of the “can’t take the country out of the boy” cliché, was also implicit in the CMA’s new marketing strategy and further contained an explicit assumption that “country” as a category was not solely geographic. The classic cliche only works if “country” is something that can be portable, an essence which remains even as its people are far from the farm. In this regard, “country” means actual rural space in the first part of the phrase (the country from which the boy leaves) but means country character in the second half (the country essence which remains inside him even in a bustling metropolitan space). The trick was to balance both of these aspects of “country,” to somehow prove intrinsic character borne out of authentic rural experience while also asserting a comfort level and success within the city. The sound of the album supported this thesis: the production borrowed much of the Nashville Sound instrumentation, for instance the heavy use of choreographed background vocals, but

Whitman did slip in his trademark yodeling (on tracks such as “You’re the Reason” and

“Bouquet of Roses”), a nod to an earlier style of country vocals.

The specific drive for an all-country format was the CMA’s innovation in response to the larger shift towards Top 40 which had imperiled the country industry. The

CMA measured success through statistics on the number of radio stations which programmed country at some point in the day and how many all-country stations existed; by these measures, their efforts were entirely successful. 48 But whether the songs these

48 In 1963, there were only 97 all-country stations; only two years later there were 208. “Growing Sound of Country Music,” Broadcasting , October 18, 1965, 72. By 1971 there were 525 and by 1974 this number had grown to 856, representing a full 20 percent of all the AM stations in America. George O. Carney, “From Down Home to Uptown: The Diffusion of Country-Music Radio Stations in the United States,” Journal of Geography (March 1977), 107. See also, “CMA Radio Survey Shows Upsurge in 98 stations played could truly be called country music was very much up for grabs. The

Nashville Sound was heard over more and more stations, much to the dismay of many fans. Traditionalist fans took to the letter to editor pages to bemoan the specific changes wrought within the new studios of Music Row and the discursive shifts engineered by the

CMA. They claimed instead that country music depended on fiddles and simple singing and that in fact “city people” had no place in country. These fans often blamed the influence of “city people” for the major shifts in the genre which, in their eyes, made country music less authentic. It was not just the association with pop music which tainted the new style in the eyes of resistant traditional fans, but also the connection they saw between the new sound and urbanity itself. 49

The Sound itself was not “urban” per se, but the urbanizing proclamations about the Sound suggested a larger set of associations about urbanity. The comments linking the Sound to the City conditioned the new style to be understood (made legible) as urban, in contradistinction with the rural fiddles, twang, and steel guitar of previous styles. No matter that country music had been previously recorded in New York, Chicago, and Los

Fulltime C&W,” CMA Close-Up , May, 1963, 1, this study puts the number at 115 in May of 1963. 49 An anonymous writer, addressing the CMA, framed the transition as a switch from country to uptown, “Comments are made that the orchestras backing many of the modern Country singers, the mod clothes instead of the western cuts and boots, and even the songs themselves, are no longer Country, but an up town sound that is causing Country Music to no longer be the American art form for which it is so well known.” “Country Music – Is it Losing Its Identity?” CMA Close-Up , September, 1973, 8. A 1971 ad for a Stonewall Jackson album also used the notion that country albums were becoming too “urban.” Featuring a picture of the New York City skyline on the left and Stonewall Jackson’s new album, recorded live at the Grand Ole Opry, on the right, the text reads, “When your country albums start to sound disturbingly like city albums, remember … you can always count on Stonewall for the real thing.” Columbia Records, advertisement, Music City News , February 1971, 3, ellipsis in ad. 99 Angeles, the level of sophisticated production on the Nashville recordings conditioned an understanding of the music as newly urban. Country music culture was not uniform in its approval and enjoyment of the new sound. The main voices of dissent in the 1960s came from fans writing letters to the editor in trade journals such as Music City News , not

industry executives themselves or even prominent traditional artists on the Opry. The

instrumentation changes associated with the Nashville Sound gave rise to heated debates

about whether or not the new sound could still be called “true country,” and these debates

often centered specifically on the geography of the fans and the locations where the new

music was conceived and produced.

One particularly passionate fan crystallized the oppositional sentiment by arguing

that country music was the authentic music of the specifically rural and working-class

people of America and that the musical changes brought about by the Nashville Sound

were destroying this connection. His 1965 letter to the editor invoked the key sonic

touchstones of the Nashville Sound (horns, background choral groups) while pitting

money-grubbing city folks against the true country music fans:

Country Music belongs first to the laboring and rural people of this country. They

have no musical training and often can’t even read music, but when the day’s

work is done they can take down the old guitar, banjo, or fiddle and play the

simple songs that tell about their way of life in a fashion that the finest symphony

orchestras in the world can never imitate. They don’t want your horns or drums –

they don’t want your chorus singing in the background or even your Jordanaires

making little noises behind them. All that stuff is for the city people who jumped

100 on the country music bandwagon when there turned out to be so much money in

it. 50

The writer belittled the much celebrated Nashville Sound vocal group, the

Jordainaires, and their “little noises” and drew a stark divide between the “laboring and rural people” and “city people” who were changing the music for, in the writer’s opinion, blatantly commercial purposes. In specific contrast with the urban high art of classical symphonies, the writer defined country music as that which could be easily played within the home, after a hard day’s work, with the simple instruments at hand and nothing else, describing a form of “authentic” country music in opposition to that being produced through modern technology in the studios of urban Nashville. And although it was unclear if this fan specifically blamed the CMA for the original changes or considered its leaders the “city people” who jumped on the bandwagon, this kind of letter did explicitly contradict the language and ideology of the CMA promotional efforts. While the CMA had begun saying in 1960 that country music fans were the norm in American cities, this writer structured his lament around a proprietary claim: that country music instead belonged to rural people.

This letter’s references to true fans’ instrumentation preferences (“they don’t want your horns or drums”) were common among other critiques of the Sound as well.

Defenders of the traditional sound of country music often pointed directly to instrumentation changes as the new sound’s principal sin. Many of these fans invoked a nuanced but highly significant shift from fiddles to violins, even as they presumably

50 James Kennison, Letter, Music City News, October 1965, 2. 101 understood that violins and fiddles are essentially the same instrument with different styles of playing, which made the strong preference for the one over the other that much more striking. It was not that violins created intrinsically intolerable music, just that they could not be used for country music. The switch from an older style of fiddle playing to the heavy use of orchestrated string sections or violins, served for many as the principal lens through which the changes were understood. The Nashville Sound was discussed favorably by stars and producers and belittled by traditionalist fans, but both sides understood the spatial dimensions of the situation.

A 1964 fan letter to Music City News outlined rigid boundaries for country music and argued specifically that the Nashville Sound did not fit the criteria, again, in part because of the move away from the fiddle and towards non-traditional instrumentation:

Country music has gone so … Pop that we true Country Music fans don’t know

what a true Country record sounds like any more. Violins and chorole groups

certainly don’t belong on a country record. Indeed not – only guitars, steel guitars,

fiddles, bass, singer and most of the time dobros. … Perhaps the Nashville sound

does satisfy a lot of people’s musical desires, but all of us true country fans can

just look because you all are too busy to care about us. 51

In this way, the Sound represented an unfortunate shift away from a treasured musical heritage, and these critics blamed city people and the industry’s willingness to sidle up to them for commercial reasons. The use of orchestrated violins and other more classical string instruments became the principal signifier of country music’s twin demons of

51 Lynn Nickless, “Letter,” Music City News , November, 1964, 2. 102 commercialization and urbanization. The CMA did not dispute this: in fact, their 1960 mailing to sponsors and radio stations explicitly rejected the older style of “fiddle- twangin’” music. The shifts in instrumentation were understood by both sides but the meaning and the value attached to them differed.

In the early 1970s, after the commercial success of the Nashville Sound had peaked and many varied voices within country culture had begun to critique the new sounds, retroactive defenses of the Sound also tended to rely on spatial metaphors to associate the transition in the music with geographic movement. They imagined the

Sound a necessary shift which allowed country music’s stewards to transport the genre from a kind of mythical originary rural space outward into the cities and an ever expanding field of coverage, in the service of admirable commercial aspirations. In 1972

Eddy Arnold told an interviewer, “I stayed pretty much with the same kind of song. What

I did was just change my background a little bit – from the down-home kind of fiddle and steel guitar to the violin. And we orchestrated them, so that we could appeal to Middle

America rather than just appealing to the minority. You see, for many, many years country music only appealed to a minority.” 52 Arnold argued that he only changed his background “a little bit,” and that the shift to the orchestrated violins over the fiddle and steel guitar was necessary in order to appeal to a wider audience.

Singer-songwriter Dave Dudley defended the shift in a similar way in a 1973 interview, “they’ve made it up town or whatever the word might be. I think they’ve done that for a reason, I don’t believe the songs have changed. I think that everybody including me would like to have more people like country music so we’ve made it more acceptable

52 “Eddy Arnold” Country Music World, September, 1972, 28-31. 103 by putting on violins or whatever they do.” 53 As with Arnold’s argument, for Dudley the

violins were a virtually interchangeable piece which could be added in without altering

the core of the song or its generic label as country. Dudley’s dismissive phrase,

“whatever they do,” shifted agency away from the country star and toward an unknown

producer or engineer, suggesting that the true country authorship and authentic feeling

remained intact despite the modifications made by someone else , the producers.

Arnold and Dudley openly admitted to wider commercial aspirations (Atkins did too in later discussions of the Sound), but did not attach the same negative connotations to commercialism as the irate letter to the editor writers who bemoaned the stylistic changes made in the name of increasing country’s audience. Arnold and Dudley defended the Nashville Sound by minimizing the “background” changes, while maintaining that the songs themselves were still true country songs, and in fact had not changed at all. They made this provocative claim despite the fact that, as the letters from angry fans showed, many fans defined country music in terms of instrumentation choices.

Both artists also invoked geographic markers, “uptown” or “Middle America,” in line with the need to appeal to wider audiences. Dudley’s notion of “uptown” differentiated the modern music from its rural past and Arnold’s “Middle America” signified a desire to move away from associations with the South. The trick for the

Sound’s defenders was to suggest that country music, whose principal feature was often its authentic connection to “the people” (often defined in terms of earnest lyrics and natural singing) could still retain this country character while adding marked urban accoutrements and literally going uptown. Following a tradition established by

53 “Interview with Dave Dudley.” Country Song Roundup , January, 1973. 104 performers like Little Jimmy Dickens and Roy Acuff, they argued that inherent country character was not necessarily dependent on place or instrumentation. Inspired by “Town and Country” promoter Connie Gay as early as the late 1950s, one journalist declared,

“country music is not really a kind of music; it is a style, a way of playing. The one quality indispensable to a country music performer is ‘down homeliness’ – an amalgam of simple virtues of the kind that your sweet old Grandmother used to praise.” 54

As well, in 1973, Nashville journalist John Pugh somewhat retroactively described the Sound through its musicians, not its music:

No one has ever been able to give a precise definition of the Sound, but it

basically boils down to two things: 1) incredibly facile studio musicians who can

hear a song once, get it on paper, improvise an arrangement, and usually get a cut

within half a dozen takes, and 2) the easygoing session atmosphere, with everyone

subjugating his own part to the total effort and doing his best to send the artist

home happy. In short, a bunch of good ole country boys picking and grinning like

nowhere else. 55

54 Phillips, “Country stylist,” 17. 55 John Pugh, “Music Mecca,” Nashville! , October, 1973, 33-9. The adept musicians and their willingness to work with the artist (and vice versa) were common themes often used to contrast the Nashville studios with a place like New York, which was seen as less democratic or communal. It was not the case that no one was talking about the actual music itself, the shifts from fiddles and steel guitars to strings and background vocals, but more that these shifts were rarely discussed in the specific context of The Nashville Sound. To hear these commentators tell it, the Sound itself was something more ephemeral and magical than simply switching out instruments. See also Chet Atkins quote, “In New York when they have a recording session, an arranger brings in a part for every instrument. It’s all there, but it’s only one man’s ideas. In Nashville we get together and everybody down to the janitor throws in his two cents worth. As a result 105

Pugh’s rich description of the Nashville Sound does attempt to maintain a country

element even as the music radically shifts. And the CMA and other Nashville Sound

players were not looking to entirely obliterate country’s connections with its past. But

this connection played out in more abstract terms, not in specific spatial references to the

country. Spatially, the Nashville Sound embraced the urban over the rural. 56 For a period in the early and mid 1960s, the city was the future of country music. In other words, the

CMA did not feel the need to go out of their way to make country seem “down home.”

Instead, they believed that “country” could comfortably move uptown. The CMA sold both the idea and the sound of the Nashville Sound as the future of country music, and the organization figured this future as urban.

The fact that the CMA and other associated organizations constructed their offices on the Row as well indicated that the neighborhood was not just a convenient place to make records but also the home of a broader country music culture. Music Row leaders and property owners looked to make the neighborhood more modern and more urban

we get a mixture of ideas and a better sound,” in Chester Campbell, “The Tin Pan Valley Boom,” Nashville Magazine , November 1963, 8. 56 Historian Joli Jensen has impressively argued, with respect to comments like Pugh’s and others which appeared in journalistic discourse on the Sound, that country commentators used this distinction between New York’s cold urban professionalism and Nashville’s relaxed down home warmth, to soften the transition (or attempt to soften) from rural-oriented, seemingly spontaneous live performances at the Opry to slicker, more explicitly commercial recordings in the studios on Music Row. To make Music Row more “down home,” in other words. Referring to a 1961 McCall’s article which explicitly spelled out the differences between a Music Row studio and one in New York, Jensen writes of the article’s argument, “It implies that the Nashville studio offers a recording experience that is personal rather than professional, more rural than urban, more down home than uptown, oral not written. In other words, it symbolically identifies Music Row as much like the already authenticated symbolic origins of country music -- the Opry, front porch, and honky-tonk,” 82. 106 (according to a particular cosmopolitan definition of urbanity). They looked to build more high-rise buildings and hoped that urban renewal would provide a wide boulevard for the even greater traffic they expected the neighborhood as a destination to generate.

Rather than trying to minimize the hustle and bustle of the Row, they looked to build up the neighborhood into a more urban space. Rather than trying to imagine Sixteenth

Avenue as more “down home,” they looked to expand vertically, tear down older buildings, and fully differentiate the Row as a modern urban space.

The industry’s efforts to renew country music’s urban home, Music Row, paralleled the work done by groups like the CMA to convince people of country fans’ class and geographic standing – not poor hillbillies, not old-fashioned, and not tethered to any particular region. This construction of modern country as urban instead of rural manifested itself in the industry’s push for the Music City Boulevard project. Rather than being reluctant to play up country’s urban location, they instead wanted to convert the dilapidated urban space which Music Row inhabited into a clean urban showcase. Like the CMA’s straight ahead endorsement of the new Nashville Sound and the description of their fan base as urban consumers, the push for Music City Boulevard made no move to incorporate an idealized or glorified rusticity into its vision, instead looking to bring country out of the past and into the present, and ultimately the future, of Nashville.

“Shantytown USA”: Music Row and the University Center Urban Renewal Project

The construction of new studios began inauspiciously in 1954, when versatile country music producer and Nashville symphony conductor Owen Bradley purchased a

107 duplex in a residential neighborhood away from downtown and constructed his own recording studio. Over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of producers, publishers and performers followed Bradley to his studio’s neighborhood, buying cheaper properties and converting old rooming houses into offices and studios, in the process creating what would come to be known as Music Row. 57 The “Nashville Sound” recordings this neighborhood produced, and the dramatic effect their success had on the industry, solidified Nashville’s position as the dominant recording site of country music.

Country had never really had a clear-cut urban “home,” so to speak, and the establishment of Nashville as country’s home base, in addition to creating a cohesive set of studios, musicians, and publishing houses, provided a platform for the industry to use its own neighborhood to promote the increasingly salient idea of country “coming to town.” 58

In stark contrast with the Opry stars who had lived on the edge of Nashville, and early publishing houses such as Acuff-Rose, the development of Music Row in the mid

1950s resulted from country music figures investing in property in an urban neighborhood outside of the Central Business District. The cosmopolitan urbanity invoked by the “country comes to town” discourse of the Nashville Sound era, however, did not match the urban condition of Music Row, at least as the neighborhood was

57 John Lomax, III. “The Center of Music City: Nashville’s Music Row,” The Encyclopedia of Country Music . Ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford UP: 1998), 385- 9. 58 Other institutional factors were at work, as well – WSM’s first annual Disc Jockey convention in 1953, for instance, also brought together various players from around the country to Nashville. See Peterson, 200-1. See also “Capitol Bldg. Proves Faith in Music City,” The Music Reporter , November 3, 1962, 1, for an early assertion of the connection between investment in the neighborhood and investment in the industry’s future. 108 described by country music figures in the 1960s. The development of Music Row and the enlarged circle of contact between the country music industry and the spaces of Nashville produced a more complicated relationship. Producers, record executives, and some performers complained about the condition of Music Row itself, while others bought property in the hopes for a significant return on their investment.

The Country Music Association’s newsletter, which expanded into a full-fledged journal, CMA Close Up, in 1961, marked a change for country music publications by opening an office directly on Music Row. The journal’s masthead featured the downtown

Nashville skyline as viewed from Music Row, and its columns and features covered local news events as well as business and personal notices about Nashville-based recording artists. The spatial orientation of the new journal mirrored the consolidation of Music

Row as a self-conscious industry neighborhood. Music City News’ cover design also employed a shot of the downtown Nashville skyline from the perspective of Music Row, with some of the Row’s more modern buildings in the foreground – a particularly urban and modern vision of Nashville, not rural, which established a place identification with the Row.

Over the course of the 1960s, the connections between the public relations work of the CMA and the new Sound produced in the studios of Sixteenth Avenue solidified.

The CMA and its journal set up shop in an office building across the street from

Bradley’s studio in 1965, surrounded by multiple publishing houses, talent agencies, and major label outposts for Decca and Capitol. More neighborhood service and retail businesses changed their names to reflect the emergence of the Row as a distinct neighborhood and souvenir shops opened in response. The city eventually endorsed a

109 change in its nickname to include Music City USA (in addition to “Athens of the South”) and municipal leaders attended country music functions to show the industry its due respect. The metropolitan government had leased a prime piece of real estate at the North end of Music Row for the construction of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and it was actually the opening of the Hall in 1967 which caused businesses across the street and around the corner from the Hall to start using the moniker “Music City” in their names.

Signs for Music City Motors, Music City Service Center and Gas, and Music City Esso, all cropped up by the end of 1967. 59

The explosive growth of Music Row over the course of the late 1950s and early

1960s gave the industry a material investment in the urban space of the neighborhood as

well as a cultural investment in re-vamping and using the urban space to construct a

particular spatial idea of the genre’s current instantiation. As Music Row developed and

consolidated in the urban space of Nashville, many industry leaders hoped to use the

material space of country’s new neighborhood as yet another opportunity to refute tired

hillbilly stereotypes. Key figures within the country music industry (property owners on

Music Row and producers involved with the new Nashville Sound, but not the more

prominent members of the Opry) looked to modernize their sound in the same way that

Nashville looked to modernize its built environment. The broader national conversation

about urban renewal associated the process with modernization and looked to re-vamp

“blighted” or dilapidated housing and infrastructure and replace them with modern and

efficient structures. Similarly, the CMA and Nashville Sound producers hoped to

59 Dixie Deen, “Country Music Hall of Fame Opens,” Music City News, April 1967, 4; R.L. Polk and Co., Polk’s Nashville City Directory (Detroit: R.L. Polk and Co., 1967), 60. 110 modernize “hillbilly” music. The Nashville Sound was the sound of modernity rising, and urban Nashville itself was the genre’s future, in contrast with country’s twangy rustic past.

Given this ideological interest, industry figures were concerned about the structural and aesthetic integrity of the neighborhood. Don Davis, whose Wilderness

Music offices were in the heart of Music Row (operating out of a house at 913 17 th Ave

South, one block over and one down from Bradley’s studio, since 1965), invoked fairly extreme poverty and dilapidation when he publicly speculated, “Sometimes I wonder if

Metro wouldn’t rather just take our tax money the way they’re doing now and let us stay here in ‘Shantytown’ from now on.” 60 The reference to “Shantytown” contrasted sharply with the plans for modern office and studio construction which were either in the planning stages or already underway. Columbia and RCA planned on investing millions of dollars in high-rise office buildings to go along with the construction of sophisticated and expensive studios which had already created the Row in the first place.

An article in the 1968 Country Song Roundup Annual invoked a similar image of dilapidation, describing the prospect of a visitor coming to Music Row to get a glimpse of the “magic” and finding something else entirely: “Some of the buildings are old with wrinkled faces that tell their age by loose hinges and sagging windows. The streets and byways are narrow, as well as dimly lit. And the general look of the neighborhood isn’t the best.” 61 The emphasis on the aging structures and infrastructure suggested that it was

60 Jack Hurst, “Industry Sings Blues Over Road,” The Nashville Tennessean , April 11, 1970, 1. 61 Betty Hofer, “Inside Music City,” Country Song Roundup 1968 Annual (Derby, CT: Charlton Publishing, 1967), 68. 111 the deteriorating physicality of the neighborhood which the industry wanted to modernize. Another article from earlier in the decade referenced “rickety homes” and

“low-rent apartments” as reasons for renovation. 62 Popular songwriter Tom T. Hall, in describing his first days in Nashville living on Music Row, disparagingly referred to the neighborhood with the ultimate marker of urban poverty: “The first apartment I had here was on 16 th Avenue – when it was really a slum.” 63 Hall’s provocative use of “slum” revealed a belief that they could produce a new kind of urban space on Music Row, in contrast with its own past.

Rather than thinking of country’s urban locale as contradicting their ideal image of country music simply for being urban, key industry figures instead saw it as the wrong

kind of urban space and looked, as did many other municipalities and groups in this

decade, to urban renewal to fashion the right kind of space for their neighborhood. The

dilapidation of the neighborhood did not fit the industry’s idea of itself, and it was not

that this was an inevitable product of coming to the city; their support for urban renewal

showed a belief that “the city” could in fact provide a comfortable home for country

music. In fact, as late as the fall of 1968, investors (led by Eddy Arnold) planned on

building a fourteen-story office building in the heart of the Row. The building would

have housed record labels, publishing offices, and talent agencies, as well as a restaurant

62 “Music City’s Booming Land Rush.” The Music Reporter , June 29, 1963. 63 Jack Hurst, “Song Writer Tom T Hall Joins Opry,” The Nashville Tennessean , January 10, 1971, 4-A. 112 and a rooftop with swimming pool and heliport. 64 This was hardly an effort to keep the

Row “down home.”

The prospect of a new boulevard running through the heart of Music Row, part of a much larger urban renewal project in the planning stages, led industry figures to believe that renewal could turn Music Row into a more tourist-friendly urban space with less substandard housing, better infrastructure and sewage systems, and more open sight lines to make the space more aesthetically pleasing. 65 In these efforts, industry boosters did not

elide the urbanity of Nashville but rather trumpeted the urban possibilities of Music Row.

Conscious of the notion of their historical role as barely tolerated hillbillies in a city that

billed itself as “The Athens of the South,” industry leaders, artists, and fans hoped that

“Music City Boulevard” would solidify country’s place as the premier industry, both

symbolically and economically, in Nashville, as well as making Nashville itself a premier

American music city.

But the boulevard was never planned as or designed to be “Music City

Boulevard;” it was not until the industry seized upon the idea and began to bill it as such that the urban renewal project and country music became linked and the boulevard’s

64 “Music City Expands with New Buildings,” Music City News , November 1968, 3. Also see “Long Complex in Step with Urban Development,” Music City News , January 1968, 29; and Frank Sutherland, “9 New Buildings Slated in Music Row Plans,” The Nashville Tennessean , October 16, 1968, 1. 65 In 1960, the blocks between Division and Grand, and 16 th Avenue and 18 th (the heart of Music Row), contained 278 housing units, 208 of which were classified as Sound, 50 deteriorating (37 of these had all plumbing facilities and none of the deteriorating structures were without flush toilets) and 20 of which were dilapidated, according to the 1960 census definition. Only twelve of the 278 total units were occupied by non-whites. Only 70 of the 1088 units in the whole census tract were dilapidated. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Population and Housing: Block Statistics, Nashville-Davidson, Tenn. Urbanized Area (Washington, DC: 1961-2), 6. 113 informal name and attachment to country music became salient. 66 Nashville was one of the first American cities to fully utilize federal funding to embark upon several large- scale projects by the mid-1960s. 67 Nashville civic leaders used urban renewal beginning

in 1949 to raze blighted housing and re-make three neighborhoods: the downtown area, a

large portion of East Nashville, and Edgehill. When Congress passed the 1949 Housing

Act, Nashville’s already existing Housing Authority seized the opportunity for garnering

federal funds, razing 96 acres of low income housing north of Capitol Hill in order to

construct a leg of interstate highway and commercial and retail development. Nashville

then embarked upon the East Nashville Renewal Project, which involved both the

replacement and rehabilitation of substandard housing. 68 Though not near Music Row,

the success of these two projects led Nashville to apply for federal funding for even more

renewal and savvy industry figures saw an opening for their own neighborhood.

Music Row’s immediate neighbor to the West, Vanderbilt University, began looking

to expand its campus in the early 1950s. In fact, university officials had been somewhat

quietly buying proximal properties as they came on the market. 69 However, the Nashville

government soon saw Vanderbilt’s desire for expansion as a way to bring federal urban

66 See Larry Daughtrey, “College Area Work to Start,” The Nashville Tennessean , July 12, 1967, 1, which mentions the project and the boulevard without referencing country music or Music Row. 67 Don Doyle, Nashville Since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 125. 68 See also Robert Battle, “Nashville: Residential Building Booms as Population Expands,” The National Real Estate Investor , December, 1961, 22. 69 “Final Project Report.” Part I of Application for Loan and Grant, University Center Urban Renewal Area-One, Tenn R-51, August 4, 1967. Binder #15, Metropolitan Clerk’s Office, Nashville, Tennessee, 3; “Minutes of the Board of Trust,” Special Collections, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, October 19-20, 1956 and November 1-2, 1957. 114 renewal funds to the city. 70 A clause added to the federal 1954 Housing Act regarding universities, hospitals, and other public amenities promised that any purchases these institutions made for land expansion would count towards the one-third local contribution which federal urban renewal regulations required. 71 This made privately planned university expansion an attractive and inexpensive way for cities to secure federal funding for improving the infrastructure and housing base of the university’s surrounding neighborhoods. Private spending could count for the local share of public funding.

Despite assertions by many community members that the areas around Vanderbilt were not really deteriorating and did not need renewal, the Nashville Housing Authority approved Vanderbilt’s expansion plans as part of a larger municipal project and the nearby Music Row was, at least initially, swept along in its wake. 72

The Nashville Housing Authority announced the plan in December of 1960 (a full six years after Bradley bought his duplex), along with three other new areas slated for urban renewal by the Nashville Housing Authority, which was also in charge of urban renewal generally in addition to public housing. As a smaller part of this larger project, the

Housing Authority saw a potential boulevard through Music Row (as it happened) as the

70 “Background Statement,” in Final Project Report, 3, Part I of Application for Loan and Grant, University Center Urban Renewal Area-One, Tenn R-51, August 4, 1967, 11; Binder #15, Metropolitan Clerk’s office, Nashville, Tennessee. 71 “University Center Project Affects Total Community,” The Nashville Tennessean , August 6, 1967, 4-B; and “Council Sees, Buys a Bargain in Renewal,” The Nashville Tennessean , August 15, 1967, 3-B. On the provision for university expansion, see also Ashley A. Foard and Hilbert Fefferman, “Federal Urban Renewal Legislation,” 123, and William L. Slayton, “The Operation and Achievements of the Urban Renewal Program,” 228, in James Q. Wilson, ed. Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1966). 72 For descriptions of the traffic concerns which the boulevard was intended to solve, see “Project Area Report,” in Final Project Report, 11. 115 answer to traffic congestion between the city’s southwestern residential neighborhoods and the major east-west thoroughfares which fed in to downtown. 21 st Ave South was one of the most congested streets, in part because of the University and in part because it was one of the few arteries connecting the two parts of the city, and the Boulevard between

16 th and 17 th was intended to divert much of that traffic. 73

However, in April, 1967, the federal government broke the project down into two

phases because of funding restrictions; the first stage was the land specifically associated

with Vanderbilt’s growth and the second that of Scarritt and Peabody colleges, which

were much smaller but closer to Music Row. 74 Thus, the piece of the Boulevard designed to go straight through Music Row was delayed until the second phase. With the bulk of the university purchases now attached solely to the first phase, and therefore less

73 Wayne Whitt, “Wrong Way on 1-Way Street?” The Nashville Tennessean , December 20, 1970. 74 Planning documents emphasize the importance of Vanderbilt’s wishes: “Vanderbilt University decided to expand its existing campus; this decision has served as a major basis for the overall planning of University Center,” in “Report on Planning Proposals,” 6, Final Project Report, Part I of Application for Loan and Grant, University Center Urban Renewal Area-One, Tenn R-51, August 4, 1967; Binder #15, Metropolitan Clerk’s office, Nashville, Tennessee. Also see Pat Welch, “HUD Defends Funding VU Area Project,” The Nashville Tennessean , August 11, 1971. “Edmunds said the project was cut in half, however, because ambitious plans to rehabilitate the area around Peabody and Scarritt college campuses, put in a ‘Music City Boulevard’ and expand the Hillsboro Village shopping center cost almost twice as much as the $7 million HUD had allocated.” A survey of Vanderbilt’s files on its expansion and physical plant makes it even clearer that Music Row did not figure into the university’s plans and reinforces the reasons for shunting the boulevard to Stage Two. In fact, commercial country music development might have actually fallen under the rubric of the “undesirable” development which VU wanted to protect its campus from. Maps of the campus and surrounding area include, at most, Scarritt and Peabody and their eastern border is 18 th Avenue South. Vanderbilt expanded its campus south and west, away from the mixed spaces of Edgehill. See, in particular, “Site Development Plan, Vanderbilt University,” Clarke and Rapuano, Inc. November 5, 1965 Box 21, Centennial History Project – Administration – Physical Plant, Folder 74, Special Collections Vanderbilt University. 116 university dollars counting towards the local contribution, the debate over the Boulevard became a debate over whether local funds would be used to renovate Music Row. The music industry focused its attention on pressuring the metropolitan council to allocate the funds, even as the project had been driven from the beginning by Vanderbilt’s expansion plans.

At this point, the industry and its local supporters saw the Boulevard project as an opportunity for the local government to make a crucial investment in renewing their neighborhood. The Metropolitan Council publicly debated the boulevard issue in October of 1970, giving the industry a platform to make its case.75 Music Row’s ambitions never fully factored into Housing Authority planning, though planners did recognize the surprising growth of the industry’s presence in the neighborhood. Despite the Row’s eventual excision from the project, the occasion of the urban renewal debates did provide a platform for discussing the kind of urban neighborhood the industry believed it deserved. The industry was looking for a new way of arranging visitor experience, in line with their discursive presentation of the new Nashville Sound, which could showcase modern attractive features, not the dilapidation associated with their hillbilly past. Linked to this was the sense that local support for the Boulevard would prove the city’s interest in presenting the neighborhood and country music as viable tourist attractions.

In these efforts, the music industry had wide support among the Nashville business community; key members of the Nashville business community saw the

Boulevard and its effect on country music enterprises as a good investment for the city.

75 The 1963 merger of the city of Nashville and the surrounding Davidson county led to the formation of a Metropolitan Council. Doyle, 215. 117 Edward Jones, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce’s executive director, argued for the

Boulevard by pointing out, “People write us and tell us they came to see Music City

(row) and then couldn’t find it.” 76 Jones was not affiliated with the industry but instead

was arguing for country’s benefit to the greater Nashville economy. As well, Nashville

Housing Authority and Metro Trustee Glenn Ferguson, longtime advocate of the music

industry, argued the building of the boulevard would pay for itself in increased tax

revenues, and suggested, “it seems strange to me that everyone the world over – except

the city administration – recognizes the importance of this industry.” 77 Ferguson used the world-wide commercial appeal of country music (which the CMA had frequently couched in urban terms) to argue for lucrative spatial change in the Music Row neighborhood, and as with the CMA and the promotional discourse around the Nashville

Sound, this argument highlighted country music’s success with fans from beyond rural

America. In fact, Ferguson positioned the metropolitan government as out of step with the times, not country music, which was in the worldwide vogue.

The more cosmopolitan sense of “country coming to the city,” which the CMA and others were fully involved in promoting, did not translate to the discourse surrounding country music’s presence in the material space of Music Row. Even an editorial cartoon in a newspaper which supported renewal for the neighborhood fell back on rural iconography to describe the plight of an industry which was trying to distance itself from the negative associations of such imagery. An editorial cartoon in the

76 Robert Kollar, “C. of C., Metro Officials Differ on Boulevard,” The Nashville Tennessean, September 17, 1970, 1. 77 Frank Ritter, “Boulevard $$ Down Drain?” The Nashville Tennessean , September 20, 1970, 6. 118 Nashville Tennessean, two months after the eventual metropolitan council vote against the boulevard, juxtaposed two images; the first showed a well-dressed gentleman in an automobile driving past a sign which read “Nashville: MUSIC CITY, U.S.A., World

Famed Home of ‘The Nashville Sound.’” The second showed the same visitor encountering what looked to be a farmhouse, with a nearby shed, one lone, dead tree, and a sign tacked onto a bent stick in the ground reading “Music City’s Music Row.” 78 The headline, “A Tale of Two Cities,” highlighted the contradiction between the world- famous Nashville Sound and its dilapidated neighborhood, but the image suggested rural poverty instead of the density more often associated with an urban neighborhood . Even as country figures used the language of urban poverty (“a slum”) to describe their neighborhood, the notion that country’s home base must be inherently rundown, dilapidated, and rural still persisted.

The industry believed that urban renewal would create an urban space more in line with the notion of the modern kind of sophisticated urbanity produced through the music of the Nashville Sound, their public discursive presentations in album iconography and trade journals, and in the targeted public relations presentations of the CMA. In the end, though, the University Center Urban Renewal Project, as its title indicated, was principally driven by the expansion of Nashville universities, most notably Vanderbilt

University. Federal funding limitations forced a prioritization and Vanderbilt’s expansion made the cut while the stretch of Music City Boulevard set to run through the heart of

Music Row did not. Industry figures looked to increase their capital and symbolic investment in Nashville but did not fully have the backing of the city at this point.

78 “A Tale of Two Cities,” The Nashville Tennessean , December 23, 1970, 10. 119 Despite the vocal community support, the council vote went against the boulevard in October of 1970. 79 Briley had reversed his stance several months before, coming out

against funding the boulevard, suggesting instead that they convert the two already

existing streets to one-way streets. Although several key community voices argued that

the boulevard was necessary for the city, as country music was such an important part of

the city by this point, Briley took the opposite stance, saying at the time of the vote,

“Music Row is only one of hundreds of projects desperately needed in our city.”

Councilman James Tuck echoed Briley’s sentiment, noting “There are 35 other

(councilmanic) districts which need projects also.”80 As well, land speculation in the

neighborhood ahead of the renewal project had increased the land values and driven up

the metro government’s price tag for the entire project. 81 Once the Boulevard was moved to Phase Two of the University Center Project, and federal funds were no longer guaranteed, the Council balked at the inflated price tag of the needed property. The

Metropolitan Council did not buy the industry’s arguments on the economic or symbolic importance of the boulevard, to Nashville or to country music.

By contrast, many Nashville institutions took the industry’s side, arguing that country music was now one of Nashville’s most important industries. Both local newspapers were in favor of the boulevard and couched their support in terms of how crucial country music was to the city. The Tennessean’s editorial, “Music Row Promise

79 Wayne Whitt, “Council Votes Against Music Row Boulevard,” The Nashville Tennessean , October 21, 1970. 80 Dick Battle, “Council Discusses Urban Renewal at Tonight’s Meeting,” The Nashville Banner , October 20, 1970. 81 Christine Kreyling, “Reading the Row,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars , Cecilia Tichi, ed. (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 307-321. 120 Ought to be Honored,” referred to Briley’s flip-flop on the issue as a “breach of faith with one of the community’s largest and most appreciated industries.” 82 U.S. Representative

Richard Fulton echoed this line of thinking in a telegram to Mayor Briley in support of

the boulevard, “The music industry people have just been too good to Nashville to let this

matter drag on. They have certainly helped us, and now, when they need it, I feel that we

should give them all the help we can.” 83 The notion of reciprocity and symbolic support seemed to outweigh the economic arguments as the most compelling reasons for building

Music City Boulevard.

Regardless of the myriad reasons for and against funding the boulevard, in the aftermath of the vote the music industry figures focused on the Council’s lack of willpower. The defeat on the council vote led to widespread disillusionment with the metropolitan government among country music leaders, and they stopped attending council meetings and planning sessions for the future of Music Row. 84 Two multi-story plans for new office buildings were on the books but were both cancelled when boulevard plans were cancelled. 85 As well, media coverage suggested that, with the boulevard plans stalled, there were “slums creeping up around Music Row.” 86 For all the rhetoric of

“country coming to town” and the multi-million dollar success of the Nashville Sound,

82 “Music Row Promise Ought to Be Honored,” The Nashville Tennessean , September 18, 1970. 83 “Fulton Vows Boulevard Fund Help,” The Nashville Tennessean , April 18, 1970, 1. 84 Robert Kollar, “Row’s Rah-Rah Spirit Fades: Cool to New Music Mall Pitch,” The Nashville Tennessean , December 15, 1970. 85 Wayne Whitt, “Slums Creeping Up Around Music Row,” The Nashville Tennessean , December 22, 1970, 1; Wayne Whitt, “Boulevard to Halt at Music Row,” Nashville Tennessean , December 21, 1970, 36; and Kenneth Jost, “Will Music City Move On?” The Nashville Tennessean , January 10, 1971, 10. 86 Whitt, “Slums Creeping.” 121 the industry was unable to convince the city of Nashville that its new urban home needed any substantial modernization. However, the neighborhood of Music Row had developed well before the boulevard plans were on the books and future development was not entirely dependent on the renewal project. Even while the CMA’s efforts to convince radio and advertising industries that country fans were urban consumers were wildly successful, out on Music Row, in spite of the increasing recognition of country music’s importance to the city of Nashville, the industry was ultimately unable to fully re-make their neighborhood into the clean, modern, showcase to which they aspired.

Conclusion

Despite the commercial progress country music had made and despite the

deliberate efforts on the part of the CMA and others to paint country as a plausible urban

genre, pervasive hyperbolic rhetoric continued to associate country music with rusticity.

In an article in the 1970 Country Music Who’s Who , for instance, Jack-Warren Ostrode

insisted that the “credit for the appeal to present-day audiences really belongs to the

pioneers of yesterday who wrote their songs from the privacy of their souls and sang

them lustily behind a rusty plow on an ancient, barren hill. Blessedly, their talents have

been constantly re-born in each new generation of Country Music artists.” 87 The image of a “lustily” singing plowman played on stereotypes of simple earthy plain folk and the bizarre description of an “ancient barren hill” further distanced the primordial country

87 Jack-Warren Ostrode, “California Country – ‘Suburb’ of Nashville,” Country Music Who’s Who (Nashville: Record World, 1970), Part 3, 27. 122 performers from the modern world. The image was fanciful, but the root ideas still permeated country music discourse of the time.

Country music, some industry leaders argued, was no longer produced in the hills and no longer consumed and enjoyed only by “hillbillies;” a significant shift even though

Opry figures had from the beginning used their urban locations to play with the boundaries of an all-encompassing hillbilly stereotype. Despite country music’s long association with rural poverty and humble origins (and earlier blends of humble origins and modern middle class subject positions), in the 1960s the CMA looked to provide the genre with a markedly new socio-spatial identity while still attempting to preserve the music’s rural spirit and deep connection to “ordinary” Americans. Artists and commentators described the “Nashville Sound” as more urban or “uptown,” country marketers looked to situate their expanding audience in urban areas, and the new constellation of recording studios emerged in a neighborhood which industry figures believed could be turned into an appealing tourist destination through urban renewal.

These three developments were linked, I argue, by their shared investment in the notion that country music and its fans were becoming more urban, and that country’s newfound urbanity was preferable to country’s previous geographic and class markers. For these cultural actors and industry stewards, to make country music more modern meant making it more urban. They associated “the country” with the past and looked to the cities as the future of the genre. But as the next chapter shows, urban Nashville contained its own set of complications, and the “country comes to town” discourse which imagined urbanity going hand in hand with modernity and middle-class comfort quickly bumped up against

123 a city beset by segregation, poverty, and the civil rights struggles which these conditions sparked.

124

“You Sound Like Us but You Look Like Them”: The Racial Politics of

Country Music in the City of Nashville

Chapter Three

As the previous chapter showed, in the late 1950s and 1960s one particular wing of the country music industry (Music Row executives, Nashville Sound producers, and the public relations minded Country Music Association) turned to urban space (and the idea of urban space), as part of a larger strategy for demonstrating the distance between the modern sounds of country and the hillbilly music of the past. These groups produced and disseminated a vision of “the city” as a place of greater sophistication and modernity, home to middle-class working Americans who were either long-time country music fans who had migrated to the city, or longtime city dwellers who had recently become fans of the more palatable new style of country music. Commentators frequently deployed the metaphor of country “coming to town” but the urban dimensions of the “town” in the ubiquitous phrase were ambiguous. Even as the country music industry consolidated in

Nashville, the discursive trope of country coming to town referred to a more abstract notion of urbanity (not necessarily Nashville itself) while the Country Music Association explicitly targeted fans in every American city, regardless of size or region. This newer notion of “town” depended less on particular ideas about urbanity and more on the

125 expectation of a striking contrast between the town and the country; in other words, the fact of “hillbilly” music leaving the country was more important than where it ended up.

This chapter will examine the ways in which the racial politics of the city of

Nashville intersected with country music’s own racial politics and shaped the genre’s changing relationship with urban space in the 1960s. The development of the Nashville

Sound and country music’s astounding commercial success coincided with the flowering of the civil rights movement in Nashville and throughout the South and the nation. Yet the civil rights movement unfolded without interaction with or comment from the country music industry, even as the local battles for integration unfolded in and around the very neighborhoods which they inhabited. The profound commercial success of country music’s Nashville Sound came at a time when American cities, including Nashville, underwent a major transformation. Civil rights activists challenged segregation in public spaces, municipalities used federal urban renewal funds to renovate (bulldoze) large swaths of urban space, and cultural understandings of urban space shifted to emphasize crime, disorder and poverty. As a response, country music culture over the course of the

1960s increasingly asserted the music’s whiteness and its ability to speak for “ordinary” people during tumultuous times.

The central argument of the chapter is that various figures increasingly identified country music as specifically white, ordinary, and unchanging in a period of tumult, a constellation which dovetailed with an anti-urban and implicitly white conservative politics largely opposed to liberal government programs. Country music figures were quick to suggest that country’s appeal stemmed from its ability to speak for the everyday concerns of ordinary people, and yet their inability to acknowledge the pressing everyday

126 concerns (decent housing, education and employment) of urban Nashville’s African-

Americans suggests that their frequently deployed identity category of “ordinary folks” only included white folks. Country music’s emphasis on white ordinariness increasingly aligned with the conservative politics of law and order and the “Silent Majority,” culminating in Guy Drake’s satirical attack on welfare policies, “Welfare Cadillac,” which drew on implicit racial prejudice.

And yet paradoxically, in the late 1960s, African-American Charley Pride became one of country’s top stars in both wings of the culture, recording on Music Row in the

Nashville Sound style and frequently appearing on the Opry. Country producers, marketers, and journalists ostensibly celebrated his success as proof that anyone, even

African-Americans, could sing country, but they simultaneously marked him as an anomaly, a black singer who somehow had a genuine country voice. They used his entrance into the upper echelons of country stardom to aggressively mark him as the exception which proved the rule of country’s otherwise solid whiteness. In addition to the discourse around Charley Pride, variations on the moniker “white man’s blues” proliferated in discussions of authentic country identity. The definition suggested a parallel between country music and the blues, but also used the possessive construction to claim a separation. Country, the phrase argued, was a form of the blues, but one which belonged to white men. Like the separate but equal ideology which undergirded Jim

Crow practices, this separation argued that whites need not concern themselves with the

“blues” of African-Americans (and vice versa). In so doing, they aligned in spirit with both the ethnic revival movement and conservative populist ethos of the late 1960s.

Country music missed the opportunity afforded by the embrace of the urban detailed in

127 the previous chapter and the music’s hints of true populism found in the attention to ordinary folks manifest in the genre. As the next chapter will show, this eventually led the Grand Ole Opry to abandon downtown Nashville in favor of a middle-class suburban theme park complex.

Music Row and the Spaces of Black Nashville

In 1954, Owen Bradley purchased his duplex on Sixteenth Avenue just a few blocks South of Broadway and West End, the prime arteries heading west out of downtown. His neighborhood was a relative island of white residents surrounded by primarily African-American neighborhoods on three sides. 1 The area was primarily

residential but also bordered a commercial district with both black and white customers. 2

Even though Bradley’s duplex was in a seemingly mixed race neighborhood, in actuality

it straddled a distinct racial boundary. East of Sixteenth stretched blocks of almost

entirely African-American residents, while between 16 th and 19 th Bradley’s immediate

1 Edgehill was a historically black neighborhood but had not been as homogenous as other neighborhoods in the city; North Nashville was the only region in the city home to what one study referred to as Established Negro Areas, census tracts that had been at least 90 percent black every census year from 1930 to 1960. John Vahaly, Jr., and Benjamin Walter, “Black Residential Succession in Nashville, 1930 to 1960,” in James F. Blumstein and Benjamin Walter, eds., Growing Metropolis: Aspects of Development in Nashville (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975), 81-118. 2 Advertisements from the black Nashville Commentator show Sixteenth Avenue businesses advertising to black customers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Buford’s TV Sales and Service at 1028 16 th Ave S in 1957 and Belmont Meat and Grocery at 1019 16 th Ave S in 1961 (two and a half blocks from Bradley’s studio). “Your South Nashville’s Shoppers Guide, Nashville Commentator , August 10, 1957, 4; Ibid, November 16, 1957; Ibid, April 1, 1961. 128 neighbors were nearly all white. 3 Sixteenth Avenue was the census tract dividing line

throughout the period and by 1970 the tract East of Sixteenth was 91.4% black, the tract

on the Music Row side was 2.5% black.

As chapter two showed, Music Row figures looked to urban renewal to replace

“dilapidated” housing in the neighborhood, a situation which some figured as

“Shantytown” and the “slums.” They cited dilapidation, but the disrepair which industry

figures referenced was actually more along the lines of lack of upkeep. In the blocks

West of Sixteenth, residents were almost entirely white renters inhabiting mostly sound

structures. 4 On the eastern side of 16 th , there were slightly more deteriorating structures but still the blocks nearest to Sixteenth contained many lower middle-class African-

American homeowners.5 The preponderance of dilapidated structures were farther East,

3 According to the 1960 census, census tract 11, the section of Edgehill bordering Music Row, was 89.7 % black. Tract 12, which contained Music Row, was 95.8 % white. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Population and Housing: Census Tracts: Nashville, Tennessee SMSA (Washington, DC: 1961-2), 15-6. The racial dividing line is even better understood by comparing block by block stats for 1960. Between 16 th and Villa Place, the blocks are about half non-white, whereas between Villa Place and 15 th Avenue they are almost one hundred percent non-white. Presumably, the Sixteenth Avenue edge of the blocks contained the white households and the Villa Place side the black homes. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Housing: City Blocks: Nashville, Tenn. – Selected Census Tracts in Davidson County (Washington, DC: 1961- 2), 6. 4 In 1960, between Grand and Edgehill and 16 th and 19 th almost all structures were Sound (200 out of 225), and only 4 were dilapidated. Only five of the units were non-white but only 46 were owner-occupied. Ten years later, out of 336 residents in the same blocks, only 13 were black. There were 107 housing units, 19 of which lacked some or all plumbing, but only 20 were owner occupied. Ibid, 1960 City Blocks , 6-7; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Housing: Block Statistics: Nashville-Davidson, Tenn. Urbanized Area (Washington, DC: 1972), 36. 5 Between South and Tremont, and Villa Place and 15 th place, there were 67 housing units (64 of which were non-white), 43 of which were owner-occupied. The average home value of the owner-occupied units was higher than the greater Nashville average. Ten years later these blocks contained only 47 structures, only 5 of which lacked 129 centered around 12 th Avenue South (five blocks east of Bradley’s studio), which was also one of the main commercial strips for Black Nashville. 6

Before the development of the music industry base of Music Row, Sixteenth

Avenue marked the West edge of Edgehill, a historically black neighborhood extending

from Sixteenth Avenue East to Eighth Avenue. 7 Just East of Bradley’s block, Villa Place

(running parallel to Sixteenth) was home to African-American homeowners, including musicians from nearby Tennessee State and Fisk Universities. The neighborhood was less than a mile from a triangle of black universities: Meharry Medical College, Fisk

University, and Tennessee State University. Doctoral music student and frequent sideman

W.O. Smith remembered Villa Place as the social center of TSU’s jazz musicians in the late 1950s. 8 Thus, Music Row developed adjacent to not just any black neighborhood but

one with a greater than average musical heritage.

some or all plumbing facilities and 31 of which were owner-occupied, none of which were white, Ibid. 6 Advertisements in the black weekly, The Nashville Commentator , throughout the 1960s reveal some of the geography of black Edgehill. The “South Nashville Shopper’s Guide” in each provided addresses of cafes, drug stores, service stations, shoe shops, etc. The bulk of the neighborhood’s retail was on 12 th and 8 th Avenues South (700 to 1400 blocks, mostly on 12 th ), though the guide did occasionally feature ads from businesses on Sixteenth Avenue. 7 Reverend Bill Barnes, interviewed by Gary Gaston, Isabell Call, Dan Cooper, and Michelle Bowen (Nashville Civic Design Center). http://www.sitemason.com/files/dyZCXm/BarnesInterview.pdf Last accessed on September 15, 2010. 8 W.O. Smith, Sideman: The Long Gig of W.O. Smith: A Memoir (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991). With so many musicians in town Nashville’s night clubs became a site for integrated jam sessions, though not without incident or unequal restrictions on participation. In the 1950s, white country session musicians like Hank Garland and Buddy Harman could play in black clubs but the reverse situation with much less frequency. 130 Though it was not planned as such, Music Row developed in a racial boundary neighborhood in a city about to erupt in civil rights struggles. For pioneers like Bradley, the location was fine in the 1950s as a cheap alternative (relative to downtown) for studio construction and initial office development. Once the neighborhood became a larger showpiece for the industry, however, investors became more concerned with the image of the neighborhood. An active civil rights movement in tandem with unequal consequences of urban renewal had made Nashville’s urban spaces, particularly on the West Side, more marked racial space.

Nashville, compared to other Southern cities, experienced a more moderate history of civil rights accommodation. Mayor Ben West, in the early 1950s, supported an ordinance which changed the city council electoral process from at-large elections to mostly district-by-district representation, so that two African-Americans were elected.

West also successfully argued that black police officers should be on the force. 9 And the city’s public schools were officially integrated as early as 1957. Three years after Bradley purchased his duplex, the Nashville Board of Education drew up what came to be known as the Nashville Plan in accordance with the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education for

the Fall of 1957. The Plan called for a gradual integration of one grade per year, starting

with the first grade, and gave parents of both races an option to opt out via written request

if their child was zoned into a school in which they were the minority. 10

9 Don Doyle, Nashville Since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 228. 10 Ibid, 235. Also see Benjamin Houston’s dissertation for a nuanced treatment of Nashville’s claims to racial moderation. Benjamin Houston, “The Nashville Way: A Southern City Confronts Racial Change, 1945-1975,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2006. 131 There were a few factions within Nashville ready to fight integration of the schools, but there was much more institutional and broad citizen support for integration, or at least for supporting the Supreme Court’s ruling. 11 Even an African-American newspaper generally very critical of the municipal government, the Nashville Globe and

Independent, supported this belief, emphasizing the significant role that outside agitator

John Kasper (of the White Citizen Councils) played in resisting Nashville’s 1957 integration plan while praising Mayor Ben West and the pro-integration forces within

Nashville. The paper argued that Kasper and his followers were outnumbered “at a time when the best element of Nashville’s people have become reconciled to carrying out desegregation along the lines recommended by the United States Supreme Court.” 12 In

fact, Kasper was jailed multiple times by the Nashville police for incitement to riot and

11 The National Council of Churches (whose office was only blocks from Bradley’s Studio) produced a 1957 report to appraise various groups interested in integrating Nashville schools on the basic situation in Nashville: which groups were opposed, to what degree were they opposed and how violent would they be, and which groups or individuals would they be able to turn to for support, Will Campbell, “Memorandum,” Box III:A105, NAACP Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. In 1957, Nashville African-Americans boycotted a Louis Armstrong show at the Ryman because of segregated seating policies. The auditorium instituted segregated seating after a bombing at an Armstrong concert in Knoxville two weeks before. The community boycott succeeded; only a few hundred blacks attended on the lower level while the whites were crammed into the balcony. 12 “Lawbreaker Comes to Nashville for One of His Tirades,” Nashville Globe and Independent , August 9, 1957, 1, and “Kasper and Co. ‘On the Run’: Lawless Element Hears from Real Leaders of the City,” Nashville Globe and Independent , August 16, 1957, 1; see also the Globe and Independent’s generally optimistic (but also cautionary) editorial, “They Whom We Trust,” August 16, 1957, 4, “This is because white parents, well disposed toward their officials and other fine leaders, are showing that they also do not intend to be misled by any publicity-seeking hotheads of their race.” 132 when finally released the third time (after being unable to meet the bail) left Nashville for over a year. 13

Black Nashvillians saw the support of the white community as crucial to the movement even as they understood that support to be generally rooted more in support for the rule of law than out of any particular belief in black equality. A diverse set of

Nashville interests, including business, retail, and newspaper concerns, wanted to avoid the kind of ugly and destructive clashes which had marked civil rights movements in other parts of the South. The city fashioned itself as a more tolerant but still Southern city. Roughly six hundred mostly white citizens had formed The Nashville Community

Relations Conference, an integrated mixture of businessmen, clergymen, and teachers, who were not necessarily for integration on principle but were officially opposed to extralegal efforts to fight integration. 14 The public schools of Nashville gradually became

more and more integrated, without substantive public resistance, until the 1970s and

enforced busing changed the terms of the debate. 15

The Nashville sit-ins had their genesis even before the more famous Greensboro protests of early 1960. The presence of black universities in Nashville was a crucial

13 Doyle, 242. 14 The Council of Churches report pointed out that “Nashville is probably the only city in the South with at least a veneer of Deep South tradition that has within it a group of 600 people who have placed themselves on public record … as offering support to the school board in bringing about a peaceful transition from segregated to desegregated schools.” Campbell, 2. The Nashville Tennessean actively supported integration and the Banner , while opposed to integration by federal declaration, also opposed violent and extralegal opposition on the part of segregationists. 15 Richard A. Pride and J. David Woodard, The Burden of Busing: The Politics of Desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). 133 factor in the early beginnings of this movement. 16 A group of students from Fisk had organized the previous year to apply civil disobedience to the problem of integrating

Nashville’s public accommodations. They had performed test sit-ins in the final months of 1959, sitting at lunch counters but leaving when asked to. Between February and May of 1960, massive organized sit-in efforts forced downtown Nashville businesses to integrate their lunch counters and other public accommodations. The protestors faced violence from white counter-protesters, jail time, and, in one case, expulsion from

Vanderbilt University for their role in the movement. 17 Generally regarded as the most

philosophically grounded and well organized of the sit-in movements, the Nashville

protests succeeded, after three months, in getting the Nashville government and

downtown business interests to agree to integrate. The key event was the segregationists’

bombing of black activist Alexander Looby’s house. The following day protesters

marched on City Hall and a shaken Mayor West agreed, when asked, that segregation

was wrong. 18 West’s concession that segregation was wrong, along with succeeding

16 “Negroes Fight Back in the South,” New York Amsterdam News , February 20, 1960, 1. The Highlander Folk School also played an important role. Guy Carawan, the white leader of the Highlander Folk School, produced an album chronicling the Nashville sit-in movement, using the principal participants in the movement and combining staged re-enactments of crucial moments with the songs which were central to the movement’s expression. The album featured spirituals, old folk songs, and an improvised cover of Hank Snow’s 1950 song, “I’m Moving On.” The liner notes referred to the song as a parody of “Hill Billy” favorite Hank Snow, but the song itself was a friendly re-working of the song which aligned the protestors with the song to suggest that segregation and Jim Crow were in fact moving on. In 1959, a year before the sit-ins, Ray Charles had recorded a version of the Snow song, presaging his decision to record an entire album of country songs two years later. Guy Carawan, The Nashville Sit-In Story (Folkways Records, 1960). 17 Doyle, 246. 18 Bobby L. Lovett, The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee: A Narrative History (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 137-40; “Violence in Nashville,” 134 negotiations between black activists and white businessmen looking to expand their customer base, cleared the way for the eventual integration of Nashville’s public accommodations.

In 1961, the integration efforts spread to hiring practices, and SNCC leaders in

Nashville targeted an H.G. Hills grocery store two blocks from Bradley’s studio on

Music Row, at the corner of 16 th and Grand. For three weeks, integrated groups of picketers protested the store’s discriminatory hiring practices, encountering violent opposition from groups of white youth as well as arrests and beatings courtesy of the

Nashville police force. 19 In addition to the downtown sit-ins, which were front page news

in Nashville for months, Music Row also became a contested urban racial zone over the

course of these protest actions. The industry seemed to respond with indifference, and

vice versa. When it came to analyses of race relations and civil rights struggles in

Nashville, country music figured neither positively or negatively; it was nearly

impossible to find any trace of country music as an economic, demographic, or cultural

force in Nashville in histories of the civil rights movement within the city. 20

Daily Defender , April 27, 1960, 10. Also see Carawan, Nashville Sit-In Story, and David Halberstam, “’A Good City Gone Ugly,’” The Reporter , March 31, 1960, 17-19. 19 Letter from Lee Berman, and Voice of the Movement , August 11, 1961 (Volume 1, no. 15), from Papers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (245), Reel 40, Nashville Public Library Special Collections. See also, “Picket Clash Trial Delayed,” Nashville Tennessean , August 8, 1961, 1, and “Store Picket Case Dropped,” Nashville Tennessean , August 11, 1961, 2. 20 The following memoirs and histories of the Movement all devote a substantial amount of space to the Nashville Sit-Ins but the only mention of country music as a defining feature of the city in the descriptions is John Lewis: “Nashville at that time was an odd mix of racial progressiveness on the one hand conflict and intolerance on the other. … [it had] established itself as a national center for music, religious publishing, and higher education … Compared to other cities in the South, it was a truly progressive place in terms of race.” Lewis, 80-1. Even in this quote Lewis does not single out country 135 Country music was in, but not necessarily of, the city of Nashville. The industry was not integrated in to the community and not always eager to play up the complexities and specificity of its spatial location. Trade journals did not draw Nashville into country music’s orbit when issues of civil rights were most salient, but only to advance the industry’s own interests. Country journals only sporadically situated coverage of the industry within the neighborhood of Music Row or the larger environs of Nashville, and referred to the municipal government only when Mayor Briley recognized country figures and accomplishments. 21 Later in the 1960s, Music Row publications also often

provided much of the same municipal propaganda as other Nashville media, celebrating

music specifically as a force within Nashville but sees the city as a national center for music. See also Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (New York: Penguin, 1977); Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990); and Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 21 “Metro Mayor Hails C&W Industry; Appoints Tradesmen Ambassadors,” CMA Close-Up , November, 1963, 3; “The Day Music City Came of Age,” Music City News , March, 1964, 1; and “CMA Ground Breaking Huge Success,” CMA Close-Up , March 1966, 1. In early 1967, Music City News’ changed their cover page subtitle to “The Sound of a City Heard Around the World,” to emphasize the journal’s world-wide readership and country’s international popularity. The phrase further tied the music to Nashville. However, neither the journal’s title nor its content exclusively focused on country music; in fact, by this point a sizable chunk of the journal focused on gospel music and Nashville’s role in that industry. By the mid-1960s, Nashville had become a major recording center for other genres besides country, including black and white gospel artists, and while the journal acknowledged this diversity, the separateness of gospel and its culture from that of country music was simultaneously emphasized. 136 Nashville’s role as a pioneer in American urban renewal and extolling the city’s growth and stability. 22

Even as Nashville promoted its support for integration, the city was still structured by unequal access to jobs, education, and housing. 23 Urban renewal and its

effects on African-American opportunities for affordable housing became a central issue

for black activists. Much of this activism centered around the Edgehill Urban Renewal

Project which in fact adjoined Music Row. The Edgehill Urban Renewal Project

principally involved demolishing older single-family homes and replacing them with

multi-unit public housing. The Edgehill Project involved the relocation over 2,000 mostly

African-American families. 24 The metropolitan government contributed roughly $12

22 “This is Your Guide to Nashville … Music City U.S.A.,” Thurston Moore, ed .,The Country Music Who’s Who, 1966 Edition (Denver: Heather Publications, 1965), Part 7, 30. 23 Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Housing and Urban Renewal in the Nashville-Davidson Country Metropolitan Area,” February 1967, Box VI:F121, NAACP Records, Manuscript Room, Library of Congress: “The Negro in Nashville has been told that he has a right to be proud of his community. Nashville was the first city in the old Confederacy to have an ordinance-based human relations commission.” The report further asserted that while black freedom was protected by law, opportunities were still limited and restricted, even though the city was more moderate. In Early 1962, the NAACP celebrated gains made in employment with the phone companies, Ford, city government, and downtown department stores. Mayor Ben West arranged meetings with black activists, civil service department heads and the Nashville chamber of commerce established an employer-employee committee to deal with “human relations,” arguing that the use of “Negro manpower” was necessary for the region’s economic development. NAACP Newsletter , Nashville Branch, January 27, 1962, Box III:C170, NAACP Records, Manuscript Room, Library of Congress. See also “Committee Recommends Open Housing Ordinance for Nashville,” The Nashville Commentator , April 15, 1967, 1. 24 Mansfield Douglass, III, “To the Metropolitan Commission on Human Relation (Sub-Committee on Housing),” December 5, 1966, Box VI:F121, NAACP Records, Manuscript Room, Library of Congress. The Edgehill project was first given federal approval in early 1962, approved by the Nashville metropolitan planning commission in October of 1963 and approved by the Metropolitan Council in October of 1965. Nashville 137 million to the project, seeing it as central to a larger, city-wide battle against encroaching slums and blight. The local government spun the project as necessary to prevent the encroachment of “blight” and maintain property values. Housing Authority documents pointed to the renewal of “steep and hazardous” streets and the building of amenities such as a new junior high school and a branch of the Nashville public library. 25 But the larger renewal project also allowed the Housing Authority to acquire properties and structures deemed substandard and construct new public housing projects, in effect becoming landlords for many low income residents. 26

Unlike previous urban renewal projects in Nashville which had not met with

immediate and sustained opposition, the Edgehill project faced a wide array of organized

interests. A coalition of African-American and neighborhood citizen groups (including

the inter-racial Nashville Committee for Decent Housing, the NAACP, and the Nashville

Christian Leadership Council) formally complained to federal civil rights agencies,

asserting that urban renewal in Edgehill would mean intensified segregation, as displaced

blacks would be forced into segregated public housing or the few non-white

Housing Authority planning documents found at the Metropolitan Court Clerks Office, Nashville, Tennessee. Also see “Millions Slated on Urban Renewal,” The Nashville Banner , April 30, 1962, 10; “Metro Commission Approves Edgehill,” The Nashville Banner , October 24, 1963, 8; Rob Elder, “Edgehill Given 2nd Approval After Hearing,” The Nashville Tennessean , October, 29, 1965, 1. 25 Ben West, Mayor’s Report, #14, “Urban Renewal,” Tape 312-61, Metropolitan Archives Sound Files, Nashville, Tennessee. See Guilford Dudley III, “Nashville Faces a Classic Urban Crisis,” Nashville Magazine , October, 1968, 30, for an example of boosterism which argues that urban renewal in Nashville was more humane than elsewhere. 26 See Frank Ritter, “NHA Urged to Stop Charging Rent in Ghetto ‘Slum Property,’” The Nashville Tennessean , June 24, 1968, 1; “NHA ‘Slums’ Spark Protest,” The Nashville Tennessean , July 1, 1968, 1; and “Rats Fail to Startle NHA Slum Tenants,” The Nashville Tennessean, July 8, 1968, 1. 138 neighborhoods in other parts of the city. 27 As well, they argued, homeowners were not getting fair value for their homes: appraisals were unfairly lowered for homes within the

Edgehill boundaries, compared to similar homes in other parts of the city. This disparity, compounded by the fact that African-American home buyers often had to pay above market prices for homes in restricted areas, meant that many homeowners would be forced into renting by the urban renewal and housing authority policies. The basic, everyday needs of Edgehill residents were not being met. As I will show later in the chapter, avoiding this topic of discussion did not square with country music’s claim to represent the daily struggles of “ordinary folks.”

Unlike other instances of civil rights resistance in Nashville, resistance to Edgehill

Urban Renewal called out the country music industry specifically for benefiting from the project, thus throwing into relief the differences between the neighborhoods and their potential futures. 28 The industry’s presence had grown enough to be acknowledged by

27 “Summary of the Meeting,” Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, December, 1966, Box VI:F121, NAACP Records, Manuscript Room, Library of Congress. See also W.A. Reed, Jr., “Edgehill Group Seeks U.S. Aid,” The Nashville Tennessean, September 19, 1966, 1; and Elder, “Edgehill Given 2nd Approval.” 28 A 1972 article from The Real Dirt , the newsletter of the People’s Rights Party (an interracial organization fighting for the rights of working people in Nashville), indicted the country music industry, associating its key figures with the ruling elites of Nashville (in particular, the leaders of Vanderbilt University), and linking the two institutions’ respective attempts to take over and convert land which could have been better used to house lower and middle income Nashville residents. The article used familiar pieces of country iconography to needle the industry and associate it with the land-hungry rich, using phrases like “The Grand Ole Land Grab,” or “Grand Ole Uproot” to describe their attempts for bringing urban renewal to Music Row, and twisting the lyrics of the folk song “This Land is Our Land” into “This land was their land … but now it’s our land…” in a cartoon tying together WSM, Vanderbilt, and National Life and Third National Bank. The article employed satire to associate country music with the rich and powerful while also noting the irony of the use of “working class culture” for profit 139 black activists as a key player in the white power structure of the city, even as country figures complained that they themselves were being neglected. African-American real estate broker Inman Otey argued before hearings on the proposed renewal plan, “There is a distinct segregation pattern being formed in urban renewal in south Nashville. The

University Area is on the other side of 16 th Avenue. Part of the south Nashville urban renewal project will be bought as residential and will be reclassified as commercial.

There will be a Negro reservation created.” 29 At an October, 1965, Metropolitan Council meeting, Councilman and NAACP branch president Mansfield Douglas specifically referred to the “music industry complex on 16 th Avenue South” as a possible cause for

the controversial shift in zoning from residential to commercial (on Hawkins and Bigler

streets). 30

In light of this proximity, claims that 16 th Avenue and Music Row were “slums”

both made sense and were suspect; the proximity of Edgehill was enough to raise the

specter of “slums” but Music Row was “better off” in terms of structural deterioration

than the neighboring blocks to the East. Studio leaders, publishers, and stars all looked to

by the powerful. The authors epigraphically referred to the lyrics of a Hank Williams song, “Move over, little dog, or I’ll move on over you,” to suggest that country music culture did not care who had to be removed to facilitate its expansion. But this satirical article missed the fact that Music Row and WSM’s Opry were often at odds, and had different spatial and commercial aspirations. With the corporate parent backing of National Life and Accident, WSM and the Opry did have the muscle to shape their own space within Nashville. As the next chapter will show, the Opry looked to move its performance space away from the poverty and “slums” near downtown and toward the middle-class space of the suburbs. Centennial History, Record Group 101, Changing Status – Town and Gown, Special Collections, Vanderbilt University, Jean and Alexander Heard Library 29 “Notes from Edgehill Urban Renewal Meeting,” September 11, 1966, 4, Box VI:F121, NAACP Records, Manuscript Room, Library of Congress. 30 Elder, “Edgehill Given 2 nd Approval.” 140 position their neighborhood as “the slums” in need of major renovation and renewal, and complained when the metropolitan government declined to fund the Music City

Boulevard project. 31 Industry planners, investors, and property owners wanted urbanity to signify “modern and cosmopolitan” for Music Row, but this turned out to be difficult.

The neighborhoods had too much messy overlap, and Music City Boulevard seemed to promise an opportunity to more clearly demarcate the neighborhood of Music Row as a

distinct entity.

The combination of highly visible civil rights protests and massive urban renewal

campaigns marked the urban space of Music Row in a particular way, as unstable and

racially dangerous. Though it was not nearly so explicit, part of what defined Music Row

as in need of “renewal” was the neighborhood’s location near the African-American

blocks of Edgehill. When country figures talked about the need to make it easier for

tourists to “find” Music Row, or when they talked of the push to create a showcase which

would highlight the industry’s presence, part of what they were trying to differentiate

Music Row from was the nearby Edgehill. 32 Even so, the specter of Edgehill existed only

31 Reverend Bill Barnes, of the Edgehill United Methodist Church, indicated in an oral history that the initial boundaries of the renewal project, which left Music Row just outside of the Edgehill project, were not incidental. “It probably was not a coincidence that the line for urban renewal was the alleyway between Villa and 16 th Avenue because at 16 th you had Music Row. So black folks got redistributed and shuffled around and monochromatized.” Here Barnes suggested that being left out of the renewal area was a blessing for Music Row, as it kept their neighborhood intact while setting up the African- American residential section just East of the Row for demolition and displacement. Interview with Reverend Bill Barnes, http://www.sitemason.com/files/dyZCXm/BarnesInterview.pdf Last accessed on September 15, 2010. . 32 See William Greenburg, “’Public Privies, 1 Water Spigot,’” The Nashville Tennessean , February 10, 1967,1, and Frank Ritter, “Poor Tour ‘Silk Stocking District,’” 141 in absence. Throughout the debates about whether the city should fund Music City

Boulevard, industry supporters never once mentioned the earlier Edgehill project as precedent, as if they could will it out of existence by avoiding specific mention of the neighborhood and the renewal project.

Even if the Row leaders did not specifically invoke Edgehill, though, other country music commentators did, reinforcing the notion that Music Row was perilously marked. Paul Hemphill’s widely discussed 1970 book, The Nashville Sound , specifically tied Music Row to urban renewal and Edgehill, describing the Row as “an eight-square- block area about two miles from downtown, in the urban renewal area around Sixteenth and Seventeenth Avenues South, near Vanderbilt University and a vast Negro section.” 33

That unspecified “vast Negro section” was Edgehill. John Grissim’s book ( Country

Music: White Man’s Blues ), published the same year, also foregrounded and frontloaded

a discussion of Music Row and the surrounding rundown neighborhood:

What is so amazing is that one can leave the company of such talented, wealthy

artists and musicians working in such a technical environment, walk out the front

door onto 17 th Avenue South, and see weed-filled lots, run-down buildings and

private homes for senior citizens. In fact, the whole of Music Row (which

technically refers to 16 th Avenue South) is part of a poverty-stricken Model Cities

district. 34

The Nashville Tennessean , July 21, 1968, 6-A, for prominent examples of local media coverage which highlighted the poverty of Edgehill. 33 Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 35. 34 John Grissim, Country Music: White Man’s Blues (New York: Paperback Library, 1970), 24. The Model Cities Program was a particular kind of urban renewal 142 Grissim was wrong, though, in a very telling fashion. The Model Cities program operated in North Nashville, over a mile away, home to the largest concentration of black businesses in Nashville. 35 Music Row, at the time of Grissim’s book, was adjacent to urban renewal driven by Vanderbilt’s expansion to the West and public housing construction in Edgehill to the East, neither of which were part of the Model Cities program. Model Cities neighborhoods, at least in Nashville, were predominantly African-

American and Grissim’s slipup here reveals the way in which he understood the purportedly poverty-stricken section of Music Row as black and simply used “model cities” as a kind of shorthand.

Martin Luther King’s Assassination: “The Show Must Go On”

In the days following Martin Luther King’s assassination, the neighborhood of

North Nashville became a battleground for enraged students of Tennessee A&I State

University who confronted police and National Guard forces. Over the course of the weekend snipers held the Guard at bay while fires raged and students destroyed property. 36 The metropolitan government issued a curfew and troops were separately sent

program designed to allow local communities to plan and implement a “total attack” to reshaping a neighborhood, and was in fact in place in North Nashville, not in either Music Row or Edgehill. Grissim got it wrong here, perhaps conflating the University Center Urban Renewal Project with the Model Cities districts of North Nashville. 35 “Model Cities Issues Still Unresolved,” The Nashville Banner , October 15, 1970, 34. 36 “Curfew at 7 P.M. After A&I Siege,” The Nashville Banner , April 6, 1968, 1; “Guard Seals, Patrols North Nashville Area,” The Nashville Tennessean , April 5, 1968, 1. 143 to seal off the university’s campus and protect the downtown area around the Capitol. 37

The curfew meant that night’s Grand Ole Opry would have to be cancelled for the first time in its 43-year history. To make it up to visiting fans, longtime Opry figure Roy

Acuff engineered an impromptu afternoon show in a smaller private venue over his downtown storefront museum. While the fact that Opry stars were able and willing to convene a private show in the aftermath of a national tragedy is provocative in and of itself, the industry press coverage of this show further revealed a divide between

Nashville’s African-American community and country music. The May issue of Music

City News framed the event as Roy Acuff saving the day for lucky country fans without even mentioning King’s assassination as the cause of the possible unrest, creating an odd juxtaposition of tone and mood:

There’s a rumor of a march uptown. A siren screams around the corner.

Uniformed men, carrying rifles, and closing places up and down the street. Some

people have come into town and looked, and left again. There’s a feeling of

uneasiness in the streets. But upstairs at Mr. Ed’s there’s laughter and applause.

The lights are up. The show is on. And a small group of Country musicians put on

a show a lot of Music City visitors will remember … for a long, long time. 38

37 Jerry Thompson, “Guard, Police Disperse Crowd After Advance,” The Nashville Tennessean , April 7, 1968, 1; Jerry Thompson, “City Calmer; Guard, Police Still Patrol,” The Nashville Tennessean , April 9, 1968, 1. 38 Harris Martin, “Curfew Cuts Country Capers . . . But the Roy Acuff Show Goes On,” Music City News , May 1968, 32. 144 There is a stark contrast in this passage, between the “uniformed men” and sense of uneasiness elsewhere in the city and the laughter and gaiety of the small club performance. The article mentioned urban unrest in Nashville, but distanced the action on the streets of Nashville from the private show at Mr. Ed’s, even as the special show took place in the heart of downtown, on Lower Broad. The article focused on the experience of visitors to Music City, reading the tragedy of King’s assassination only through the lens of how it affected the Opry. The clear avoidance of King’s death was striking.

A comparison with Detroit and the Motown record company is instructive.

Motown released recordings of Martin Luther King’s speeches and Langston Hughes’ poetry (Hughes’ album, done in collaboration with a local Detroit poet, was titled Poets of the Revolution ), booked their artists before integrated audiences in the South, and attempted to resist the displacement of urban renewal by buying and utilizing downtown performing spaces. 39 As Suzanne Smith has argued, the music and culture of Motown was both a product of and an agent in the larger matrix of civil rights struggles, both local and national. After King’s death the Motown label contributed performers and money to the SCLC and publicly supported the Poor People’s March. Country music, which claimed to represent the lives and interests of the “ordinary folk,” made no such overture towards the Poor People’s March nor did they seem to see King as a leader of “the people,” instead choosing to mark civil rights as something different from the concerns of

39 Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 145 “ordinary folks.” 40 Country music seemed to pursue an aggressive apoliticality, although

in fact these actions (or lack thereof) supported a conservative ethos.

Unlike Motown within the city of Detroit, the various pieces of the country music

industry used Nashville but did not emerge out of a particular neighborhood or

community within Nashville. A larger network of capital and resources with scattered

historical roots in Nashville had emerged over time and Nashville became a destination

for a disparate group of musicians, investors, agents, writers, and producers. 41 Perhaps

more importantly, Orpy stars and Music Row record labels were not selling civil rights in

the same way that Motown was selling black culture and black liberation (even if in a

fashion which was conscious of its ramifications for a large white audience). Instead,

country music’s promoters were selling a particular kind of ordinariness, everyday white

life stripped of its particulars. Not only did country music generally avoid topics of civil

rights and the specific battles for rights within Nashville, but disparate country figures

40 A few country songs later provided more nuanced treatment, and after King had been enshrined as an acceptable national leader two songs specifically mentioned him. Tommy Cash’s “Six Whites Horses” focused on King’s assassination and Bill Anderson’s “Where Have All Our Heroes Gone” listed King along with Jesse Owens. 41 Commentators often noted Nashvillians’ indifference to country music and used this fact as a peculiar trait of the city which was in fact the number two recording center in the country. They noted that there were no clubs where country performers played live, no all-country radio stations within the Nashville city limits, and no autograph-seekers hounding country stars when they were out on the town. WSM surveys found that the “typical ‘Opry’ fan is a 29-year-old city dweller and that he and three other people in his party traveled an average of 480 miles to see the show.” In this sense, the country music industry thought of its “in town” fans as tourists, not residents. See “A Big New Sound Blows Out of Nashville,” Broadcasting , January 28, 1963, 67-82, and Joseph Sweat, “Keep ‘Opry Out of the Space Age,” Billboard World of Country Music, 1966-67 , 80. Also see Suzanne Smith, 156-62, for a rich description of the ways in which the Motown sound as well as its performers did develop out of Detroit’s public housing, public schools, and music clubs. Detroit also had the first radio station in the nation built, owned, and operated by African-Americans, WCHB, which began broadcasting in 1956; Smith, 38. 146 explicitly constructed a version of “ordinary folks” at the heart of country culture whose everyday concerns had nothing to do with civil rights struggles.

“The Simple Stories of Ordinary Lives”: Country’s Implicit and Explicit Whiteness

Country publicity man Tandy Rice (and later president of the Country Music

Association), when asked about the wide appeal of country tunes, explicitly connected civil rights to leftist cultural politics and contrasted this with the concerns of the ordinary folk who enjoyed country music: “Right now, country music is stable, like the great backbone of this country. The lyrics are simple, and sincere, not about civil rights and such. These folks don’t go for the Bob Dylan, Joan Baez kind of thing. The lyrics are about what concerns everyday folks.” 42 By avoiding specifically black everyday concerns

(such as equal treatment before the law and equal access to jobs, housing, and entertainment), the music implicitly spoke only for white “ordinary folks.” Rice’s quote, like much of country discourse, assumed that “ordinary” folks had moved beyond civil

42 Donal Henahan, “Grand Ole Nashville Sounds: They’re Achangin’” New York Times , October 22, 1967, 82. Johnny Cash inadvertently contested Tandy Rice’s claim by bringing a variety of politically progressive performers on to his national television show, including Bob Dylan himself. At the end of the 1960s, Cash was one of the nation’s top sellers, and for a brief time on his show he could call his own shots. His television show, which aired for two years beginning in the summer of 1969, featured a variety of musical guests including African-American stars Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, and rock and folk figures such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Michael Streissguth, Johnny Cash: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), 168-9, and Leigh Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 21. Cash was only partially identified with Nashville’s country music scene, preferring instead to position himself in the folk movement and having been banned from the Opry early in his career for performing while high on drugs. He chose to produce his television show in Nashville, however, as part of an attempt to bring himself back into the country fold and rehabilitate his image. 147 rights and suggested that the issues which Dylan and Baez advocated belonged on the margins. Rice created a particular construction of “civil rights” as something extra, gratuitous, or produced by outsiders, not based in the quotidian reality of “everyday folk.” Songwriter Teddy Bart similarly provided a nearly impossible summary of country’s appeal: “Country music is a simple, un-complicated music whose lyrics cover practically everything that ordinary people are involved with in their daily lives.” 43 Bart believed that country music was very simple but somehow encompassed everything an

ordinary person encountered in their daily lives. The emphasis on “everyday” and

“daily,” like Tandy Rice’s use of everyday folks, argues for a more fundamental and

universal level of action and feeling which excluded historically contingent issues such as

civil rights. These sentiments only make sense if “ordinary people” in their “daily lives”

do not have trouble securing a spot at a lunch counter, voting, and not being assaulted by

the police or racist vigilantes. As the previous section showed, in Music Row’s own

backyard (Edgehill) citizens were dealing with the difficulty of finding decent affordable

housing, seemingly the most “everyday” of concerns.

The emphasis on ordinary folks who were naturally unconcerned with civil rights

matched a significant plank of conservative politics which sought to mobilize white

dissent without deploying outright racism. Stephen Macek has argued that the political

demonization of the cities which linked African-Americans, crime, and liberal social

programs, began as a reaction to the urban “riots” of 1964 through the early 1970s.

Conservatives, beginning with Goldwater who was followed by Reagan and Nixon,

43 “New York City Writers Want to Know What Makes Music City So Great, Q & A with Teddy Bart,” Music City News , October, 1964, 3. 148 suggested that liberals were soft on crime (understanding rather than punitive) and that

Great Society programs themselves modeled a kind of crime by, to quote Goldwater,

“taking from some to give to others.” 44

In particular, the presidential campaign of George Wallace employed this strategy. Wallace’s rhetoric focused strongly on a divide between “ordinary” workers and soft-handed elites, including government bureaucrats, academic intellectuals, and wealthy layabouts. He claimed his critique of the civil rights movement and federal support of integration turned on this axis, rather than on simple racist ideology: for instance, he critiqued “limousine liberals” who supported integration but sent their own children to private schools. Wallace minimized the importance of civil rights, argued fervently against the constitutionality of federal intervention in state and local issues, and used the specter of black crime to suggest that Northern liberals had not fully resolved racial tensions in the interests of ordinary people either. He repeatedly claimed that he was not racist and pointed out that he had granted black rights and achievements even in his own state of Alabama (the Tuskegee Institute, for instances). 45

Wallace often used a laundry list of specific professions, in much the same way that the CMA had described country music fans in the early part of the decade, “the bus driver, the truck driver, the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the steelworker, the plumber, and the communications worker, and the oil worker and the little

44 Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 52-56; Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 45 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 136-8. 149 businessman.” 46 His campaign literature invoked two occupational categories strongly identified with country music, dirt farmers and truck drivers: “Can a former truck driver married to a dime-store clerk and son of a dirt farmer be elected President?” 47 In turn, many country stars actively supported Wallace in the 1968 election. Minnie Pearl had appeared at his campaign rallies as early as 1958 and Wallace opened most of his rallies with music from a country band. 48 By 1968, the political appeal of country music had not

gone unnoticed by other candidates as well. Nixon’s campaign penned a ditty which they

wanted a country star to sing for distribution on country radio shows, but most of the

contemporary stars supported Wallace. 49

In some ways, the ethos of country music was to sing about poverty

empathetically but to disdain liberal government efforts to eradicate it. Nashville-based

country music’s anti-liberal politics of the “little guy” culminated in the release of

“Welfare Cadillac” in 1970. Amateur songwriter Guy Drake crafted a tune about a

welfare recipient with ten children who lives an impoverished life but uses his welfare

checks to buy a new Cadillac. The song created a buzz both within and outside of the

46 Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction : The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991), 77. 47 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 234. 48 Kazin, 230. 49 Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President, 1968 (New York: Trident Press, 1969), 122; Loretta Lynn, the Wilburn Brothers, Hank Snow, Marty Robbins, and many others officially supported Wallace and recorded “My Friend George” spots for country radio stations. “’Name’ Artists Come to the Aid of the Party,” Billboard , November 16, 1968, 30. The Nixon campaign did eventually get long-time Republicans such as Roy Acuff and Tex Ritter to perform their song and endorse the campaign. Paul Hemphill also singled out Acuff and Ritter as Nixon supporters and suggested that the rest of the industry supported Wallace, Nashville Sound , 90. For the industry’s widespread support for Wallace, also see Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 239. 150 country music world. Rolling Stone excoriated its cheap racism but country publications like Music City News defended the song for telling an uncomfortable truth. 50 Songs like

“Welfare Cadillac” and “Okie from Muskogee” further imbricated country’s defense of the ordinary folks with a staunch opposition to, respectively, the liberal programs of the

Great Society and the 1960s counter culture (broadly construed).

Perhaps it was a measure of how central racial politics were to country’s conservatism that self-styled rebels such as Cash and Merle Haggard used race to measure their distance from Nashville’s country music establishment. Haggard refuted

George Wallace’s racial politics and tried to get his record label to release a song he wrote about interracial romance. 51 Haggard and Cash affiliated with country music and

their songs hit the top of the country charts, but much of their success resulted from their

appeal to record and ticket buyers outside of strictly country music circles. Cash became

a major star even as the Opry shunned him and it was not until the late 1960s that Cash

attempted to work his way back into the Nashville scene. Haggard never became a

member of the Opry and recorded his albums in Los Angeles, operated out of

Bakersfield, and generally cast himself as an outsider in regards to Nashville. Haggard’s

“Okie from Muskogee” sat at the top of the country charts for four weeks in late 1969,

50 “’Welfare Cadillac’: Disgusting Racism,” Rolling Stone , March 19, 1970, 12; John Pugh, “Welfare Cadillac,” Music City News , March, 1970, 16; John T. Pugh, “’Welfare Cadillac’ Touches a Nerve,” Music City News , May 1970, 1. Pugh’s article pointedly quotes a “highly successful Negro insurance salesman” who supported the song and saw the truth in it. For evidence of the overrepresentation of African-Americans in negative news stories about poverty in general and welfare in particular, beginning in the mid-1960s, see Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 116-123. 51 Peter LaChapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 205-6. 151 and was seized upon as evidence of the conservatism of country music more broadly, but the actual picture was more nuanced. Haggard was in fact simultaneously held up as evidence of country’s conservatism and iconoclastic liberalism. “Okie from Muskogee” became a totem of country’s conservatism and an easy shorthand (it’s clearly conservative, it’s highly popular, therefore country fans must be conservative) which in fact obscured a more complicated picture. 52 Haggard’s songs hit the top of the country charts but it is by no means certain that country music fans more broadly were buying his hits.

White Man’s Blues: African-Americans and Country Music

George Wallace was hardly the first (nor the last) commentator to rhetorically use country music’s ready-to-wear populism for political or commercial gain. 53 Country

music’s celebratory rhetoric continually centered on the music’s purported ability to tap

52 See La Chapelle’s chapter on the multiple readings of “Okie from Muskogee,” Proud to Be an Okie , 180-207. 53 Tennessee Governor Frank Clement in 1956, and U.S. Representative Richard Fulton in 1964, both invoked country as “the music of the people,” and Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford hyperbolically described the music’s appeal in their official proclamations of National Country Music Week in the early 1970s. “Governor Ready to Fight for BMI Before Congress,” Country Music Reporter , November 24, 1956, 1; Rep. Richard Fulton, “What Country Music Means to Me,” Music City News , November, 1964, 28; “President Proclaims Country Music Month,” Music City News , November, 1972, 2; Gerald Ford’s 1974 proclamation making October National Country Music Month provided a typically sweeping summation of country’s appeal: “It is a music which can be happy or sad, fast or slow, but it is always about life. The words of country music songs talk about life how it is really lived. Country Music is life with a melody,” CMA Close-Up , November, 1974, 10. For early examples of the assertion that country is the “music of the people,” see “Crying, Dying or Going Away,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , August, 1953, 2, and “Jack Stapp, ‘Maker of Stars’, Engineers Country Music’s Greatest Talent Display,” Pickin’ and Singin’ News , June 12, 1954, 3. 152 into the quotidian truth of ordinary Americans’ lives. In 1958, the Grand Ole Opry’s manager referred to country music as a “ledger of life,” waxing poetically, “The words are those that filter through the mind after an exhausting day of honest toil … they’re the phrases that bubble through the laughter of a gay holiday … or push through gritted teeth when a man lies face down to sob out real grief into the fragrant earth.” 54 And the

Country Music Association, in the early 1960s, used the language of the ordinary working-class in their promotional efforts designed to highlight the urban residences of modern country fans. Tex Ritter hyperbolically and impossibly claimed in his speech at the CMA awards banquet in 1973, “the country song seems to be the most direct for the country writer knows no other way. His songs reflect the hopes and dreams of everyone as well as everyone’s fears and failures. And his songs are a common meeting ground.” 55

Ritter ostensibly aimed at inclusivity with the broad universal, “everyone,” but in fact

avoided discussing the structural inequalities which create different sets of fears and

failures for different groups of people. Ritter linked a universal set of “hopes and

dreams,” with those expressed in country song, setting forth an implicit argument that

those who did not find their hopes expressed in country song did not fit the inclusive

“everyone.”

54 Letter from WD Kilpatrick, manager of Grand Ole Orpy, to “Music Vendor,” WSM Radio & TV, Box 1, Folder 3, Vanderbilt Special Collections, November 8, 1958. 55 Sharon Sweeting, “President’s Report,” Tex Ritter Fan Club (Snohomish, WA, January 1974), Fan Club Newsletters Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, Tennessee. Journalist John Egerton followed suit, writing in 1974 that country music “is about the everyday experiences of ordinary people, about love and faith, playing and praying, working and drinking, living and dying.” John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 205. 153 Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential proclamation also strove for an impossible universality: “Strong, simple, and moving, country reflects the joys, the sorrows and the ideals of our people. Love of family, love of country, faith in God, and the happiness and heartbreak of everyday life – these are the themes that run throughout our country music, and that bind us all together as Americans.” 56 Nixon’s proclamation, like Ritter’s speech,

equalized both the happiness and heartbreak of all Americans, suggesting that all sorrow

was shared, rooted in a generic component of human experience rather than differentially

distributed across a systemically unequal society. But the descriptions were so universal

as to avoid the particular, and provided no way to examine the particulars of structural

inequality.

As Diane Pecknold has argued, country music in the early 1970s, “was

resoundingly white without being expressly anti-black, and, indeed, this was precisely

why the New Majority theorists found it so useful. No other cultural form allowed for a

clear embrace of Southern traditions and values while still hewing to a moderate position

on civil rights.” 57 Maybe country music was not expressly anti-black, but the resounding

whiteness which Pecknold astutely points out carried with it and simultaneously relied

upon an ideology which marked off civil rights as something that “ordinary” people need

not be concerned with, contributing to conservative racial politics.

Country music’s race-blind rhetoric further deepened the connections with

conservative populism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, the invocation of

country as the “white man’s blues” began a new iteration of this hyperbolic legacy,

56 “President Proclaims Country Music Month,” Music City News , November, 1972, 2. 57 Pecknold, 226. 154 marking off the ordinariness of country music as a particularly white experience and expression. Country music was not definitively all white, and yet it increasingly was discussed as if it was. In a 1965 Music City News letter to the editor, disc jockey Jon

Swope celebrated the new appeal and sweep of the Nashville Sound and argued that country music belonged to “everybody,” arguing that “country music is music for the people … people in the towns, and in the country … young and old … rich and poor … white collar or blue” (ellipses his). 58 Swope set up a series of clichéd dichotomies which

could have easily included “white and black,” but which pointedly did not.

African-American culture had influenced the development of country music as a

genre, and many country music fans were in fact African-American, making this absence

all the more striking. Almost all country singers, songwriters, musicians, producers, and

executives were men (save for a few female singers and even fewer songwriters), though

not all white. Several Nashville Sound hits were in fact written by black writers. Sonny

James, in particular, recorded hit country singles written by black writers and

performers. 59 In terms of the production of country music, the use of “white man’s” was

quite accurate. But on the consumption end, the phrase completely elided the existence of

black country music fans , despite overwhelming anecdotal evidence in the explanation

narratives of black stars like Ray Charles and Charlie Pride (and in other histories and

stories in later years) that many rural black families listened to the Opry every Saturday

58 Jon Swope, Letter, Music City News , November 1965, 2. 59 Of James’ string of hits released between 1969 and 1972, several were penned by black writers Brook Benton and Ivory Joe Hunter (“Endlessly” and “It’s Just a Matter of Time” by Benton in 1970, and “Since I Met You, Baby” in 1969 and 1971’s “Empty Arms” by Hunter). Pam Foster, My Country, Too: The Other Black Music (Nashville: My Country, 2000), 36 and 105. 155 night for decades. 60 Historian and journalist Pam Foster has cogently argued that black country music fandom has tenuously existed in black culture throughout the past several decades, occasionally celebrated but more often downplayed and scorned. 61 As well,

country and black gospel also shared much overlap in terms of both fans and song

content. 62

African-American Deford Bailey performed on the Opry from its inception in

1925 until he was unceremoniously fired in 1941. Bailey played the harmonica, and was initially one of the Opry’s most popular acts, both in Nashville and on the road. His harmonica playing was rooted in an earlier tradition of string band music which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shared by rural southern whites and blacks alike. Bailey referred to the music he learned from his grandfather and others as

“black hillbilly” music and saw himself as part of this longer tradition. 63 Bailey’s talents were celebrated by the Opry and its fans, but WSM management and Judge Hay adopted a paternalistic attitude towards Bailey, managing his finances for him, paying him less

60 Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (New York: The Dial Press, 1978), 222; “A Negro Hillbilly? It’s Charley Pride!,” The Chicago Defender, April 2, 1966, 12A; Hazel Garland, “Video Vignettes,” New Pittsburgh Courier, November 16, 1974, 20. 61 Foster, 20-30. 62 Gayle Wald has shown the links between gospel and country performers and cultures and how these often correlated with those of white and black fans and performers. Red Foley was one popular country star who included gospel songs on his records and claimed to love having black fans, and gospel performers such as Clara Ward frequently mentioned their respect for Foley as well. Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-And-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). See also Bob Rolontz, “Sacred Songs Close Kin to C&W Music,” Billboard , December 5, 1953, 42, for further discussion of Red Foley’s central place at the intersection of the two genres. 63 David C. Morton, with Charles K. Wolfe, DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 17. 156 per performance than white musicians received, and discursively presenting him as something of a “mascot” for the Opry. Hay wrote, in his own self-published history of the

Opry in 1952:

Like some members of his race and other races, Deford was lazy. … He was our

mascot and is still loved by the entire company. We gave him a whole year’s

notice to learn some more tunes, but he would not. When we were forced to give

him his final notice, Deford said, without malice, ‘I knowed it waz comin’, Judge,

I knowed it wuz comin’.’ 64

Judge Hay justified the move by literally voicing Bailey’s acceptance of the dismissal in

simulated black dialect and also referred to Bailey’s laziness as a racial trait (despite the

clumsy attempt to also agree that laziness was not confined to African-Americans). Hay

himself had a long history with minstrelsy.

Bailey lived in Nashville from roughly 1918 until his death in 1982, and in fact

lived most of those years in the neighborhood of Edgehill, just blocks from Music Row.

After his abrupt exit from the Opry, Bailey became a neighborhood businessman, running

a shoeshine shop which also sold various sundries. This enterprise sustained him until the

Nashville Housing Authority claimed both his home and the building which housed his

shop, in 1970 and 1971, respectively. Fired by the Opry and displaced by the sweep of

Urban Renewal, Bailey represented both the erasure and displacement of African-

64 George Hay, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: Privately published, 1953), 10. Bailey’s biographer argued that he had never actually forgiven WSM and Bailey avoided the Opry for decades. Morton, 129. 157 Americans which country music discourse performed simultaneous with Nashville urban renewal’s own demolition and dislocations.

The paternalist tone had changed slightly by the 1960s, though, when Charley

Pride became the first major African-American country star. In early 1966, Pride signed with a major label, the first African-American country singer to do so. His label’s first marketing strategies downplayed or completely elided Pride’s race, only releasing promotional materials featuring his image after his songs had been on the air for many months. 65 Even so, Pride’s handlers aggressively asserted his authenticity as a country

singer from the beginning. The label titled Pride’s first album Country Charley Pride, suggesting the possibility of an audience which doubted the authenticity of a black country star. As well, a small article in Music City News foregrounded the need for

“proof” that Pride was in fact country with the headline “Charlie Pride Album Proves

He’s ‘Country.’” 66 This combination of surprise and doubt seemed to indicate that an

implicit layer of whiteness already covered country music. A 1968 article on Pride in

Billboard made this explicit with the headline “Country Music Now Interracial.” 67

Pride also strategically established that he had always been a country music fan, in part by emphasizing his listening to radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry as a child.

An article in Music City News , shortly after his major label signing, pointed out that

Pride’s interest in country music began in boyhood and specifically mentioned Pride

65 Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A.; A Fifty-Year History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 66 “Charley Pride Album Proves He’s ‘Country,’” Music City News , November, 1966, 10. 67 Bill Williams, “Country Music Now Interracial,” Billboard , August 17, 1968, 1. 158 listening to the Grand Ole Opry. In addition, the article asserted that “Charley’s background is made up of the ‘stuff’ that Country Music comes from, earthiness, hard work, high hopes and heartbreak. And his love for it is genuine, developed during boyhood.” 68 Clement told a Billboard journalist in 1967, “He’s sincere about it. Country music is all Pride knows. He grew up listening to the ‘Grand Ole Opry.’” 69

Pride’s promotional discourse emphasized the authentic country sound of his

voice and the fact that it involved absolutely no artifice – the “natural” way Pride sung

just happened to sound “country.” In the liner notes to the first album, producer Jack

Clement wrote “Charley Pride knows a lot about Country Music, but more than anything

else, he knows how to sing Country Music.” As one article summed it up: “His voice and

his style is perfected simplicity. He has adopted the very best of country music songs for

his own and delivers them in a good, straight-forward, honest voice, a voice that has to be

the kind for which country music was written.” 70 Again, without explicitly addressing the

oddity of a black country singer, the article writes against an implicit notion that Pride’s

voice is not country: “a voice that has to be the kind … .” In other words, the description

68 “Charley Pride: First Negro Country Music Singer on Major Label,” Music City News , February, 1966, 11. Also see Bob Battle, “Pride Tells What’s Right With America,” The Nashville Banner , September 24, 1974, 7, for an explanation of Pride’s interest in country music which highlights African-American Opry listeners. 69 Arnold Shaw, “Country Music and the Negro,” Billboard World of Country Music, 1967-8, 82. 70 Virginia A. Alderman, “Charley Pride: Just Keeps on Breaking Records,” Country Song Roundup , May, 1972, 11. Pride’s producer, Jack Clement, often provided the legitimacy in regards to Pride’s voice and singing style. However, Clement also said, in an oral history in 1977, “I’ll tell you one thing about Charley Pride which is, I think, racial. It pertains to a certain resonance that you find in the black voice. Charley’s got that. You can hear it in the studio on the speakers. It’s you know, that extra impact. It’s that … some kind of extra … tone” (ellipses in text of interview). Jack Clement, interviewed by Country Music Hall of Fame. 159 of Pride implies the potential belief that his voice was in fact the kind for some other, blacker, type of music.

In 1967, Pride first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and reportedly told the audience, “I’ve got a lot of reasons to be happy tonight, real happy. But I guess my biggest reason is that I’m an American.” 71 Pride prioritized his Americanness over any

racial identification, continuing a strategy of acknowledging but downplaying his unique

position in country’s racial order. His strategy on stage, which played well and often in

journalistic summaries, was to joke about his blackness, referring to it often as his

“permanent tan,” suggesting in a self-consciously playful way the possibility that

underneath the tan he was white, and permitting Pride to be discussed first as a country

singer and only secondly as a black man. Despite Pride’s efforts to minimize or downplay

the importance of his blackness (which occasionally involved excusing or downplaying

white racism), the black press enthusiastically supported Pride and repeatedly covered his

successes. 72 Black journalists, particularly with the Baltimore Afro-American , celebrated

his commercial and artistic achievements while often pointing out the (undeserved) rarity

of an African-American country star.

71 “Charlie Pride Says, ‘I Just Gotta Talk to’ Em,’” Country Song Roundup , December, 1967, 42. 72 See for example, “He Sings … Music of the People,” Afro-American , February 19, 1966, A4; “A Negro Hillbilly? It’s Charley Pride!” The Chicago Defender , April 2, 1966, 12A; “Country Charley Pride struck it rich during intermission,” Afro-American , August 12, 1967, 11; “Blue-eyed soul, brown-eyed hillbilly: tan singer shows it works both ways,” Afro-American , October 14, 1967, 11; Hazel Garland, “Video Vignettes,” New Pittsburgh Courier , June 28, 1969, 24; “Country singer bags gold disk,” Afro- American , February 21, 1970, 10; “Charley Pride Awarded Gold Record for Album,” New Pittsburgh Courier, February 28, 1970, 10. 160 But Pride was not the only African-American country singer for long. Sparked by

Pride’s success, several other labels signed black artists. O.B. McClinton recorded on

Enterprise, Memphis-based Stax’s county imprint, and Stoney Edwards recorded for

Capitol in Nashville. Shelby Singleton’s unfortunately named Plantation Records signed black singer Linda Martell after she was discovered singing R&B in a South Carolina club. 73 None of their careers achieved the same kind of success as Pride’s, but their albums were promoted in a similar fashion. The title of Stoney Edwards’ first album,

Stoney Edwards – A Country Singer , points to the contradiction seemingly inherent in a black country performer and hopes to persuade disbelieving record buyers that the black man on the cover is indeed a bona fide country singer while revealing the inherent whiteness at the core of “country singer.” Certainly a Merle Haggard album entitled

Merle Haggard – A Country Singer would seem highly redundant, even for his first album. The naming helped produce the idea that country music was normally performed by whites. O.B. McClinton also recorded a country album on Stax Records in 1971, and, as with Pride’s early publicity material, the front cover showed McClinton with his back to the camera (the back cover, however, did feature a close-up photo of McClinton). 74

73 Charley Pride frequently appeared on the Opry and Linda Martell made a guest appearance in September of 1969, Stoney Edwards in 1971. See Johnny Shealy, Grand Ole Opry Performance Log, 1961-2006, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library. 74 McClinton later told an interviewer that he was unhappy with the album and the producers’ attempts to make him sound less “black” and more generically country: “I couldn’t stand to listen to the playback and the reason why it sounded like that was because Jim Malloy was paranoid. He thought that the next black country singer had to be even countrier than Charley Pride … In fact, he would come down out of the control room and say, ‘You sound black on that word.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, look at me, ‘cause I am!’” McClinton argued that he should be able to sing in his own “natural” style but the producers disagreed; even after Charley Pride’s success there was still hesitation on the 161 Like Edwards and Pride, McClinton’s first album title (“Country”) reinforced the idea that, despite the racial evidence, he was in fact a true country singer. One of the songs on the album, a McClinton original, was titled “Country Music, That’s My Thing.”

Pride often made the point that he was a country singer first, a hillbilly even, and a black man second. In fact, he later took the point even further and argued that he was post-racial, simply an American of no color. A 1976 popular book, seemingly for kids, featured biographies of three prominent country stars: Loretta Lynn, Mac Davis, and

Charley Pride. Pride’s section drew heavily on quotes from Pride himself, uncited, which revealed the degree to which Pride wanted to present himself as simply a country singer.

First, the text positioned Pride as refusing to think of himself as only black: “Charley himself said: ‘I have a lot of different genes in me. African genes, Caucasian genes,

Indian genes. I didn’t make this society, I was born into it. So I decided to just be Charley

Pride. Genetic man! American! I had enough courage not to deny myself as an individual.” 75 Here the text framed Pride’s decision to not solely identify as black as an act of courage. The text then raises the idea of other African-Americans questioning

Pride’s decisions both to be a country star and, it seems, to not use his stardom as a platform for political action: “Most of his fans are white, although an increasing number of blacks now enjoy country music. Some black people feel Charley isn’t militant enough about his race. But he says: ‘You have to try to listen to me and look at me. Under

part of Music Row executives to fully support a black country star, and in fact very few black country stars followed in Pride’s footsteps. Rob Bowman, “O.B. McClinton: Country Music, That’s My Thing,” Journal of Country Music , Vol. 14, no. 2, 23-9. 75 George Zanderbergen, Nashville Music: Loretta Lynn, Mac Davis, Charley Pride (Mankato, MN: Crestwood House, Inc., 1976), 32. 162 myself, I am no color. You’ve got to look past color and look at the man.’” 76 Here, Pride

explicitly refuted his blackness, arguing instead that he was “no color.”

Pride may have argued this, but country music discourse did not support it. Pride

and other black country singers were marked as black, and seen as hillbilly singers who

“just happened to be black,” reinforcing country music’s whiteness while at the same

time staking out stark boundaries for a star like Pride: he would only ever be the “black”

country star. 77 His blackness was alternately quietly alluded to and forcefully

emphasized, and he was allowed into the country fold only if he knew (and remained in)

his place. The most potent example of Pride not being allowed to forget his blackness in a

white industry crystallized in an anecdote he himself allegedly related to the Nashville

Banner . Their editorial quoted him as saying, “I met a white man he says ‘You know –

you sound like us – but you look like them.’” 78 Despite the editorial’s attempt to play the

line for humor, Pride and his audience were not allowed to forget the fact that his

country-sounding voice was the only thing keeping him in the country music business.

He was marked as a black man in a white world, and while the us/them dichotomy was

partially played for laughs, an undertone of menace still remained. 79 Pride also used his

76 Ibid, 44. 77 John Grissim, Country Music: White Man’s Blues (New York: Paperback Library, 1970), 41. Also see “‘I’m a Country Singer Who’s Black’ Comments O. B. McClinton, C&W Star,” Music City News , May, 1972, 12, for a discussion of McClinton which uses the same construction, a country singer “who happens to be black.” 78 “ Amusement Week,” Nashville Banner , March 2, 1974. John Egerton provided a converse understanding, suggesting that because Pride did not sing soul or blues he was not really black: “Pride’s blackness is a pigment of the imagination – his style is pure country, not blues or soul,” Egerton, 205. 79 See also LaWayne Satterfield, “O.B. Doesn’t Mind Being ‘The Other One,” Music City News , October 1973, 3-C, for an article which foregrounds the fact that 163 autobiography to share stories of disbelieving fans who appreciated his music but could not believe he was black when they saw him in person. In telling these stories, Pride the autobiographer downplayed much of these white southerners’ outright racism. 80

Charley Pride (as well Bailey before him and a couple of mildly successful performers like Edwards and McClinton later) was the exception which proved the rule for country music in the 1960s. Pride never escaped the label, in some form or another, of the black country star. He was continually marked as racially odd, and the careful treatment of his ability to sing good country music almost in spite of his race maintained country’s essential connection to whiteness. Pride’s identification first as an American and a country singer and not as a black man resonated with the conservative politics of the time which argued for a generic inclusiveness and against special favors or directed government aid.

The Defense of White Man’s Blues

Not only did Charley Pride’s presence threaten to de-stabilize country’s solid whiteness, but the rise of Motown and the success of Rhythm and Blues, in tandem with the civil rights movement, led country to emphasize its own unique connection to ethnic struggle and triumph. Pride’s success led to more explicit statements of this whiteness,

country fans often mistake McClinton for Pride and for McClinton’s own non-plussed response. 80 In his autobiography many years later, Pride expressed something of this contradiction, as he argued that he never experienced any racism from actual country music fans but defended his decision not to live in Nashville on the basis that the city was too segregated. Charley Pride, with Jim Henderson, Pride: The Charley Pride Story (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1994), 174 & 195. 164 and the emergence of the phrase “white man’s blues.” His emergence and subsequent stardom shifted the terms of the racial debate within country music, producing a tension between racial inclusion and absolute whiteness. When journalist John Grissim titled his

1970 book on country music Country Music: White Man’s Blues , he performed a similar sort of move (comparing but separating country and blues) but the phrase “White Man’s” more insistently argued that country spoke for the mainstream of white culture. This discourse produced country music as white, and the converse was true as well, the blues were assumed to be not white, otherwise “white men” would not have had to have their own version. They were parallel in the sense not only of being homologous but also in the sense of two lines which will never cross or come together. The possessive also lessened the need to address civil rights – blacks presumably had their own avenues of expression and motivation in the blues, soul, or gospel. Country was the white man’s blues intended for expressing the troubles of ordinary hard-working whites. 81 According

to some, of course, these troubles were caused by groups such as liberal government

bureaucrats and entitled anti-war protestors.

The successes of the civil rights movements led to what some historians have

referred to as a “white ethnic” backlash in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The title of

Matthew Frye Jacobsen’s recent monograph, Roots Too , exemplifies the general thrust of

81 Though I do not substantially address issues of gender in this analysis, the phrase “white man’s blues” certainly reveals its salience and the fact that much of country music culture was structured around an assumed masculine center. For decades independent female voices were fairly anomalous and marked as such, though this began to change by the late 1960s and early 1970s with the careers of stars such as Loretta Lynn, Tanya Tucker, and Tammy Wynette. See Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, eds., A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004) for rich analyses of the intricacies of gendered aspects of country music culture. 165 this scholarship: aggrieved whites in the post-civil rights era said something to the effect of “we have roots too!” 82 Country music was no different in many ways, even though

rural Southern heritage movements have not been discussed at length by scholars of the

white ethnic revival movements. Country music had a more partial claim to the emerging

“white ethnic” movement. Two of the defining features of the ethnic movement

specifically excluded rural working-class southerners. First, the emphasis on the

hyphenate (as in Polish-American) and the attendant political and cultural nods to the

importance of Ellis Island and official immigration excluded country figures. Second,

Northern white ethnics frequently claimed to have never participated in the enslavement

or suppression of African-Americans for which affirmative action programs were

purportedly required to correct. 83 Rooted in a response to the civil rights movement and, in particular, government sanctioned Affirmative Action and busing programs, white ethnics claimed that they were being attacked by liberal elites for sins which they themselves had never committed. Country music, despite its nods towards racial inclusion and, by the late 1960s, lack of overt racism within its mainstream productions,

82 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: The White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). As Jacobsen has astutely pointed out, white ethnics’ “inchoate sense of social grievance required only the right vocabulary to come alive,” 20. In Jacobsen’s analysis, the channeled social grievance was sparked in large part by the language and accomplishments of the civil rights movement. For European descendents and hyphenate Americans, Jacobsen intriguingly argues that during this period they strategically passed off their whiteness as “not-quite-white,” 22. 83 Thomas J. Sugrue and John D. Skrentny, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s , eds. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008), 171-192, 180-1. See also Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1973) and Perry L. Weed, The White Ethnic Movement and Ethnic Politics (New York: Praeger, 1973). 166 had a more difficult time making this claim due to the genre’s clear roots in the relatively recent South.

And yet, the presentation of country music as the white man’s blues did parallel, to a degree, the heritage arguments that drove much of the cultural expression of the white ethnic movement. Even though they could not technically participate in much of the ethnic revival movement, country music figures felt a kinship. We, too, country artists and fans seemed to say, have our own unique cultural forms which express our unique folk culture and heritage. Part of this association and highlighting of country’s whiteness seems to be rooted in this sentiment, that at a time of civil rights attention focused on the plight of blacks and other non-white groups in the 1960s and 1970s, poor whites, hillbillies, or just plain country people were forgotten (or caricatured). As Anthony

Harkins has shown, mainstream media attention to the “discovery” of Appalachian poverty in the 1960s re-introduced the figure of the hillbilly to the national media discourse while simultaneously lampooning it. In this regard, country music was not only looking to invoke its heritage but re-define how that heritage was depicted and conceptualized. Harkins points to the heightened attention to representations of hillbilly poverty in mass media advertising and television shows between 1962 and 1969, the same era in which journalistic and political attention to Appalachian poverty increased.84

In the 1968 primaries, Robert F. Kennedy’s trips into Appalachia had elevated the visibility of (and purported national concern for) white rural poverty. This in turn,

Harkins argues, led to an increase in depictions of southern mountain inhabitants, both benign and highly derogatory.

84 Harkins, 184-202. 167 Country musicians and industry leaders did see themselves as aggrieved hillbillies, facing similar sorts of discrimination and prejudice as other minority groups, and frequently used the language of minority rights to express this. As disc jockey and

CMA Board member Joe Allison later told Diane Pecknold in an interview, “almost everything we did back in those days was very defensive … because we still had people hacking at us and calling us hillbillies and all that kind of thing. Being country was like being a Jew or being black or being any other ethnic derivation that had to fight its way out of the criticism into the light. It was the same thing. I don’t know if it socially was as important, but we felt that way.” 85 Country music was able to re-assert its whiteness while simultaneously acknowledging it was a marked whiteness, a particular kind of ethnic marker with its own very unique heritage and genetic makeup.

Country music always had overlapping influences with black music, but in the years leading up to 1970 the whiteness of country was emphasized more strongly, even as commentators recognized the parallels with black music. Country music was looked to as heritage. One of the best textual examples which encapsulated this trend was an article on the Grand Ole Opry in a 1970 issue of Country Song Roundup . The author, Darrell

Rowlett, hyperbolically began, “The heart of rural white America is found still pounding and straining, lashing out at urban living from its breast in Nashville, Tennessee. Its pulse can be measured by the nasal whines and wails, steel guitars, rickety banjoes, and crying fiddles. As the Negro claims a soul sound in the Rhythm and Blues, the southern dirt farmer has his miseries preserved with country music, and the sagas are sung weekly at

85 Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007), 158. 168 the hillbilly blues shrine, the Grand Ole Opry.” 86 The passage claims a shared experience

of misery in need of expression through song, but suggests “Negroes” and white “dirt

farmers” required separate musical forms to express and preserve these experiences.

Country star Penny DeHaven followed this same construction in an interview for

Country Song Roundup , when asked to define country music: “White man’s blues. I just

stole that from somebody, but it’s the truth that’s how I define it. You spill out your

whole heart. You spill out your feeling inside … When it comes to country music you’ve

got to really feel it.” 87 Like Rowlett’s assertion about rural blacks and whites, the parallel

here between country and blues (and white and black experiences) was strong: just like

the blues, DeHaven seemed to say, country music provided a space to fully express the

deepest, most heartfelt emotions. These declarations made the case that the two genres

were similar musical forms but that country clearly and inarguably belonged to whites

while African-Americans had the blues. This delicate balance produced and required an

understanding of country music as not racist, but not especially concerned with civil

rights either, in effect arguing that blacks had their own musical culture to deal with their

own daily struggles.

Country music discourse in the 1960s did recognize, to a degree, the extent of

black cultural influence on country music, but the discourse tended to vacillate between

celebrating country music for the purity of its lineage traced back to Anglo-Saxon

86 Darrell Rowlett, “Shrine of the Hillbilly Blues,” Country Song Roundup , December, 1970, 6. 87 “Interview with Penny DeHaven,” Country Song Roundup, January, 1972, 6. 169 immigrants and celebrating the music for its multi-cultural roots and output. 88 The parallels country figures drew between themselves (or which were drawn for them) and blues artists, and by extension between southern rural whites and blacks, reflected some of this vacillation. From a marketing point of view, country music seemed to be trying to capitalize on the great successes of black music by aligning the genre with R&B and soul but differentiating the music by emphasizing its whiteness. A 1966 Saturday Evening

Post article asked, “What is country music? It’s soul in a rhinestone suit …” 89 By 1966,

“soul” was clearly identified with black musical expression even as the name of the genre had not fully solidified. 90

88 See Arnold Shaw, “Country Music and the Negro,” Billboard World of Country Music, 1967-8, 82, for an article which more explicitly acknowledges African-American influence on country music and questions why there were not more black country stars. 89 Charles Portis, “That New Sound from Nashville,” The Saturday Evening Post , February 12, 1966, 30. Anthony Harkins has located this sort of dualism in the discourse surrounding “hillbilly music,” of the 1930s and 1940s, finding that hillbillies and their music were recognized as a particularly white kind of “Other” music. “Although ‘hillbilly,’ both as a label for a musical genre and for its performers, clearly denoted ‘whiteness,’ therefore, it constituted a strangely mixed cultural and racial category, simultaneously distinct from and akin to African-American and other nonwhite images. Another example Harkins provides is Bluebird Records’ decision in the mid-1930s to create the category, “Hill Billy and Race Records,” lumping them together while marking their discreteness. Harkins refers to this as a “synchronous racial merging and dividing.” Also see Claude Hall, “R&B Stations Open Airplay Gates to ‘Blue-Eyed Soulists,’” Billboard , October 9, 1965, 1, for an early discussion of the frequency with which R&B stations were “integrating” their playlists and the concept of “white” soul which implicitly marked the default signifier of soul as black. 90 The institutional switch from Rhythm and Blues to Soul fully solidified around 1968 or 1969 (Billboard changed its R&B charts to Soul in 1969), but as early as 1965 Billboard articles commented on the “soul” of R&B singers and the concept of “blue- eyed soul” to describe white soul singers appeared as early as 1965. In late 1965, Billboard song reviews frequently used “soulful” to describe R&B songs but not country songs. See also “New Album Reviews,” Billboard , September 18, 1965, 42, for a review of The Soul of Brook Benton which describes the title as “appropriate.” Soul Train began in 1968, locally in Chicago, and then went national in 1971. Soul Beat started publication in 1964. Time , also in the summer of 1968, explicitly argued that “soul” was a product of 170

Conclusion

Along with urban renewal and civil rights struggles, King’s assassination and the unease produced within the country community in urban Nashville clarified the stakes of country’s investment in urban spaces. An abstracted white public of “ordinary folks” could not embrace racially marked urban spaces. The next chapter shows that the Grand

Ole Opry, in tandem with corporate steward National Life and Accident, had the branding potential and reserves of capital necessary to move the Opry out of downtown

Nashville and its perilous proximity to the “slums” and create a suburban theme park space which would both generate daily revenue and play a role in re-orienting the spatial associations of the Opry and country music at large. No longer content with “coming to town,” the Opry and mainstream country music looked to re-write the genre’s narratives and argue that country need not be any place in particular.

No longer was the city/country contrast as necessary (particularly as the city reveals itself to be a marked black space in its own right), as country music discourse began to argue that country character trumped country space. As chapter four indicates, this would eventually manifest in the biggest spatial move in the industry’s history, the creation of the suburban Opryland complex and the Opry’s abandonment of downtown

the black experience, “It emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. It is compounded of raw emotion, pulsing rhythm and spare, earthy lyrics – all suffused with the sensual, somewhat melancholy vibrations of the Negro idiom. Always the Negro idiom.” “Lady Soul: Singing It Like It Is,” Time , June 28, 1968, 62-66. Beginning around this time, too, many books on black music and the black experience used “soul” in their titles. 171 Nashville, its home for over three decades. As CMA leader Joe Allison would later tell it, country music was continually fighting for respect and a place in the American mainstream. The next chapter shows that the next logical step for an abstracted white public of ordinary folks was to decamp for the suburbs. Grand Ole Opry leaders, stars, and fans all looked to the new Opryland USA complex in Nashville’s suburbs as the long overdue recognition of the music’s wide appeal.

172 “Country Music is Wherever the Soul of a Country Music Fan Is”: Opryland USA

and the Construction of New Country Homes

Chapter Four

The first three chapters have demonstrated that various social actors within country music culture used material space and ideas about space as key components of a larger cultural process which shifted country music away from the music’s marginalized hillbilly roots and toward the American mainstream. This chapter shows that this trend culminated in the spring of 1974, when The Grand Ole Opry left the turn-of-the-century

Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville and moved into a newly constructed amusement park complex (Opryland U.S.A.) in the city’s suburbs. The size of the new complex, along with its multiple commercial options and extravagant rides and live animals, stood in stark contrast with the staid cathedral-like old auditorium. The Opry’s managers were aware that the historic location was just as important as the list of performers who regularly plied their trade on the historic stage. 1 They realized that

references to the Ryman as a “tabernacle” or “mother church” referred not just to the

auditorium’s early history as a home for religious meetings but also to the theater’s

central sacred place in country music culture. 2 But the Opry’s corporate parent, National

1 As a 1970 article pointed out, “After all, the authenticity and charm of the Opry lies in its unique setting as well as its music.” “History of the Grand Ole Opry House,” Country Music Who’s Who, 1970 (Nashville: Record World, 1970), Part 6, 36. 2 See Paul Dickson, “Singing to Silent America,” The Nation , February 23, 1970, 213, for a reference to the auditorium as the “mother church” of country music and John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (New York: 173 Life and Accident Insurance Company, envisioned the new park as something bigger than just a home for the Opry; they saw it as a chance to expand the Opry’s brand.

The question was where to expand. In the second half of the 1960s, urban space became both a material and cultural battleground, as commentators depicted America’s cities as under siege from the encroaching blight of “slums,” teeming with poverty, crime and disease. As key players within Nashville’s political economy, country music industry figures also participated in this conversation. In the 1960s, the CMA and Nashville Sound producers had supported the municipal push for renewal in their Music Row neighborhood, which industry figures repeatedly described as “run-down,” “dilapidated” and a “slum.” At the time of the Opry’s move to the suburbs just a few years later in

1974, the Opry’s leaders joined their Music Row counterparts in decrying the “slums” of

Nashville by painting the downtown area around the Ryman as yet another morally and physically deteriorating urban space inappropriate for country music and its fans. Opry figures tapped into and mobilized a potent national discourse which fit the genre’s racial politics, as described in the previous chapter. An abstracted white public of “the people” was compromised by a stark downtown setting. A new suburban theme park complex gave the Opry a way out of this unpredictable downtown space.

The Opry moved out of its long-time home just as country music culture was shifting its understanding of the importance of home and “the country” itself. Massive migrations over the past several decades had changed the socio-spatial landscape of country music’s fan base. Song lyrics, liner notes, and broad hyperbolic proclamations in

Harper and Row, 1974), 207, for a reference to the Ryman as country’s “ancient holy temple.” 174 the late 1960s and early 1970s suggested a new kind of “country home,” one which did not have to actually be in the country but which would be filled with memories of the old homestead as well as the values inculcated by country raising. When the Opry moved to

Opryland, the new home provided a platform for justifying the move within this larger rubric of home, nostalgia, and progress. Opry stars suggested that the intrinsic “country” nature of the music and its fans would not change despite the new home(s). Two separate but linked developments in country discourse played out in the discussions of the Opry’s new home at Opryland. First, Orpy figures emphasized the importance of keeping the rural past alive in one’s memories, rather than in contemporary lifestyle. Second, they argued passionately that unique and authentic country character would not be corrupted by moving out of the country and into a more modern setting. Instead, stars frequently cited songwriter Tom T. Hall’s formulation, “they’re taking us out of the barn” to encapsulate the move. 3 Hall’s declaration signified the comfort level which country figures had in leaving the actual country behind. Instead, leading figures believed that country music had finally gained the level of national recognition and respect which it deserved and that their new “home” at Opryland was both the proof of this and the best way to announce it to the world.

The Ryman Downtown

3 Bill Hance, “Ryman Opened 82 Years Ago With a Prayer, Closes on Amen,” The Nashville Banner , March 16, 1974, 1; Carolyn Holloran, “A Touch of Sadness: Impressions of the Last Night at the Ryman,” Country Song Roundup , September, 1974, 32. 175 Between its inception in 1925 and its move to the Ryman in 1943, the Opry changed location several times, in part because other facilities were either too small for the growing audience or did not want the Opry and its purportedly rowdy fans; so a permanent home in the Ryman downtown had brought a certain amount of pride for the

Opry and its fans. 4 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Opry’s location in the historic

downtown Ryman Auditorium was both a sign of the city’s acceptance of country music

as well as a vehicle for that very acceptance; Opry nights meant tourist dollars for all

manner of downtown and surrounding Nashville businesses, making the city more willing

to celebrate the Opry and what it did for the local economy. Despite a history of grudging

acceptance on the part of the city’s elite, by the mid to late 1960s, the country music

industry was bringing millions of dollars to Nashville and the city institutionally

supported the industry by emphasizing its potential to increase Nashville tourism. The

city recognized that most Opry visitors came from outside of Nashville, and they brought

their tourist dollars with them. 5

For these visitors, a trip to the Opry was not just a visit to the Ryman but to the downtown Nashville blocks around the Ryman as well. Fans generally spent the afternoon ahead of the show shopping, eating, and drinking in Nashville’s downtown establishments (like Linebaugh’s restaurant and Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop), expanding

4 Harry Stone, “Looking Back,” The Country Music Who’s Who, 1966 Edition , Thurston Moore, ed. (Denver: Heather Publications, 1965), Part 8, 28; Charles Wolfe, A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation Press, 1999). 5 Chamber of Commerce promotional publications emphasized Nashville’s distinction as “Music City, USA,” pointed visitors towards the Opry House downtown and the Hall of Fame on Music Row, and included a separate listing of “Music City USA Points of Interest.” Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce Publications and Reports, Folder 8 of 11, Nashville Public Library Special Collections. 176 the ritualized space of an Opry visit to include not just the Ryman but the surrounding downtown blocks. 6 Before the show, fans waited in lines around the corner on to Lower

Broad, the neighborhood’s primary commercial strip. By the late 1960s, Tootsie’s Orchid

Lounge, whose back entrance abutted the Ryman’s own back entrance, had become a

world-famous watering hole for Opry stars to get a quick beverage before and after their

sets. As a result, Opry fans frequented Tootsie’s and other hot spots in hopes of an up

close and personal glimpse of their favorite stars.7 The density of downtown development

facilitated this easy access to multiple retail sites and created a festive atmosphere on

show days, but also created a more unpredictable heterogeneous space.

The development of suburban office and retail centers had affected downtown

Nashville and retailers and city officials alike worried about the effect on the

neighborhood’s character. 8 In the late 1960s, these downtown retailers and developers looked to urban renewal as a way to revitalize the area and combat the flight of shoppers to the suburbs. 9 Preliminary renewal reports emphasized both the importance of

maintaining the vitality of the downtown area and the importance of the Opry and the

country music industry to Nashville’s economy. One firm even proposed including a

Performing Arts Center in their plans for a joint public-private redevelopment of the

6 Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (New York: Ballantine, 1970). 7 Hemphill, 15-20. 8 See John Pugh, “The Future of Lower Broad,” Nashville! , February, 1974, 52- 62, for discussion of the neighborhood’s decline and descriptions of its future as a “second-rate retail area.” 9 Chester D. Campbell, “Reshaping A City,” Nashville Magazine , April, 1967, 39; Rhodes Johnston, “Downtown Renewal Tops Final Hurdles,” The Nashville Tennessean , July 26, 1968, 1. See Kathy Sawyer, “Rich Nashville Area Offers Strong Lure for Retailers,” The Nashville Tennessean , June 2, 1968, C-1, on the explosion of suburban shopping centers in the region. 177 downtown area. According to their report, WSM officials were interested in the idea and willing to consider moving the Opry “uptown,” as it were, just a few blocks. 10 Thus, the

Opry could conceivably have worked with municipal urban renewal plans and stayed

downtown.

But an emerging racially inflected understanding of urban space made this seem

infeasible. Just one year before the decision to relocate the Opry, in 1967, both Coney

Island’s Steeplechase Park and Chicago’s Riverview Park had closed their gates after

decades of providing urban amusement to working to middle class whites. In both cases,

declining attendance numbers were tied to integration and the unwillingness on the part

of white families to share such spaces with African-Americans. 11 By 1968, Nashville’s public leisure spaces were in the process of integration and, as I showed in the previous chapter, Music Row had in fact been a site of prominent civil rights protests and sat only blocks away from new public housing, making that neighborhood too an unlikely site for a major investment of the industry’s capital. 12 On the weekend of Martin Luther King’s

10 Central Loop General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, Project No. TENN R-48 (GN): Economic Re-Use Analysis, Summary of Findings. Prepared for Clarke and Rapuano, September 1963, 26. 11 See Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1-4. Avila uses the fact of these closings to introduce his argument that Disneyland’s location in the suburbs was tied to a shift in the desirability of public space in urban areas along with a new kind of suburban commercial amusement structured around inaccessibility not accessibility. 12 Don H. Doyle, Nashville Since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 252-5. For descriptions of the violence perpetrated by white onlookers against African-American picketers of a HG Hills Grocery Store at 16 th and Grand, in the heart of Music Row, in the summer of 1961, see Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959-1972, Reel 40, in the Civil Rights Collection of the Nashville Room, Nashville Public Library. 178 assassination, in 1968, a curfew in place for downtown Nashville had forced the cancellation of the Opry for the first time ever.

Throughout the 1960s, urban tensions manifested in a major shift in how cities were lived and understood, in Nashville and across the nation. Suburban expansion had reduced the residential population near city centers and new suburban retail centers (in tandem with never fully resolved traffic and congestion problems in inner cities) cut into downtown retailers’ share of the market. Rather than acknowledging the shifts in residential distribution and shopping patterns, business research publications and studies advocated continuing to chase after middle-class suburban women and generally disdained non-white lower middle and working-class residents who lived closer in, even though they were a loyal consumer base since they had fewer transportation and economic options. 13 Lower income ethnic and black neighborhoods near downtown were not seen as an opportunity but as the threat in the late 1950s and 1960s. Cultural urban

historians have shown that retailers, investors, government officials, and journalists all

saw downtown as under siege from “blight” and “slums,” while popular culture imagined

“The City” as a place of crime, poverty, and disease. Popular culture productions in turn

demonized the inner city and presented downtown and other expressly urban

environments as dangerous, diseased, and threatening to engulf the surrounding “better”

sections. 14

13 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 167-174. 14 Stephen Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). See also Eric Avila’s chapter on science fiction and noir films of the 1940s and 1950s for an early incarnation of this trend, Popular Culture in the Age , 65-105. 179 Over the course of the 1960s, country music discourse gradually adopted this language as well. In the dominant discourse on the need for the Opry’s relocation, the city was not imagined as a cosmopolitan center of sophistication, as it was in the earlier

“uptown” iconography describing the success of the Nashville Sound in the early 1960s; instead, the Opry stars positioned downtown as a dangerous, morally dubious space unsuitable for country fans and their families. Music Row figures had stepped around describing their neighborhood in explicit terms of physical danger, but Opry figures in

1974 were much more bold, painting the space as uncontrollably seedy, dangerous, and not in keeping with the Opry’s avowed family-friendly atmosphere. Opry veterans Roy

Acuff and Hank Snow both used the term “slum” to disdainfully describe the neighborhood, and Vic Willis ominously suggested, “Thank God we’re getting out of here. They should’ve built a new Opry House 49 years ago. They talk about atmosphere encircling this place. Well, let me tell you something. We don’t need this type of atmosphere.” 15 Willis’ use of the word “encircling” resonated with the prevailing

descriptions of the slums as a “ring of blight” surrounding and encroaching upon the

downtown areas of the nation. 16

15 Hance, 1. 16 Historian Alison Isenberg has shown that one of the principal concerns for downtown retailers, as early as the 1950s, was encroachment by the “ring of blight” which was generally thought to surround most American city centers and which was almost always referred to as the “slums.” Business and government officials were worried that lower-class commercial establishments would emerge downtown because of its proximity to these residential slums. Isenberg, 189. Orpy announcer Grant Turner, in an oral history a month after the move, referenced downtown transients “eating chicken from shoe boxes.” Turner actually regretted the Opry’s move and cited the transients as a positive example of the character of downtown, but this descriptive aside seems to reference the African-American tradition of packing food (most often chicken) in shoe boxes or other cardboard boxes for long journeys. Psyche A. Williams-Forson has found 180 In keeping with this discourse, the element of physical danger was often present in country stars’ descriptions of the area, and stars focused on the alley between the

Ryman’s back door and Tootsie’s Lounge, previously a celebrated aspect of the Opry’s environment which facilitated star-fan interaction. Porter Wagoner provided WSM with a testimonial which emphasized the seediness of the Opry’s location and the need for a family-friendly venue for fans: “We will have vastly improved parking facilities and better access to the fans, rather than meeting them in a dark alley. The entire complex is safe for the children and the whole family.” 17 Wagoner focused on the “dark alley”

between the Ryman and Lower Broad businesses, even though the Ryman was actually

surrounded by retail businesses which drove a great deal of concentrated pedestrian

traffic. Another Opry veteran, Hank Snow, claimed, “But the good point about it is that

we got out of that alley. We got out of that which actually is known as really the slums of

the city, until they clean it up a little more.” Snow went on to mention the lack of

dressing rooms, parking and air conditioning, but the slum location of the Ryman was,

references to these “shoe box lunches” in novels, black cookbooks, oral histories, and contemporary ethnographies of African-American travel. Because of longstanding restrictions on black access to public accommodations, packing a lunch made practical sense, according to Williams-Forson, chicken “travels well” while also signifying on multiple levels within black culture. Turner also referred to area South of Lower Broad as the “Black Bottom” and a “semi-slum.” Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 116-131. 17 “Opry Member Quotes,” courtesy of Brenda Colladay at The Grand Ole Opry Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. The space between the Ryman and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, a common pre-and post- show hangout, was, in fact, an alley, but one which was heavily trafficked on Opry nights. Wagoner’s suggestion that they only encountered fans in a “dark alley” suggested a more desolate urban space than the one Oprygoers actually experienced. Also see Hank Snow’s WSM testimonial, “There is naturally a certain amount of sentiment attached to the old building, but the change will be good. The old Opry house is in a slum area, the parking is bad, and its not a safe or fireproof building.” “Opry Member Quotes,” Grand Ole Opry Museum. 181 for him, the first strike against the old Opry. His disdain for “that alley” revealed an urgent desire to leave downtown. 18

Later rationales for the move further revealed the extent to which Opry stewards perceived the downtown space as “under siege.” They used words like “protect” and

“control” to describe the new suburban space in pleasant contrast with the downtown space. In 1975, Acuff wrote, in his introduction to journalist Jack Hurst’s book on the

Opry: “We are now in a beautiful spot at Opryland, and we have enough land out here to protect it.” 19 Hurst quoted WSM president Irving Waugh in the same book, “We decided that instead of rebuilding down there we should go outside the city to a place where we could control our own environment.” 20 Waugh insisted they had to go “outside the city,” suggesting that it was not just downtown which was unsuitable, but that there was no urban space which would allow them to control Opryland the way they wanted to. The connection between privatized suburban space and the dangers of the city were crucial to the construction of the new space as a better fit for the Opry, its fans, and their families.

But physical danger was not the only perceived threat to the “whole family” which the downtown space purportedly posed. Leading Opry figures also invoked a moral disdain for lower-class commercial amusements. Roy Acuff frequently referenced the combination of drinking establishments and adult service providers as not in keeping with the Opry’s image and its fans’ sensibilities. Acuff (a downtown property owner

18 Hank Snow, interviewed by Douglas Green, September 22, 1975, Country Music Foundation Oral History Collection (Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center), Nashville, Tennessee. 19 Roy Acuff, “Introduction,” in Jack Hurst, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1975), 12. 20 Jack Hurst, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry , 335. 182 himself) told an interviewer six months after the move, “So many of the undesirable types of establishments got up around us down there. It went from a beer joint to a drink joint to the rubbing parlors, and all the different things of sin …” 21 National Life

Chairman G. Daniel Brooks also showed disdain for morally questionable “cheap amusements,” but also potentially implicated country music as one such entertainment by using the phrase “honky tonk.” In justifying the decision to surround the Opry with a larger amusement park complex, Brooks implicitly invoked the taverns and souvenir shops of the blocks surrounding the Ryman when he proclaimed in 1969, “It is our plan to create a park of great beauty. We expect to give it the strictest maintenance, and the surrounding land will enable us to keep out the garish, honky-tonk commercialism that has sprung up around some of the other amusement areas around the nation.” 22 Brooks’

21 Gerry Wood, “King of the Hillbilly Singers,” Nashville! , October, 1974, 69. See also Roy Acuff with William Neely, Roy Acuff’s Nashville :The Life and Good Times of Country Music (New York: Putnam, 1983), 197; and Roy Acuff, “Introduction,” in Jack Hurst, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1975), 12, and Doug Green, “Roy Acuff,” Country Music World , January, 1973, 17, for other examples of Acuff referencing drinking and prostitution as the prime reasons to get the Opry out of downtown. City directories indicate that most of these establishments cropped up after the land for Opryland had already been purchased and plans to move set in motion, though the properties changed hands mostly around between 1966 and 1968. Acuff himself sold his museum on Lower Broad, two years after the move, to an owner who converted it into an adult movie theater, (for $110,000; he had bought it in 1964 for $30,000), Historic Nashville, Inc., “Downtown Survey,” Nashville Public Library Special Collections, Box 8, Property # 188. See also “Park Overshadows Grand Ole Opry,” New York Times, August 12, 1972, 7. In reference to the enjoyable spectacle of Opryland, “The fantasy-wrapped package of smiling faces and good cheer erases the images of the bars and peep shows flanking the late 19 th -century tabernacle that has housed the Opry since 1941.” This article claims Tubb’s Record Shop was invited to move to or add an outpost at Opryland but Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge was not, in order to maintain family- friendly atmosphere. 22 G Daniel Brooks, The National Life and Accident Insurance Company News Release, October 13, 1969, 5, courtesy of Brenda Colladay, Grand Ole Opry Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Dangerous urban blight was often explicitly tied to working-class 183 decision to enfold the Opry within the new privatized and controlled park officially and literally enacted the charges many traditionalist critics had laid at the feet of the industry’s leaders over the previous decade: that the “honky tonk” and its fans were left outside the gates of the new more moderate country-pop Nashville Sound. Brooks defined the contemporary version of the Opry and country music as not the honky tonk style of old.

The National Life chairman’s invocation of “garish” entertainment argued that

Opryland belonged specifically to middle-class families and not to potentially lower-class urban revelers. 23 Like the downtown retailers who were afraid of their commercial districts catering too heavily to a kind of cheap shopping and recreation experience, the

Opry’s “protectors” constructed a particular style of middle-class tourism as normal for fans of country music and others. Brooks (along with prominent de facto spokespersons such as Acuff) favored one particular space and recreational milieu (suburban, controlled and predictable) over another (urban, unpredictable, more colorful), a position which was neither inevitable nor obvious for country music. Acuff’s disdain for drinking joints, for instance, hardly squared with country music’s lyrical content over the previous decades,

commercial amusement. One author cited the “honky-tonk” transformation of generic downtown business areas (not Nashville in particular): “the main streets become infested with ‘sucker joints’ for tourists; all-night jewelry auctions, bargain linens and cheap neckties, hamburger stands, and bars with jazz bands. The slums, in other words, are spreading to the central business district.” Morton Grodzins, “Metropolitan Segregation,” Scientific American (October 1957). 23 A fact sheet distributed by National Life “for use by Opry talent in answering questions during personal appearances” emphasized that “pews were chosen for seating because that is the seating in the old House and because they allow families to sit together in close contact.” “Facts Sheet on New Grand Ole Opry House,” courtesy of Brenda Colladay at The Grand Ole Opry Museum. See also, Brooks, “News Release,” 2, for the principal importance of the new park being “family-oriented.” 184 which frequently presented social life in terms of a productive cultural mix of the seamier side of life and a sterner moralism, often understood through a kind of hedonist Saturday night penitent Sunday morning dualism. Historically, both sides had a place in country culture and worked together to create country’s unique appeal. 24 In an oral history

conducted in May of 1974, country star and Opry announcer Grant Turner lamented the

Opry’s move and argued that much of the important colorful character of the Opry came

from its wilder, more unpredictable surroundings; Turner mentioned street performers,

peddlers, transients (eating chicken from shoeboxes on the steps of the downtown

buildings), and even the massage parlors and prostitutes. 25 Turner lamented the Opry’s

loss of the surrounding mixed-class character and the various pleasures which it offered,

but his was a minority voice. Most of the rest of the Opry community instead embraced

their new comfortable home in the suburbs as a fitting environment for the show’s

modern incarnation and its many fans. If the unseemly characteristics of downtown

“pushed” the Opry away, the suburban space which gave way to Opryland, USA, also

had its own unique “pull.”

The Suburban Opryland

The Ryman Auditorium, built in 1890, was in major need of structural renovation,

for reasons of both safety (reinforcing and fireproofing) and comfort (air conditioning

and newer more comfortable pews). Irving Waugh, who became president of WSM in

24 Bill Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 25 Grant Turner, interviewed by Douglas Green, May 13, 1974, Country Music Foundation Oral History Collection (Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center), Nashville, Tennessee. 185 1968, researched the financial investment needed to make the auditorium fire-resistant, improve air conditioning and heating, and expand the site itself to provide more space for dressing rooms for the stars and offices for WSM. 26 Waugh decided that rather than investing in the auditorium just to maintain a show which only ran twice a week and which had no other major mechanisms for generating profit, it would be more sound to invest in a larger complex of facilities which would allow WSM to capture more of the

Opry visitors’ tourist dollars as well as bringing in visitors who were not even Opry fans at all. 27 As WSM’s chairman of the board, Edwin Craig declared in 1968, “We always have been interested in enhancing the growth of the Grand Ole Opry concept.” 28 They

were looking to capitalize on the Opry’s “brand.”

To expand on this branding possibility, National Life concentrated on creating a

commercial space which would generate revenue continuously as well as consolidate and

divert the expenditures of Opry visitors. For instance, out of town fans coming to the

Opry (and surveys showed that almost all in attendance were from out of town) stayed in

motels downtown or around Nashville, which were not owned by WSM or National Life.

The Opryland complex included a hotel from the beginning, and by going out of the

urban region and settling in the country or suburbs, National Life knew there would, at

26 National Life had purchased the Ryman in 1963 and had done some minor renovations subsequently. Historic Nashville, Inc, “Downtown Survey,” Property #129, 116 5 th Avenue North, Opry House/Ryman, folder 1, Nashville Public Library Special Collections. 27 “Interview with Irving Waugh,” Radio and Records , January 27, 1978. Also see “WSM Studies Future ‘Opryland’ Complex,” Music City News , November 1968, 21, and Everett Corbin, “Waugh Divulges New Grand Ole Opry Site as WSM Fest Gets Underway, Music City News, November, 1969, 2, for Waugh’s emphasis on the new technologies and television facilities. 28 Ibid, “WSM Studies.” 186 least at first, be fewer competitors for those guests. The same thing was true with restaurants and shopping, which comprised Opry Towne, a key feature of the Opryland complex. 29

WSM president Irving Waugh’s public declarations at the time of the decision to

move the Opryland and upon the subsequent acquisition of the land, made clear that his

vision for the Opry’s future could never have been realized in a crowded, competitive

downtown. In the Fall of 1969, after WSM had announced its intention to move the Opry

to an amusement park complex, but before a final decision on land acquisition had been

made, Waugh told Music City News , “New housing for the Opry is inevitable. Opryland

will enable us to broaden the base of country and folk and provide a setting in keeping

with the development and growth of this uniquely American form of entertainment.” 30

Waugh then detailed plans for a complex of restaurants and shops which would be included in the park and stated, “The large space required will prohibit the new complex from being constructed either in or near the present Opry location or the famous Music

Row area.” Opryland’s ambitions required a larger tract of land for the various pieces of the complex, including parking lots, retail spaces, and the animal and ride spaces of the amusement park, but also to keep out competing and unsightly commercial offerings.

29 As Kevin Archer has shown with the case of Disney World (where the Disney Company was much more effective in this regard than at Disneyland), acquiring larger and larger tracts of land meant consolidating profits as well as taking over space which could have been used by the competitors. Kevin Archer, “The Limits to the Imagineered City: Sociospatial Polarization in Orlando,” Economic Geography 73 (July 1997): 322- 336. 30 LaWayne Satterfield, “Opryland USA Gets Go-Ahead,” Music City News , October, 1969, 11. 187 Waugh wanted a fairly flat plot of land with convenient interstate highway access, not too far from downtown but with relatively little surrounding development. In 1969,

National Life officials took to the skies in a helicopter looking for the perfect plot of land and found it when they saw an extension of the Briley Parkway under construction, near, but not on, the curve of the Cumberland river, only nine miles from downtown. With the river on one side and the interstate on the other, the future site for Opryland was well protected from encroaching nearby development. 31 The Opry’s new neighborhood contained a combination of undeveloped rural land and new residential construction for relatively affluent suburban families without the commercial or industrial intrusions of urban Nashville. 32 Residential construction had already taken most of the land east of the

parkway and so development was limited to the interstate exchange which the Opryland

itself dominated. Opryland provided National Life with the opportunity to control not just

the park but its surrounding commercial space.

31 Caleb Pirtle III, The Grandest Day: A Journey Through Opryland, U.S.A., the Home of American Music (Nashville: Opryland, USA, 1979), 23-4 32 In 1970, 4,877 white persons lived in the park’s census tract while two African- American persons lived there (Davidson County, home to both suburban Opryland and the downtown Ryman, was 20% black in 1970). The percentage of owner-occupied units near Opryland was 84% and the median asking home price was $21,300, ahead of the county-wide median of 18,100 but not even in the top 10 census tracts county-wide in that category. Mostly home to families, two thirds of families in the tract had incomes at least three times the poverty level and only 4.8 percent lived below the poverty line. Nearly 40 percent of the population was under 18. Nearly a quarter of the population had moved out from within the city limits of Nashville in the previous five years. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population and Housing: Census Tracts: Nashville- Davidson, Tenn. SMSA (Washington, DC: 1972), P-4, P-12, P-20, P-28. Statistics show that the region’s white rural migrants, beginning as early as the 1950s, were moving directly to Nashville’s suburbs and not the city itself. John Vahaly, Jr., and Benjamin Walter, “Black Residential Succession in Nashville, 1930 to 1960,” 104, 81-117, in Growing Metropolis: Aspects of Development in Nashville , edited by James F. Blumstein and Benjamin Walter (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975). 188 Briley Parkway’s imminent completion at the time of the purchase was crucial to

Waugh’s plan for the Opryland complex. National Life took keen advantage of

Nashville’s highway construction and expansion plans. Strategically placing Opryland ahead of the Parkway’s construction ensured that the complex would be the first development in the area but would still be conveniently connected to the interstate highways bringing fans in from outside of the Nashville metropolitan area. As Waugh himself said, “The location should be easily accessible by car. At the same time, the highway access should be well-defined and should create an absolute minimum of traffic activity in the area surrounding the project other than the major arterial.” 33 By essentially buying all of the land on the Western side of the soon-to-be-opened interchange, National

Life ensured their complex would be the only attraction at the Parkway’s interchange.

National Life also bought 369 acres but only used 110 for the actual development of

Opryland, further leaving a buffer zone around the park, to distance the visitor experience from the sights and sounds of unwanted commercial development: what the official

National Life press release referred to as “sufficient acreage to provide for the Opryland park itself, parking, and enough additional area to permit control of the park environment.” 34 The “additional area” had no necessary park function but allowed WSM

to control the visitors’ entry and exit to the Opryland. This was a major change from the

space of the Ryman, where “unprotected” visitors waited in lines on the street and in

nearby alleys downtown.

33 Brooks, “news release,” 3. 34 Ibid, 5. 189 The spatial arrangement of the complex established a buffer zone around the ring of the park to separate the visitor from the outside world and the planners designed the park itself as a kind of surreal fantasy land to further distance the visitor from any particular kind of spatial associations. WSM and National Life, knowing full well the importance of the Opry’s “authentic” setting, went to great lengths to sell the new

Opryland as a natural, realistic environment. Their initial press release stated, “The entire

Opryland U.S.A. complex is alive with naturalness. There is NO animation. Instead, the total flavor is one of reality from live buffalo roaming the range to honest to goodness

American antiques used throughout the scores of buildings.” 35 The emphatic denial of any animation in the complex seems to have been a fairly open attack on other theme parks, in particular that most noted (and animated) of parks, Disneyland. 36 In contrast to

that park’s suburban, overdeveloped locale, Opryland’s stewards intended to retain “real”

elements of the actual country, including open spaces, live animals, and real trees.

Like Disneyland, the park would incorporate a magical fantasy space (in

Opryland’s case, the real American landscape condensed into 110 acres) while fairly

openly merging modern amenities and tailoring the park to automobile-driving visitors.

Their press release indicated the demands of combining a “real” natural setting with the

practical requirements of a major tourist attraction:

35 “Opryland U.S.A. Sets America to Music in a 110-Acre Entertainment Park,” Opryland USA news release, May 1972, Opryland Vertical File, Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, Tennessee. 36 As journalist Jack Hurst acknowledged a few years later in his monograph on the Opry, “it would be a ‘theme park’ somewhat resembling the ones at Disneyland and Six Flags over Georgia, but in keeping with the outdoor, natural image of country music it would be as genuine as possible, with real trees and flowers and the best and most authentic building materials,” Hurst, 340. 190 The total entertainment at Opryland is real people and real animals doing real

things. There is no animated hoopla to take away from the Americana flavor of

the park. Opryland’s concern with the naturalness of the park is evident the

moment a guest pulls into the 3800 car parking area. It is landscaped to blend in

with the rolling hills along the Cumberland River. It is estimated that nearly 5,000

trees have been transplanted from Opryland’s woods to open areas. 37

The vast array of attractions threatened to eclipse the original purpose of the park, to be a new home for the Opry. All the animals, rides, and retail options which brought the up to

3,800 cars onto to the grounds suggested to some that the spirit of the Opry itself was being lost.

The Grand Ole Opry’s Marginal Place within Opryland

In addition to housing the Opry itself, Opryland, USA (the official name of the entire complex) purported to showcase all forms of homegrown American music, not just country music, and thus catered to a much broader audience at a time when the genre of country music was expanding to include chart-topping country-pop hybrids. Opryland also signaled the larger move away from strictly traditional country sounds by incorporating all varieties of American music, not just country, into the park’s rides and

shows. National Life looked to cash in on country’s new national and international

successes, as well as country’s ability to position itself somewhere between the pop and

37 “Opryland U.S.A. Sets America.” 191 country charts and markets. The Opry itself remained home to many traditional acts and sounds which were not as commercially successful as the Nashville Sound country-pop hybrid, while maintaining an uneasy alliance with the more commercially successful country-pop stars. 38

Following the model of Disneyland, Opryland’s planners divided the park into thematically organized nodes. Since Opryland billed itself as a presentation of all forms of American homegrown music, the park’s design pattern broke down based on five different genres or fields of American music. Opryland’s musical programs reflected a new emphasis on contemporary pop sounds over the traditional folk sounds. Brochures and press releases highlighted the wide range of the country’s musical heritage which the park intended to cover, including “Music of the American West;” “American Jazz and

Blues” (the New Orleans section); “American Music of Today” (the Mod section); and the “American Country Music” section which housed the new Opry House. 39 The modern country section, however, was not the home of traditional country music.

In fact, Opryland’s musical organization presented traditional country music as a relic (but a relic dear to their heart) of the past. The Roy Acuff Music Hall and traditional folk performances were found in the “Hill Country” region, which the park presented as more of a historical re-enactment space. WSM’s description of the park section distanced the music from the contemporary world: “Appalachian mountain town artifacts set the

38 “Opryland Sets America to Music: But It’s Only a Little Bit Country,” Music City News , April, 1972, 30. See “’Grand Ole Opry’ Preserves Country Music Heritage,’” Billboard World of Country Music, 1964-5 (Cincinnati: Billboard Publications, 1964), 38, for an argument as early as the mid-1960s that the Opry was a repository for musical styles which no longer fit the contemporary country mold. 39 “Opryland U.S.A. Sets America to Music in a 110-Acre Entertainment Park.” 192 scene in the Hill Country Area of the Park. There weren’t any modern electric machines to handle the work in those days, so everything was done by hand. … The warm, friendly staff of Hill Country, dressed in their authentic costumes of the day, make this Area a delightful and rewarding experience for all.” 40 Opryland positioned the “hillbilly” era of

country music in the distant past, which in fact had to be historically re-enacted by

modern performers, and in so doing continued the trend of country music representing its

newest incarnation as more modern and palatable (while still maintaining reverence for

past incarnations). This completed the journey begun in the Opry’s earliest days (and

described in chapter one) – country music productions gradually made more and more

explicit the fact of their own distance from the country. 41 The park relegated rustic

lifestyles to the past while still celebrating them nostalgically.

Many cultural critics called attention to Opryland’s rebuke of country’s past,

taking a certain amount of pleasure in disparaging country music for trading in its

authenticity. 42 Critics saw abandoning the old Ryman as shameful, wondered if the

40 Our Shield , Special Opryland Issue. Grand Ole Opry Museum Collections. 41 See Robert Krishef, The Grand Ole Opry (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1978), 64, “If the Grand Ole Opry house does not have quite the same ‘down-home’ feeling that the Ryman had, neither are the fans all down-home folks any more. They are generally more sophisticated, and they like many different kinds of country music.” 42 See Ada Louise Huxtable, “Only the Phony is Real,” The New York Times , May 13, 1973, 138; Garrison Keillor, “At the Opry,” The New Yorker , May 6, 1974, 46-70; and Paul Hemphill, “Okie From Muskogee,” in The Good Old Boys (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 135, for critiques of the Opry’s decision to move. Also see “Interview with the Hagers,” Country Song Roundup , January, 1974, 27, and Bill Knowlton, “Cryin’ the Ryman Blues,” Pickin’ , May, 1974, 10-12, and Doug Tuchman, “Editorial,” Pickin’, August, 1974, 2. See Roy Reed, “Grand Ole Opry is Yielding to Change,” The New York Times , May 29, 1970, 12, for a good summary of national journalistic understandings of the implications of Opryland. “And now, as if to add one more flutter of acceleration to the headlong Americanization of the South, the Opry is getting ready to abandon familiar old Ryman Auditorium in the grit and Victorian decay 193 authentic character of the Opry would be lost, and could not seem to understand the appeal of the new park. Given the traditionalist opposition, National Life and WSM intended to minimize the extent to which they discussed the Ryman and instead to focus on the spectacular new facilities which country music so richly deserved. 43 National Life

instructed employees to only discuss the Ryman in the particular context of the ways in

which the new theater drew on elements of the old one. The Opry’s manager emphasized

that the show would remain exactly the same and described the move as a simple “lift and

place” procedure: “What we’re planning to do is simply lifting it out of the Opry House

and putting it into more pleasant surroundings.” 44 But stars and fans together created a more interesting narrative which justified the move and reassured possible skeptics about the character of the new place. They argued that, like any home, the true life of the place came from the people who lived there, and country people would not lose their unique character. Country star Jean Shepherd told the Nashville Banner , “The new place is

gorgeous, but it makes you wonder if you can kick your shoes off out there. But you

know Jean Shepherd, I kick my shoes off wherever and whenever I feel like it.” 45

Shepherd raised the fear that behavior at Opryland would have to be more ordered and regulated, but then dispelled that fear almost immediately. She believed the Opry’s relaxed, downhome character would remain intact despite all the money that was poured

of downtown Nashville and move to a fancy suburban home that would look as natural in Los Angeles as in the hills of Tennessee.” 43 “Move Into New Grand Ole Opry House” memorandum, March 12, 1973, Ray Canady, “Very little time should be devoted to explaining or excusing the Ryman. We must get away from discussing buildings and spend more time on the Opry itself. We need to look ahead, not backwards.” Files of The Grand Ole Opry Museum, courtesy of Brenda Colladay. 44 “Opryland Begun; Show Is Unchanged,” Music City News , August, 1970, 1. 45 Hance, “Ryman Opened 82 Years,”1. 194 into the convenience and technology of the place. Her willingness to kick off her shoes whenever she felt like it transcended what a disapproving commentator such as Paul

Hemphill referred to as the “antiseptic” nature of the new space. 46

To provide overwhelming star support for the move, WSM collected a set of testimonials from leading Opry stars in support of the move and the new Opryland complex. Most emphasized that they were slightly sad to leave the Ryman but that it was certainly for the best and everybody (fans and performers), would be more comfortable and happy at the new place. Iconic figures such as Acuff and Minnie Pearl downplayed the nostalgic resistance to moving in favor of emphasizing the fans’ comfort. Pearl summed up the feeling well: “There is always a certain sadness connected with a move from an old place to a new… The most important factor, as I see it, is the comfort of the fans. The fans are the Opry – the most important part of it – and they have certainly been uncomfortable in the old house. Now, they’ll have comfortable seats, air conditioning, plenty of room and a space to park, plus other advantages.” 47

These Opry stars frequently cited fan comfort at the new place as a reason for the

move, and fan club newsletters in turn celebrated and supported the new complex. Fan

club newsletters from the time of the Opry’s move indicate fan awareness of possible

opposition to the new theater complex (most noticeably, that the technologically

advanced, expensive environment of the new theater would change the Opry’s

intrinsically spontaneous, “down-home” nature) but echoed Jean Shepherd in quickly

46 Hemphill in particular had singled the complex out as part of country’s wholesale rejection of its grittier past: “plans are announced for an antiseptic new air- conditioned Grand Ole Opry House amid a hokey Disneyland-type complex,” 135. 47 “Opry Member Quotes.” 195 minimizing the change in location. These fans presented a narrative in which slightly dubious fans almost immediately realized that the spirit of the Opry would survive any change in venue. A Tex Ritter fan wrote, “despite all the mechanization and new-theater respectability, Cousin Minnie’s ‘HowDEEEE’ carried with it an unmistakable message – the Opry might have moved, but it will stay down-home.” 48 “Down home,” here, was

clearly not tied to any geographic or structural space, as the continuity of Pearl’s

distinctive greeting still fully signified down home.

The president of a Loretta Lynn fan club paralleled this quick dismissal of any

fear that the Opry had changed, “We had been a little anxious about whether the old

mass-of-organized-confusion type setting would be banished with the move from the old

Ryman. How delighted we were when the curtain went up that evening and there was the

same old everybody-running-around, talking, and joking and just a general air of

unorganized fun and brotherhood!” She went on to encapsulate the change in terms of

home and the fact that the people mattered more than the material space of the home:

“No, the Opry hasn’t changed. The HOME of the Opry is the only change and believe us,

it is only for the better!” 49 According to these fans, Minnie Pearl’s possibly disruptive

“HowDEEE” and the general air of unruliness which were hallmarks of the Opry

followed it easily to its new expensive environment. This idea was striking, that change

in the nature of “home” could be so downplayed and the spirit of the Opry could be so

48 Jim Cooper, “Minnie says Howdy to New Ole Opry: Spirit of Tex and Others Present,” Tex Ritter Official Fan Club , June 1974, Country Music Hall of Fame Library Fan Newsletter Archive. 49 Kay Johnson and Loretta Loudilla, “President’s Letter,” Loretta Lynn International Fan Club (Wild Horse, CO), March 1974, 4. Country Music Hall of Fame Fan Newsletter Archive. 196 portable. Striking, but not entirely discontinuous with the rest of the contemporary country music discourse.

This explicit support for the retention of authentic country identity despite technological changes, new homes, and geographic relocations, resonated with (but also shifted) a longstanding discourse within country music culture. As early as the 1940s, as I showed in Chapter One, Opry figures comfortably straddled a line between the rustic past and the urban present. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, groups such as the Country

Music Association more forcefully argued that country music fans no longer lived in the country or acted like country rubes but were in fact the regular working people of

America’s cities. But starting in the late 1960s, a new strand of this discourse developed which emphasized neither the city nor the country, instead focusing more strongly on the importance of keeping the country home alive in memory even while moving into a modern home and away from the actual country.

Nostalgia and the Search for a New “Country Home”

John Loudermilk’s Grammy-winning liner notes to his 1967 album, Suburban

Attitudes in Country Verse , normalized country folks’ middle-class consumption patterns and suburban residence, while still asserting that their traditional values had remained intact. He argued that a subdivision of suburban homes could be the new location of country homes. Loudermilk opened by suggesting: “If you don’t believe it, just go out

Interstate 65 to Exit 19, drive on through Brentwood, and between the shopping center and the country club you’ll find an entire village of country houses. John D.

197 Loudermilk’s is the forty-eighth, three-bedroom brick on the right.” Situated between typical suburban hallmarks, (the shopping center and the country club), the reference to

Loudermilk’s home being the forty-eighth also suggests, without critiquing, a homogenous mass of suburban country homes. 50

The essay used wordplay and inversion to take traditional elements of the country stereotype and argue that country people were now a different kind of middle-class consumer. In a tone typical of his essay, Loudermilk admonished an imagined visitor:

Talk about the weather, sports, flying saucers, anything but farming. If you ask

him how’s the crop doing, he’ll tell you fine but they’re about to drive the good

wife out of her skull. {Their ‘crop’ being three young sons … who are country

boys, too.} If a wagon pulls up outside, don’t look for the horse. He’s under the

hood with the rest of his 249 brothers.

Taking key elements of the rural stereotype and subverting them to provide a different, more contemporary meaning (a crop of children in a station wagon), Loudermilk argued against a common understanding of “country people” as farmers still relying on horse drawn wagons. 51 It is worth noting that this kind of wordplay paralleled the efforts

50 Loudermilk further included specific details which indicated that he was in fact discussing his own home in Nashville’s suburbs (I-65, exit 19). John Loudermilk, “Country People ARE a Different Breed …” Suburban Attitudes in Country Verse (RCA Victor LSP 3807), 1967. 51 As Tex Ritter joked to the Adcraft Club of Detroit in 1964, “The songwriter who once tended stock on his daddy’s farm is now consulting his broker regarding another kind of stock.” These stereotypes were still the starting point from which these cultural brokers hoped to move general understandings of “country folk.” Cited in Diane 198 undertaken by CMA-sponsored country stars and executives earlier in the decade, but in

Loudermilk’s case the new location for country people was no longer the cities but the suburbs.

The essay’s conclusion, though, prevented the reader from forgetting the essay’s titular assertion that country people are a “different breed.” In the end, what kept them unique were their country values. Loudermilk concluded,

They believe kids ought to be thanked when they do good, and spanked when

they don’t. They know tears are just as normal as laughter and they’re not

ashamed to do either in public if they feel like it. Why, these corny country hill

people have even been known to say family grace in a public restaurant. Yea,

when you think about it, I guess country people are a different breed after all

…especially nowadays.

Here Loudermilk slyly returned to the stereotypical understanding of the “corny country

hill people” only to trumpet their unwillingness to give up their traditional (what may

seem too corny to some modern people) values. The post-ellipsis “especially nowadays”

at the end of Loudermilk’s essay referenced the ongoing culture wars and the perceived

upheaval of traditional morality and values in the 1960s. Country stars frequently and

vociferously weighed in on the issue of the counterculture and the emblems of drugs,

Pecknold, “The Selling Sound of Country Music: Class, Culture, and Early Radio Marketing Strategy of the Country Music Association,” in Country Music Annual 2002 , ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James Akenson (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 73. 199 long hair, and crazy kids with which they were confronted. Bill Anderson, in a 1973 speech at the Broadcast Executives’ Luncheon, celebrated a fan who told him she liked the music because, “it was real, nothing phoney. She said, I can sing along with it if I want to, and I don’t have to listen to some weird long-haired kid with weird, loud, music, telling me all about his drug experiences.” 52 Loudermilk established that although the

outward trappings of many rural-rooted people may had changed, their inner core and

values had not, despite, as his album’s title suggests, their actual location in suburban

spaces. Their retention of these important values kept them unique and relevant in the

face of the homogenization associated with the suburbs. What made them country was

not living on the farm but retaining the traditional values of the country.

Tom T Hall, like Loudermilk a new breed of Nashville songwriter, followed in his

footsteps with his song, “Country Is.” Hall also invoked a generic set of “values” which

were no longer tied to particular spaces. The song opens with conventional rural imagery

by declaring that “country is” sitting on the back porch and listening to the whippoorwill.

Two verses later, though, country has become (somewhat ominously) “living in the

city/knowing your people/knowing your kind.” As the song progresses even farther,

country becomes not any place in particular but instead “what you make it … all in your

52 “Country Music – Is it Losing It’s Identity?,” CMA Close-Up , September 1973, 8. Roy Acuff declared to his biographer, “Country music reflects our good American way of life. It is down to earth, for the home – not to get all hepped up and smoke a lot of marijuana and go wild about.” Schlappi, 66. See John Pugh, “Ernest Tubb – Country Music’s Great White Father,” Music City News , October, 1971, 7-B, for Tubb’s slightly more sympathetic treatment of “hippies” (though he still vehemently disagrees with their drug use). See also John Greenway, “No Talk That God is Dead,” National Review , August 11, 1970, 842, which references the odd final line of Jeannie C Riley’s “Country Girl:” “out in the country there is not talk that God is dead,” in a call for conservatives to recognize the importance of country music and its values. 200 mind.” Finally, though, as in Loudermilk’s liner notes, country is all about values:

“working for a living, thinking your own thoughts, loving your town, teaching your children, finding out what’s right and standing your own ground.” As Hall says of country in the final verse, “it’s all in your heart.” 53

In her most famous song 1970’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Loretta Lynn

celebrated her father’s ability to provide a home for his children in even the direst

poverty, but the song’s final verse also firmly locates this milieu in the past and in Lynn’s

memory. The song clearly detailed her humble upbringing and the rustic conditions of her

childhood. But the song’s narrator firmly positions these conditions in the past, and in

fact in the final verse returns to her childhood home and finds nothing but “memories…”

“Well a lot of things have changed since way back then/And it’s so good to be back home

again/ Not much left but the floor/ Nothing lives here anymore/ Except the memories of a

coal miner’s daughter.” Lynn revealed and celebrated her humble country roots but

located her present self in the modern world. She emphasizes the importance of humble

roots but used the final verse to definitively situate that world in the past. 54

Charley Pride took this even further with his 1970 #1 single, “Wonder Could I

Live There Any More.” The song deconstructed the romanticized mythology of country living by showing instead the unfortunate combination of hard work and hard times

53 Tom T. Hall, “Country Is,” Country Is , Mercury SRM-1-1009, 1974 . 54 Loretta Lynn, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Coal Miner’s Daughter , Decca DL 75253, 1970. A 1970 advertisement for Columbia’s country catalog employed a photo of a typical New York street scene, fairly grim and lonely, with the tag line, “as urban areas get larger and more crowded, our great country artists become more important. Singers like Stonewall Jackson, Barbara Fairchild, and The Chuck Wagon Gang remind us of where we’re from. Their music is theirs and ours … Their music brings the country into your home. Wherever you live.” Columbia Records, “Country Music for the Whole Country,” advertisement, Music City News , October 1970, 14-C. 201 which the narrator associated with the country, the “there” of the title. Each verse took a specific piece of an idealized rural past and questioned whether anyone would trade in the comforts of modern life for the hard work and economic uncertainty of the past. For instance, in the opening verse the narrator invokes a pastoral image of an early morning rooster call but quickly shifts the focus to the amount of chores which need to be done in the course of “another hard work day.” The chorus then suggests, quite happily, “It’s nice to think about it/maybe even visit/but I wonder could I live there anymore.” The song firmly locates the narrator outside of the country and actually takes a strong stance against the country as a viable site of anything but nostalgia – the speaker is only willing to concede that it would be maybe nice to visit. 55

Pride does not specifically counterpose either the city or suburbs to this vision of the country, but does reject the ideals of country life, at least for contemporary middle- class people. The second verse overturns the tropes of tasty cornbread baking in the wood stove and a warm connection to the land to show both the underside of rustic living and to imply that it is no longer necessary, for Pride and presumably for his fans. The family is too busy working to have any meaningful contact. The song featured elements of the new Nashville Sound – Pride’s vocals at the end of each verse and into the chorus were supplemented with the requisite background choral group and the song’s beat carried it forward without mournful steel guitar or fiddles. Pride celebrated his distance from the country life by using a musical style, the Nashville Sound, associated with country’s push to be recognized as a more modern form. The distance Pride evoked was meant to be

55 Charley Pride, “Wonder Could I Live There Anymore,” From Me to You , RCA Victor LSP 4468, 1971. 202 shared by a wide swath of country fans who similarly had left behind their childhood country homes of three room houses filled with hard work and no time for leisure.

As if recognizing that the authenticity of country was under siege, a series of songs addressed the very nature of “country” and authoritatively provided an answer, tautological though it may have been. Loretta Lynn’s “You’re Lookin’ at Country” and

Lynn Anderson’s “Listen to a Country Song” both forcefully addressed the listener directly, interpellating them into witnessing authentic country. Lynn’s song asserted her own country identity and went one step further to argue that there was not a drop of

“city” in her: “You don’t see no city when you look at me/cause country’s all I am.”

Anderson directed her listener to hear a “country song” though her song was a far cry from what many traditionalist fans described as true country. 56

The discourse was hardly unanimous however. Jeannie C. Riley’s 1970 song,

“Country Girl,” told a different story. The song contrasts the “lonesome” big cities in which she spends too much time with the country home and family which she misses and wishes she could return to (but does not). The repeated line “Oh Lord what I’d give to be a country girl again,” seems to suggest a possible return to the country but the nostalgia also seems to foreclose this possibility. Or, conversely, it allows for a celebration of the country without having to actually live there. Unlike Loretta Lynn’s self-description as

“all country,” Riley laments her inability to return to being a “country girl.” 57

56 Loretta Lynn, “You’re Lookin’ At Country,” You’re Lookin’ At Country , Decca DL 75310, 1970; Lynn Anderson, “Listen to A Country Song,” Listen to A Country Song , Columbia KC 31647, 1972 . 57 Jeannie C. Riley, “Country Girl,” Jeannie C. Riley’s Greatest Hits , Plantation Records PLP-13, 1971. 203 Confronted with the evidence of massive migration and unable to locate country stars and fans within a rural social space, the resolution provided by country music fans, performers and Opry leaders was that the intrinsic country nature of its people would keep country values and traditions intact despite the migration from the country. Their argument rested on an assertion that the old homes were infused with all of the treasured qualities by their inhabitants anyway, and that country people would be able to do the same for the new spaces. Accordingly, the justifications for the Opry’s move to Opryland aligned with these sentiments. The predominant discursive resolution on the part of industry figures can be summarized in Opry hostess Carolyn Holloran’s tautological summation of the move’s impact several months after the fact: “It’s true you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy, and the same goes for Country music. Country music is wherever the soul of a Country music fan is!” 58

Holloran’s declaration hearkened back as far as the early 1960s when the commercial success of the Nashville Sound spawned country-to-city rhetoric. As I showed in Chapter Two, Slim Whitman’s liner notes to Country Songs, City Hits also claimed, “you can take the song out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the song…” The statement could conceivably cut both ways (and surely did) for country- to-city migrants who could not fit in to urban spaces and cultures. But Holloran here and

Whitman earlier unequivocally celebrated their inability to shake their “country” nature, taking it as a badge of pride.

58 Carolyn Holloran, “A Touch of Sadness: Impressions of the Last Night at the Ryman,” Country Song Roundup , September, 1974, 32. See also LaWayne Satterfield, “Opry Has New Home,” Music City News , April 1974, 6. Satterfield declared that the first show in the new place proved, “the beautiful feeling so evident in the old Ryman Auditorium could be just as wonderfully warm in a strange new building.” 204 In turn, the new Grand Ole Opry House at the Opryland complex stood in for the modern homes in which more country fans found themselves, replete with modern amenities and comforts and in need of just a touch of down-home warmth and charm.

National journalists also paralleled the Opry’s move with the relocation many country people had made in the previous decades. One article, headlined “The Gran Ole Opry

Leaves Old Homestead,” personified the music and asserted that with the Opry leaving the Ryman, “American music last night walked away from a childhood homeplace.”

In contrast with downtown which was home to nobody (and certainly not to respectable middle-class country fans), leading Opry figures emphasized the notion of the new complex as the Opry’s “home.” This sentiment found expression in a phrase commonly attributed to singer/songwriter Tom T. Hall and repeated by various other Opry stars at the time of the move: “they’re taking us out of the barn and into a home,” which crystallized the moment and the common feeling among most Opry stars. 59 The barn was to be remembered and cherished, but only as a nostalgic totem of the lifestyles which most country fans had put behind them. 60 What was important in the present moment was that the Opry was finally getting the comfortable home that the show and its fans deserved. Hall’s preference for the home over the barn resonated with a sense of past disrespect giving way to long-awaited validation shared by Opry godfather Roy Acuff.

59 Bill Hance, “Ryman Opened 82 Years Ago With a Prayer, Closes on Amen,” The Nashville Banner , March 16, 1974, 1; Carolyn Holloran, “A Touch of Sadness: Impressions of the Last Night at the Ryman,” Country Song Roundup , September, 1974, 32. 60 See Jim Duncan, “KCKC’s Editorials: ‘Getting Country Stations Out of the Barn…’” Radio and Records , December 20, 1974, 33, for an example of an author who also uses the barn metaphor to describe an older way of thinking about country music and its fans. 205 Acuff, more than any other Opry star, spoke out against the downtown neighborhood in the run up to the show’s exit to Opryland. He used the term slum, but with a second layer of meaning for the term: to describe both the deteriorating urban neighborhood of Lower Broad and the degraded position which country music itself occupied in the broader Nashville culture. He linked how most white middle-class white

Nashvillians felt about inner city African-Americans to how he believed they felt about

Opry stars and their fans. He argued, of Opryland, “It’s first class, and nothing is too good for country music … people in Nashville don’t want to come down here [meaning down by the Ryman]. They thought the Ryman was a good place for country music. A slum.” 61 His comment connected the built environment and surrounding space of the

Opry to its standing in the community and argued that the country fans deserved better

facilities (“nothing is too good for country music”) and more respect from the city of

Nashville. Acuff drew on a deep well of bitterness and defiance which country figures

had long used to defend their music and themselves against prejudice towards backwoods

hillbillies. 62

An oral history produced by the Country Music Foundation sheds some light on

Acuff’s sense of prejudice and the fact that some people certainly expected a particular

61 Jeannette Smyth, “The Grand Ole Opry Ain’t Po’ No Mo’,” The Washington Post , March 18, 1974. 62 As Country Music Association leader Joe Allison told historian Diane Pecknold much later, “Being country was like being a Jew or being black or being any other ethnic derivation that had to fight its way out of the criticism into the light. It was the same thing. I don’t know if it socially was as important, but we felt that way.” Acuff’s use of the word “slum” indicated his feeling (echoing Allison) that the city of Nashville still understood country people as a racialized minority and Acuff saw the Opry’s move to the suburbs as a key path to changing this conception. Pecknold, Selling Sound , 158. Allison interview by Pecknold, March 26, 1999. 206 performance of rusticity from the Opry. Shortly after the Opry’s move, interviewer

Patricia Hall tried to get Opry star and pianist Del Wood to agree with her that the new place lacked the character and atmosphere of the old building, suggesting perhaps that the show should never have moved. 63 Admitting that she had only been to the Opry one time,

Hall claimed that moving from the Ryman to Opryland was like “moving from a great old Victorian house into one of these new plastic apartments.” Wood promptly responded by pointing to the Ryman’s cramped dressing rooms and inadequate restroom facilities which she had to endure, suggesting that, for the performers, access to improved facilities trumped the ramshackle charm of the old Victorian place. Wood then went on to further explain her willingness to leave the Ryman behind, and provided a cogent analysis of nostalgia for childhood homes. She said:

If I went back to my old home, the furniture wouldn’t be the same. But, most of

all, the family wouldn’t be there, and this is what is so important at making

Opryland, the new Opry House, our home, is the family’s there, you know. So

what if the furniture’s different? If I could go back to my home and my

grandmother and my daddy could be there, who are both now gone, and my

mother, and we were all young again, oh, how wonderful it would be. But we

63 Del Wood, interview by Patricia Hall, March 4, 1976, Country Music Foundation Oral History Collection (County Music Foundation Library and Media Center). Similar in spirit, Joseph Sweat wrote an article in Billboard , in 1966, suggesting that part of the Opry’s appeal was actually “standing in a long ticket line, sitting on hard church pews, enduring another summer night in air-conditionless Ryman Auditiorium.” Sweat made this provocative claim despite the fact that polls of Opry visitors continually showed that the uncomfortable seats and lack of air-conditioning were seen as the main drawback of the Opry. Joseph Sweat, “Keep ‘Opry’ Out of the Space Age,” Billboard’s The World of Country Music , 1966-7 (Cincinnati: Billboard Publications, 1966), 80. 207 can’t do that. We must take what we have now, and what we have now is the

family we have left, and this is true at that new Opry House. 64

Wood whimsically invoked the possibility of re-visiting her old family experiences but

then shifted to a more realistic view of the past. Reminding Hall that country music must

live in the present and not the past, Wood suggested that the family feeling which the

Opry provided would be just as authentic, if not more authentic, at the Opry House, even

if it did remind Hall of “one of those plastic apartments.” By drawing the comparison

with her own childhood home, Wood metaphorically aligned the Opry’s geographic

history with that of many of its fans who had left behind their own childhood homes.

Wood’s sentiment was echoed in several of the Opry stars’ testimonials collected

by WSM at the time of the move. Fifteen-year Opry veteran Archie Campbell said “But

most important, amid all this change, one thing will stay the same – the people …Up in

Bull’s Gap, where I come from, there’s a saying: ‘It ain’t the house that makes a home,

it’s the people that live there. We’re just moving to a new home.” Campbell relied on the

homespun wisdom of his small town upbringing to argue for moving the Opry to a new

multimillion dollar home. Country comedian Jerry Clower further tied the move to a

larger move into the modern world: “My home is not like it used to be, my church is not

like it used to be, my car is not like it used to be – in fact, I can’t think of much that is.” 65

Opry stars continually foregrounded their own modernity and their awareness of the

changes in the world at large. In this way, the discourse produced by and about country

64 Del Wood interview . 65 “Opry Member Quotes.” Also see “Music City Hotline,” Music City News , May 1974, 6, for a ringing endorsement of the new facilities. 208 music in the early 1970s relegated agrarian lifestyles and iconography to a pleasantly remembered past. Strikingly, Campbell’s “just” minimized the specifics of a home and emphasized the people instead. Like Loudermilk’s liner notes, these testimonials addressed the fact of change and country folk entering the “modern” world but allayed any possible fears that they would lose their country character.

The discourse surrounding the opening of Opryland as the new home for the Opry revealed a push for re-thinking country’s socio-spatial place in the American imaginary.

In 1973, President Nixon tapped into this thriving country music discourse when he declared, in his proclamation of October as National Country Music Month, “now the term describes not just a locale but a state of mind and style of taste, as much beloved downtown as on the farm.” 66 Nixon’s description of country music as a state of mind referenced two spatial opposites (downtown and the farm) but ultimately lessened the importance of geography. Nixon’s support for the ideology of the Opry reached its ultimate expression when he visited the new Opry House on its opening night, officially

endorsing the new location whereas the Ryman had never hosted such a prestigious Opry

visitor. Nixon’s visit (only five months before his resignation) was seen by national

journalists and politicos to be a trip to the one of the few places where he would still

receive a warm reception, and it was quite warm indeed. Nixon took the stage, played

two songs on the piano, and bantered with Roy Acuff. The industry press coverage

trumpeted Nixon’s visit as further proof that country had arrived and been validated.

The validation manifested itself in larger shifts within pop music as well. Just

months after the Opry moved to Opryland, a few disgruntled veteran country stars

66 “National Country Music Month,” CMA Close-Up , November 1973, 12. 209 revolted against the pop-minded Country Music Association establishment and formed the Association of Country Entertainers. The revolt was sparked by Australian pop star

Olivia Newton-John’s successes at the Country Music Association awards that year. ACE charged that songs billed as country music no longer employed the stylistic hallmarks of true country music nor rooted their songs in the geographic or class-specific country milieu. 67

The traditionalist backlash was part of a long cycle of tension between tradition

and change within country music, but the fact that Newton-John, and other pop stars such

as Kenny Rogers, had started out in pop and looked to align themselves with the country

label was striking. For so many years country artists had tried (and often succeeded) to

cross over into the pop charts; by the mid-1970s, pop stars were trying (and often

succeeding) to cross over into the country charts.

I close this chapter with one last extended passage from Paul Hemphill’s 1974

book on the “vanishing” Good Old Boys. I use this quote to illuminate the kind of

discourse which country music figures were continually negotiating with and fighting

against, even as the industry achieved the level of success which many of its fans and

performers had desired for decades. In 1974, the year of the Opry’s move to Opryland, in

the introduction to his collection of essays on the “new South,” The Good Old Boys , Paul

Hemphill invoked a sea of good old boys in the suburbs, but not nearly as genially as

Loudermilk did:

67 Kim Simpson, “Country Radio‘s Growing Pains in the Music Trades, 1967- 1977,” American Music 27, no. 4 (Winter 2009), 509. 210 But what depresses me, as the South finally joins the Union, is that little of what

was distinctive and good has been retained. The inevitable progress has put us

into decent houses and fed our poor and educated us and even made us more

tolerant of black people – however pragmatically – but it has also made us talk

and act and dress and love and hate just like the people in, say, Denver. The good

old boys are out in the suburbs now, living in identical houses and shopping at the

K-Mart and listening to Glen Campbell (Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb are too tacky

now) and hiding their racism behind code words. They have forfeited their style

and their spirit, traded it all in on a color TV and Styrofoam beams for the den,

and I find them about as exciting as reformed alcoholics. 68

Hemphill was no country insider. He claimed to only like the music of Merle Haggard

and generally wrote as if he considered everything else to be a commercial “sell out.” As

many other commentators did, Hemphill realized the fact of demographic change;

however, unlike numerous industry voices, Hemphill was not so easily convinced that

country folk remained country folk in the suburbs. He acknowledged, almost grudgingly,

that poverty and racism had been alleviated to a degree, but at the expense of the colorful

and entertaining characters the South used to produce. Hemphill explicitly rejected

Loudermilk’s assertion that country people could still retain their identity in the suburbs

(equating the suburbs with the kind of conformity against which Hemphill’s “good old

68 Paul Hemphill, The Good Old Boys (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 13. 211 boys” fought), claiming they were not and could no longer be the colorful, interesting, characters he had grown to love.

Country was caught in a bind, one that it still has not escaped. On the one hand, the working-class particularity of country and its tropes differentiated it from other genres and provided the authenticity which other genres could not: the music provided both insight into the lives of working Americans as well as a welcome musical product for those Americans to consume and share. But on the other hand, for authors like Hemphill, country people were not allowed to be anything else, to modernize with the rest of the country and move into the suburban middle class.

Barbara Ching has argued that many observers persist in wanting country music to stay in the country. She writes:

commentators often hope that the ‘damned nasal, whiny and scratchy and corny’

stuff won’t disappear, not necessarily because they like it, but because it validates

their own sophistication by making such a marked contrast … this notion of

‘authenticity’ has little grounding in any contemporary reality; rather, it provides

a way of imagining that hard country music production and consumption prove

that someone remains blissfully ignorant of whatever massive changes and

cultural imperatives the rest of us struggle with.” 69

Ching argues that hard country (a subgenre of country which resisted the stylistic changes

of the Nashville Sound and tends lyrically to addresses harder issues of class tension)

understands this duality and foregrounds country’s marked status. It is not incidental,

69 Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. 212 then, that hard country flourished in the 1970s, an era of country’s supposed embrace by the mainstream. But the core components of the industry, not just the margins of hard country, understood this paradigm and hoped to prove that they were not ignorant, and were in fact a key part of, those “massive changes and cultural imperatives” which other

Americans were struggling with in the 1960s and 1970s, the expansion of the middle class and the growth of the suburbs.

Conclusion

As early as the 1950s, the beginnings of the Nashville Sound had lead some traditionalist fans to publicly question whether the combination of massive migration from the country to the city and the synchronous changes in the production and sound of country music were not taking the genre too far from its roots and its original rural working-class fan base. These fans argued that country music belonged to rural working people and equated the new sonic and stylistic changes with the influence of upper-class city people who were interested in country music only for its commercial possibilities.

The Opry’s move from downtown to the suburbs represented yet another rejection of country music’s past, though this time the perceived spatial markers of this corruption were not urban but suburban. The industry responded by arguing that the music was still country music and that their fans were still “ordinary people,” despite the tony new zip code. As Music Row leaders did in rebutting the charges of excessive commercialism in the 1960s, the Opry’s representatives painted Opryland as a much deserved result of country’s popular and artistic success and a newly appropriate setting for the more modern incarnations of country music and its fans. Given the Opry’s deeper attachment

213 to country music’s rural roots, this ideological shift was more striking than it had been with the Nashville Sound proponents in the previous decade.

In responding to questions about the price and accessibility of the new park,

Nashville mayor Beverly Briley told a reporter, “The music will still sell itself due to its tradition as music of the people. I don’t think the move or increased cost will affect the

Opry. I don’t think that poorer people were ever the support of the Opry; so attendance will not change.” 70 This comment was particularly jarring, given that various imagined

incarnations of the “common folk” were almost always cited as the backbone of country

music, in terms of both its performers and its fans. Briley simultaneously argued that

country had been the music of “the people” while arguing that “poorer people” never

comprised the Opry’s fan base. Briley’s comment drew boundaries around the common

default country fan identity: “the people,” asserting that the poorer folks did not belong.

This chapter has shown that the question of just who the common folk were (and where

they lived) , permeated debates about the current and future state of country music, and

the construction of Opryland helped to make Briley’s language make sense.

Briley’s tendentiously ambiguous use of the popular referring expression “the

people,” in tandem with the spatial understanding of country’s new home in the suburbs,

allowed for a generic invocation of common folk with implicit race and class

identifications. While there was still much debate and division on the issue of whether

Nashville’s form of country music was still “country” enough, the Orpy’s move to

Opryland was part of a larger discursive argument made by the country music industry

70 C.D. Jaco, “A change of address, a change of image for country music’s Mecca,” The Chicago Tribune , March 10, 1974, 6. 214 that the current modern middle-class instantiation could both remain true to the authentic spirit of country music and appeal to millions of mainstream Americans. Despite some resistance, the strategy worked. The construction of Opryland brought a sense that country music had finally arrived; it became the spatial and infrastructural marker of achievement and national respect which Music City Boulevard was supposed to become but never did.

215 Conclusion

My dissertation has shown that a major transformation in the sound and ideology

of one of the most ubiquitous American music genres (moving “country” out of the

country) intersected with a powerful matrix of ideas about cities and suburbs that had

shaped the social and political fabric of the nation throughout the twentieth century.

Country music ultimately looked to link itself with the American suburbs instead of the

cities because, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the suburban association with

normative white middle-class status stood in the starkest contrast to the pervasive

stereotype of “poor rural hillbillies” that country stars, producers, and fans had been

trying to evade for over three decades. In the years since 1974, country music has

continued to respond and contribute to larger shifts in the political economy and cultural

understanding of urban and suburban spaces.

In 1994, twenty years after the last Opry performance in the old “Mother Church”

of country music, Gaylord Entertainment completed an extensive program of renovation

and improvement for the Ryman Auditorium downtown. 1 For two decades the old building had only hosted scattered historical tours, and the neighborhood’s collection of drinking dens, adult theatres, and massage parlors, what Roy Acuff referred to as “all

1 In 1982, American General bought out National Life and Accident Insurance Company. They bought the insurance company but did not want any of the Opry properties and found a buyer for the whole package in Gaylord Entertainment, an Oklahoma-based mall and theme park developer. Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 237-240. 216 manner of sin,” had only expanded in the years after the Opry’s departure. 2 Downtown

and Lower Broad, though still beset by “seedy” bars and adult entertainment providers,

was beginning a major transformation however. The Nashville Convention Center and

adjoining hotel, completed in 1987, sparked a series of redevelopments and new retail

and service businesses downtown. 3

Rather than leading the charge in revitalizing Nashville’s downtown area earlier in the decade, Gaylord waited out the changes and only returned to Lower Broad when the neighborhood was already back on the rise. But still, rather than simply relying on already existing momentum, Gaylord went one step further and built the country-themed

Wildhorse Saloon out of empty warehouse space only three blocks from the Ryman, and timed the Saloon’s opening to coincide with the auditorium’s re-opening. The Wildhorse facility featured a country music dance club, performance hall, restaurant, and television production facility: a far cry from the old fashioned simplicity of Tootsie’s Orchid

Lounge. Gaylord began renting out the Ryman’s renovated space for a variety of events several nights at week. After the venue had operated as a general performance space for

2 Historic Nashville, Inc., “Downtown Survey,” Nashville Public Library Special Collections. See also Freeman Webb Co. Realtors, “Map of Downtown Nashville,” 1979, Nashville Public Library Map Collection. In 1979, there were at least five adult establishments within a block of the Ryman. 3 The city’s initial investment in the convention center and use of the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency to establish private/public partnerships generated much of the increased development. Ronald M. Lustig and Rene Alexenko Evans, “Nashville Develops a Master Plan for Entertainment to Drive the Arts and Culture,” in Cities and The Arts: A Handbook for Renewal, edited by Roger L. Kemp, 140-6 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004). See also Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 195-201, for a broader discussion of downtown development in the 1980s, the “creative destruction” built into development cycles, and the connection between a city’s fiscal health and successful gentrification. 217 three years, the Opry experimented with returning to the Ryman during the winter in the late 1990s.

This tradition continues today, and from November to February the Opry broadcasts out of the Ryman, just as it did thirty-five years earlier. The adult establishments are gone and in their place are a combination of national chain bars and restaurants (Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood), locally owned “honky tonks” catering to Nashville’s many tourists as well as local music fans, and modern condo and office developments. In 2002, the Country Music Hall of Fame relocated to an expensive new building a block away from the Ryman. As it turned out, “the city” was appropriate enough for country music after all, just not in the particular historical moment of the

1970s.

Changes were afoot out at Opryland as well. Declining attendance numbers led

Gaylord to close down the theme park piece of the complex in 1997 and instead develop an outlet shopping mall. They retained the hotel and the Grand Ole Opry House, which now sits across a vast parking lot from a sprawling array of national chain stores and fast food restaurants. 4 Charges that Opryland USA felt like crass commercialism killing the

Opry’s unique charm in the 1970s now seem quaint compared to the total environment of retail available there now, and the departed amusement park itself has become the treasured memory in many fans’ minds.

Despite country music’s overwhelming reliance on rural tropes, by the late 1960s and early 1970s the generally positive presentation of rural life was starting to give way to an awareness that their fan base was not as attached to the actual spaces and lifestyles

4 Havighurst, 244 . 218 of the country itself. In the 1960s this awareness had begun to permeate the discourse and advertisements, liner notes, lyrics, and industry public relations materials all imagined both country music and country fans taking up residence in urban spaces across the country. But by the 1970s, these conceptions and depictions no longer explicitly positioned the music and its fans as urban. Instead, they relied on a de-territorialized absence of place.

In the early 1990s, this trend culminated in the meteoric rise of country star Garth

Brooks. Brooks wore cowboy hats and idolized John Wayne, but made no effort to present himself as a true country boy (and no one really expected him to). He put on elaborate stage shows befitting a stadium rock band and reveled in his international fame and success. Like Sarah Colley’s performance of Minnie Pearl, Brooks took care with his

“costume” of cowboy boots, wrangler jeans, and starched shirts. As journalist Bruce

Feiler has pointed out, Brooks’ appeal came from his ability to sound like the place where he came from, but that place was not the typical rural community which had birthed older country stars. In fact, Brooks had grown up in a small suburb of Oklahoma City, Yukon, a municipality whose population doubled between 1970 and 1972 due to the mandatory busing of schoolchildren in Oklahoma City proper. 5 As Feiler wrote with glee, “it was only fitting that the emblem for this Nashville – the New Nashville as it would be called

– would be a man from Oklahoma who had little in common with the social pedigree of

Sarah or the rural charm of Minnie, yet whose suburban, all-American background would become the perfect symbol for the new middle-class ascendancy in the South, as well as

5 Bruce Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 110. 219 America.” 6 Feiler did not “expose” Brooks’ middle-class roots or wonder about the irony of his upbringing. By the early 1990s, it was a matter of course that country’s biggest star would be from the suburbs.

Feiler’s sweeping evaluation presented Brooks’ rise as a major factor in country music’s current commercial renaissance. But rather than thinking of Brooks’ phenomenal success as a factor in country’s rise, I prefer to think that country’s increasing power over the preceding decades in fact made his success possible. This dissertation argues that the country music industry over the course of several decades produced spatial engagements and deployed ideas about space as part of a larger strategy to shift the common associations attached to the music, to forge a new identity which blended elements of the older rustic hillbilly but situated the music in modern economies and spaces. Whereas other culture industries have been able to proceed with an unmarked or unquestionably urban place identity, country music more emphatically used geography and place to fight rustic assumptions (while simultaneously deriving social capital from its associations with the positive aspects or markers of rusticity). By the final quarter of the twentieth century, country music no longer lived in the country and, for the most part, the genre’s fans, performers, producers and writers had made their peace with that fact.

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Periodicals

Afro-American American Magazine Billboard Broadcasting Chicago Defender Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor CMA Close-Up Collier’s Coronet Country Music Reporter Country Music Who’s Who Country Music World Country News and Views: Past and Present in Country Music Country Song Roundup Daily Defender Music City News The Music Reporter

228 Nashville! The Nashville Banner The Nashville Commentator Nashville Globe and Independent Nashville Magazine The Nashville Tennessean The Nation The National Real Estate Investor National Review Nation’s Business New Pittsburgh Courier New York Amsterdam News The New York Times The New Yorker Newsweek Pickin’ Pickin’ and Singin’ News Radio and Records The Reporter The Saturday Evening Post Sponsor Time Variety The Washington Post