Country Music's Cultural Journey

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 ii © Copyright 2011 by Jeremy Colin Hill All rights reserved 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.

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