Jost Hendrik Cornelius Burfeind Wilhelmplatz 6 24116 Kiel
E-Mail: [email protected] Telefon: 01520–2667189 Matrikelnummer: 1014350
“THAT BLACK SPECK SOUND JUST LIKE A REDNECK”:
BLACK COUNTRY MUSIC(S) AND THE
(RE-)MAKING OF RACE AND GENRE
MASTERARBEIT im Fach „English and American Literatures, Cultures, and Media” mit dem Abschlussziel Master of Arts der Philosophischen Fakultät der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
vorgelegt von Hendrik Burfeind
Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Christian Huck Zweitgutachter: Dr. Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich
Kiel im April 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction 1
2. Theoretical Framework 2.1 Race, Racialization, and Ideology 8 2.2 Genre and Crossover 10 2.3 Articulation and Genre 15 2.4 On Hijacks, Covers, and Versions 16
3. “Just Out of Reach”: Locating the Soul/Country Binary 3.1 The South and the Geography of Genre(s) 19 3.2 Richard Nixon, “Okie from Muskogee,” and the Politics of Country Music 22 3.3 The ‘Segregation of Sound’ and the ‘Common Stock’ 25 3.4 Charting Success; Or, the Segregation of Sound, Continued 28
4. Analysis, Pt. 1: Rhythm and Country 4.1 “I’ve Always Been Country”: The Making of an Alternative Tradition 31 4.2 Country Music and the Birth of Soul 35 4.3 The Impossibility of Black Country 37 4.4 Modern Sounds and the Same Old Song 39 4.5 Interlude: Race and Genre in the Early 1960s 44 4.6 Country-Soul Flourishes 46
5. Analysis, Pt. 2: Country-Soul 5.1 “Country Music Now Interracial” 48 5.2 Crossover at the Outskirts of Town 50 5.3 Introducing Soul Country 53 5.4 “The Chokin’ Kind” Explores New Territory 57 5.5 “Blacks Sing Country Music” 60 5.6 “Wherever You Go, It’s Simon Country” 64
6. Analysis, Pt. 3: Black Country 6.1 “Country Music Gets Soul”: Linda Martell 67 6.2 “I Wanna Go Country”: Otis Williams 70 6.3 The Return of the Country Repressed: Stoney Edwards 73 6.4 “Black Speck”: O.B. McClinton 80
7. Conclusion and Outlook 87
Appendix Discography a Bibliography c Deutschsprachige Zusammenfassung der Arbeit o Erklärung s 1. INTRODUCTION
You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls and two watermelons in his back pockets, and they will call him R&B. You can take a white guy in a pinstripe suit who has never seen a cotton field, take him into Nashville right out of a subway in Manhattan, and they will call him country.1
In this infamous statement from 1986, country musician O.B. McClinton draws critical attention to the racial politics of American popular music. As one of the most long-stand- ing African American performers in country music, McClinton experienced first-hand the seemingly commonsensical classification of artists according to their ‘race.’ It is this ap- parent obviousness that his sarcastic comment aims at. While country music is famously invested in authenticity and its own countryness, it is often ambiguous about what that means, i.e. who gets to be regarded as country and in what way. As McClinton’s comment implies, and as country music history since at least the early 1960s has suggested, it is easier for the genre to transcend class and regional boundaries (pointedly symbolized by McClinton’s white-collar New Yorker) than it is to deconstruct its overwhelming white- ness. Although many of the genre’s proponents have long claimed country music to be open to change, its racial politics seem to be rather rigid. A look at two recent examples will illustrate that even today discussions surrounding the topic are characterized by such contradictions. In September 2019, famed documentarian Ken Burns debuted his latest film. While his earlier works were concerned with popular topics like the Civil War, the Vi- etnam War, baseball, and jazz, his most recent endeavor, Country Music, tackles a musi- cal genre that rarely receives such extended treatment.2 At 16 hours in length, the docu- mentary introduces its audience to the cornerstones of the genre’s almost 100-year re- cording history. Yet, some viewers were quick to point out that Burns tells the story of a genre that has frequently courted controversy in a way that leaves out critical voices. Thus, the documentary – whose interviewees are mostly country musicians, songwriters, and producers – can also be seen as an exposé of the narratives that the country music industry likes to tell about itself. Among these is its relation to the issue of ‘race.’ Country Music addresses, for example, the role of segregation in the genre’s commercial birth, the Afri- can American mentors of some of its most celebrated artists, and the difficult rise to fame of African American singer Charley Pride in the late 1960s. However, it hardly engages with the common perception of these topics as being mostly problematic or significant from a historical perspective. Consequently, Pride’s story appears to highlight country music’s openness to change while simultaneously affirming its alleged rootedness in
1 Quoted in Gerry Wood, “Nashville Scene,” Billboard (November 15, 1986): 34–35, 35. 2 Country Music, dir. Ken Burns (PBS, 2019). 1 white, working-class experience. A few months before the release of Burns’s documentary, country music had found itself at the center of a discussion that had thrown such assumptions into relief when a song by a previously unknown rapper from Georgia, Lil Nas X, rocketed to the Top 20 of Billboard’s country charts. Featuring straightforward lyrics full of traditional country imagery set to a loping trap beat, “Old Town Road” was promptly ejected from the charts based on its supposedly non-country music.3 The following months produced a number of articles pointing out the allegedly racist nature of the decision, emphasizing the number of white artists who had successfully charted with similar musical hybrids. Although some of these articles drew attention to the arbitrariness on which our percep- tion of the world of music – through the lens of genre – is often based, the decision was mostly seen as a result of the bigotry of the country music industry. Yet, as Joshua Clover points out in a discussion of “Old Town Road,” genres are already at once musicological, ideological, and market categories. The idea that sounds make genres and the idea that genres have worldviews are not mutually exclusive, and much of the non-conscious work of genre goes to aligning these two ideas until they seem like one, allowing the resulting products to seek their proper markets in a way that seems natural.4
Clover indicates how the juxtaposition offered by Lil Nas X, as well as the discussion it prompted, can help to understand the complicated terrain of genre and ‘race.’ While the last decade has seen more African American artists top the country charts than any time before, it is not certain that this has actually changed the genre, or in what way. After all, the current wave of African American country singers that appeared in the wake of Darius Rucker’s first hit in 2008 is not without historical parallel.5 Charley Pride’s rise to fame in the late 1960s was (and, as Burns’s Country Music shows, continues to be) seen as opening the gates for non-white people to perform country music. Indeed, as I will argue, this historical conjuncture appears especially instructive to explore the complex linkages between ‘race’ and genre. More so than the current opposition between country and rap, that era’s popular dichotomy of country versus soul music illustrates, for example, the significant overlap between parts of these genres as well as the processes by which they were obscured. In this respect, it is noteworthy that around the same time that African American artists started to be a continuous (although still unusual) presence on the coun- try music charts, the genre’s popular perception – and its assumed politics – tilted toward
3 Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, “Lil Nas’ song was removed from Billboard for not being ‘country’ enough. But who gets to decide categories?” The Guardian (April 2, 2019). Online:
6 J. Lester Feder, “‘Song of the South’: Country Music, Race, Region, and the Politics of Culture 1920– 1974” (PhD. diss. University of California, 2006), 152–225. 7 Although there are stylistic differences between R&B and soul, my analysis understands these terms in their original usage as the umbrella term for contemporary African American popular music. David Brackett shows that it was “by the latter half of 1968 that ‘soul’ was […] on its way to becoming the de facto term for black popular music.” David Brackett, Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 271. 8 In accordance with the often ambiguous differentiation of country music and R&B/soul at the time, my analysis will adopt a rather utilitarian definition of what constitutes a country song, namely a song that was first performed (or written) by a musician (or songwriter) working in the country music genre and that has thus become identified as such. Although many of the musicians in the final part of my analysis will address topics like rural life, manual labor, and the South, most popular country songs back then – including those covered by R&B and soul artists – were concerned with themes of love and heartbreak. Cf. Rob Bowman, “Soul,” In Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World 8, Pt. 3: Genres, ed. David Horn (New York: Continuum, 2012), 439–51, 446. 9 This should not imply that all of them were actually country artists. Instead, the designation serves as an act of reclamation that seeks to center the multifaceted ways in which African American performers worked with country music. Since discussions about the racial politics of country and R&B/soul are 3 first and second part of my analysis, musicians qualified as R&B or soul whose recordings show an obvious connection to country music. As mentioned above, some of these – like Candi Staton or Joe Simon – actually had some of their most successful entries on the R&B/soul charts with covers of country songs.10 In the third part my focus will be on African American performers who, in the wake of Charley Pride’s success, became pop- ular country artists themselves. Here, I will analyze the output of, among others, Linda Martell and O.B. McClinton.11 These artists in different ways defy the logic of their so- cially sanctioned musical expressions, thus providing the opportunity to question the ide- ological work that narratives about genre perform. My analysis will cover a time frame that stretches from the 1950s, where scholars generally see the beginnings of such R&B/country crossovers, until the mid-1970s, when the first wave of black country sub- sided. In doing so, I will draw attention to both the continuity of African American en- gagements with country music as well as their development over time. In the first chapter, I will provide a brief introduction to significant theoretical concepts, most importantly ‘race’ and genre. The next chapter will look into the various connections between R&B or soul and country music. These include historical and geo- graphical factors but are also related to the social composition of their respective or even shared audiences. In addition, it will consider the ideological aversions that were increas- ingly informing popular discourse during the period under consideration. Finally, chap- ters four to six will be concerned with my main analysis. Here, I will examine selected musical recordings and their reception in the trade magazines Billboard and Cash Box. In doing so, I will also take into account other materials that framed these releases, such as liner notes and album artworks (when available)12. To demonstrate that neither form of black country music that I analyze was a mere fringe phenomenon but indeed part of popular culture, I have chosen to mostly discuss artists who had success on national popularity charts. While there certainly are different
very much structured in the alleged binaries of ‘black’ and ‘white,’ I will continue to use these terms. It is one of the aims of this thesis, however, to critically examine how such racialized ascriptions inform the understanding of musical genre. 10 Although quite a few of these artists were female, critical reception has mostly focused on male musi- cians. This bias also affects the range of available source material. Unfortunately, an in-depth analysis of this issue lies outside the scope of this thesis. 11 I have decided to not include Charley Pride since he has – by virtue of being by far the most successful African American country singer – received so much attention as the (black) exception that proves the (white) rule that it seems difficult to deconstruct this narrative by focusing on him once again. In addi- tion, Pride has cultivated a rather smooth public image that includes being reticent about discussing the role of ‘race’ in his career, both in his music and otherwise. Cf. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 133–138; Cf. Feder, “Song of the South,” 152–171. 12 At least until the late 1960s, the primary release format for both soul and country music was arguably still the single, with albums often being little more than collections of previously released singles and some newly recorded material. 4 indicators to measure popularity, charts are arguably the most objectively reliable when working at a distance of several decades from the time in question.13 I have decided to mainly use the numbers provided by Billboard since they are not only the most widely available but probably the most consistently popular reference point for industry employ- ees, scholars, and fans.14 Occasionally, they will be supplemented by data from its com- petitor Cash Box.15 In the third part of my analysis, the aforementioned criteria only allow for a small selection of artists. In the decade following Charley Pride’s first Top 10 hits in 1967, no more than a handful of African American artists repeatedly made the Top 100 of Billboard’s country charts. In the first and second part, however, the lines are not clear- cut. Since what I examine here is best described as a latent – but long-running and wide- spread – tendency, there is a wealth of material that can be restricted less easily. Thus, my selection is influenced by chart performance but also takes into account recordings whose historical importance outweighs or possibly even explains its lack of commercial success. The last two decades have seen a wealth of critical studies discussing the history of popular music in the United States. Karl Hagstrom Miller and Ronald Radano, for example, have published works about the consolidation of race as a constitutive category in recording history.16 Miller’s Segregating Sound has become a particularly important touchstone for country, soul, and blues scholars. Here, he shows how the music industry in the 1920s laid the groundwork for a racialized perspective on genre with its creation of the ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ categories. Miller’s argument finds an important supplement in
13 Granted, this approach privileges performers who managed to release recordings that, in turn, found a commercial audience. This means that, for example, black country musicians who were not successful as recording artists but steadily attracted live audiences as well as non-professional performers receive less attention, although their histories are certainly worthy of a more sustained analysis. Unfortunately, this lies outside the parameters set for this thesis. 14 Joel Whitburn’s books are considered a standard reference and are still regularly updated. All Billboard chart data in this thesis is based on Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn’s Top Country Singles, 1944–1993 (Menomonee Falls: Record Research, 1994) as well as Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles, 1942–1988 (Menomonee Falls: Record Research, 1988). 15 As John Broven points out, “Essentially, Billboard was the elitist organ patronized by the major labels, whereas Cash Box was the young upstart endorsed by the independent labels.” (187) Between them, the two publications “have proved to be invaluable research tools for music historians.” (189) Since the artists that I analyze recorded for major as well as independent labels, it appears fruitful to incorporate both perspectives. Cf. John Broven, Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ‘n’ Roll Pioneers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Relevant issues of both magazines are ar- chived online courtesy of the website American Radio History, maintained by ex-broadcaster David Gleason. See American Radio History, “Billboard Magazine: 1930 to 2016,” Online:
17 Christopher A. Waterman, “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina,’ and the Excluded Middle,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, eds. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 167–205. 18 Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, eds., A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Jack- son: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). 19 Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 20 Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, 1 (January 2008): 73–100. 21 Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 22 Hughes, Country Soul. 6 of the topic have popularized, especially regarding the redemptive possibilities of inter- racial music-making. At the same time, it is characterized by an unfortunate lack of the- orizing regarding his main field of analysis, the connection between genre and ‘race.’ This caveat also applies to Hughes’s article on O.B. McClinton and the role of ‘race’ in 1970s country music, an otherwise invaluable historical exploration that features a wealth of material.23 Published as part of the edited collection The Honky Tonk on the Left – which focuses on “progressive thought in country music” – it shows, however, the many possibilities for future analyses. This book also includes other contributions that illumi- nate the complicated relationship of country (and soul) music to ‘race.’ Of these, Nadine Hubbs’s entry on “cross-marginal solidarity in country music of the long seventies”24 is particularly insightful. Here, Hubbs explores those alliances in country music that com- monsensical perceptions of the genre usually obscure. Diane Pecknold’s article on Linda Martell’s short but highly symbolic career is equally helpful not least because it is theo- retically grounded.25 This is noteworthy since much of the work in country music studies is concerned with uncovering lost histories or revising established ones. As Olivia Carter Mather’s overview “Race in Country Music Scholarship” argues, this is often accompa- nied by a lack of engagement with the theoretical work of other disciplines (critical race studies, gender studies, or even cultural studies at large).26 Consequently, it is one of the aims of this thesis to not only shine a light on an often under-appreciated part of American popular culture but also to advance theoretical engagement with this topic. Much of the general information on the artists examined in this study comes from Barney Hoskyns’s groundbreaking Say It One Time for the Brokenhearted, first published in 1987.27 While its intent and methodology are in many ways problematic, the book re- mains the main source on the cross-pollination of soul and country music.28 In addition,
23 Charles L. Hughes, “‘I’m the Other One’: O.B. McClinton and the Racial Politics of Country Music in the 1970s,” in The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music, ed. Mark Allan Jackson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 121–46. 24 Nadine Hubbs, “‘Them’s My Kind of People’: Cross-Marginal Solidarity in Country Music of the Long Seventies,” in The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music, ed. Mark Allan Jackson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 170–89. 25 Diane Pecknold, “Negotiating Gender, Race, and Class in Post-Civil Rights Country Music: How Linda Martell and Jeannie C. Riley Stormed the Plantation,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Es- says in Gender and Country Music, eds. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (Jackson: Univer- sity Press of Mississippi, 2016), 146–65. 26 ..Olivia Carter Mather, “Race in Country Music Scholarship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Country Music, ed. Travis D. Stimeling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 327–354, 341. 27 Barney Hoskyns, Say It One Time for the Brokenhearted: Country Soul in the American South, rev. and expanded edition (Chicago: BMG, 2018 [1987]). 28 In chronicling this apparently interracial exchange, Hoskyns rests most of his research on interviews with white musicians and producers. This fosters some rather simplistic arguments which, as Hughes critically summarizes, posit that “southern soul helped redeem the white South from its racist past” and that “southern studios were a transcendent space in which racial conflict or even identity did not exist.” Hughes, Country Soul, 5. 7 the field of black country historiography has benefited greatly from Pamela E. Foster’s work, who has self-published a substantial volume on the numerous African American engagements with country music.29 While Foster’s encyclopedic approach can arguably be characterized as that of an impressively knowledgeable fan, her collection provides a number of impulses to rethink what country music is. In addition to these books, some artists have also received the occasional profile in a music magazine or, very rarely, a full-length biography.30 Most of the work in popularizing the interplay between country and soul music has arguably been done in the field of CD reissues. The seminal effort here is the box set From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music, which was released in 1998 to accompany an exhibit by the Country Music Foundation. This release, long out of print, has since then been supplemented by a number of compilations, most famously on the German Trikont and the British Ace Records labels.31
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1 Race, Racialization, and Ideology It seems impossible to recapitulate the many views and observations of theorists, activists, and others regarding the category of ‘race’ and the concomitant processes of racialization. Instead, this chapter will provide a brief synthesis of the premises that have most obvi- ously influenced the way I approached my analysis. Since at least the 1990s, the fact that ‘race’ does not have any biological grounding and is therefore a social construct has be- come widely acknowledged not only in the social sciences but in popular discourse as well.32 Yet, it is still common to hear people casually refer to something like ‘black music.’ Even scholarly studies often commit the fallacy of acknowledging ‘race’ as a social con- struct while at the same time reiterating it as a regular category for their analyses. This is partly due to the fact that the terrain of racial essentialism has (mostly) shifted from the biological to the cultural. Thus, it is possible to accept the aforementioned premises while
29 Pamela E. Foster, My Country: The African Diaspora’s Country Music Heritage (Nashville: My Country, 1998). Her second work, My Country, too: The Other Black Music (Nashville: My Country, 2000) is a revised and shortened version of the former. 30 The rare example of the latter is Richard Younger’s Get a Shot of Rhythm and Blues: The Arthur Alex- ander Story (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000). Charles L. Hughes also quotes from an autobiography by O.B. McClinton that was published in the early 1990s but seems impossible to track down now. O.B. McClinton and Gerry Wood, Hard Way to Go: The O.B. McClinton Autobiography (Key West: Gerry Wood, 1991). 31 Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country (2004) and More Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country (2008) on Trikont as well as Behind Closed Doors: Where Country Meets Soul (2012), Sweet Dreams: Where Country Meets Soul 2 (2013), Cold Cold Heart: Where Country Meets Soul 3 (2014) and Out of Left Field: Where Soul Meets Country (2016) on Ace Records and its Kent/Soul subsidiary. 32 Other ascriptive hierarchies like class, gender, sexuality, age, or (dis)ability also play an important role in analyzing cultural phenomena. Although I will engage with some of these in the course of this thesis, the main focus in my analysis is the topic of ‘race.’ 8 still holding on to the idea of an essential core of a given demographic that is allegedly reflected in ‘their’ cultural products, e.g. music. In addition, the notion that race is not ‘real’ does not mean that it is without effects. But while the racism that is at the root of such racial thinking is now condemned by many, it is often perceived as merely an individual flaw. At other times, the acknowledgment of its systemic character is relegated to the political or economic sphere. On the other hand, the way that ‘race’ fundamentally informs the terrain of everyday life has arguably re- ceived less attention. Yet, such ordinary manifestations of racial thinking – like the idea that ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race music’ correspond to specific groups of people – have had a profound influence on enforcing racial segregation in the music industry. It has also al- lowed the logic of early 20th century segregation to enter (musical) common sense in the guise of genre, naturalizing racist thinking in a way that makes it difficult to perceive it as such.33 As a consequence, the seemingly innocent juxtaposition of soul and country music appears to merely reflect ‘reality,’ i.e. segmentations that are already in place. For this reason, it is necessary to examine these genres – as Diane Pecknold argues regarding country music – as “processes by which race is constituted.”34 The process by which ‘race’ is manifested in everyday life has variously been described and analyzed as “racialization,” “racial formation,”35 or “racecraft.”36 The last term, coined by Karen E. Fields and Barbara Fields, “highlights the ability of pre- or non- scientific modes of thought to hijack the minds of the scientifically literate.”37 As Barbara Fields points out, it is imperative to remember that “[r]ace is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons.”38 For Fields, ideology does not denote a kind of ‘false consciousness’ that is akin to a veil to be lifted. Instead, she defines it as a set of social practices, the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the so- cial reality that they live and create from day to day [...] It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume [...] As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.39
33 Cf. Miller, Segregating Sound, 6–11, 119. 34 Diane Pecknold, “Introduction: Country Music and Racial Formation,” in Hidden in the Mix: The Afri- can American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–15, 2. 35 See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2015 [1986]). 36 Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014). My analysis mostly draws on Barbara Fields’s formative “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” originally published in New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990), 95–115. All quotes refer to Racecraft. 37 Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 5–6. 38 Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 121. 39 Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 134 (emphasis added). 9
Here, Fields emphasizes the repetitive, ritualistic character of ideology. She also explic- itly criticizes those who have argued that race is able to “[take] on a life of its own,” saying that “[n]othing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain.”40 As Chris Chen summarizes, “Simply put, ‘race’ is the consequence and not the cause of racial ascription or raciali- sation processes which justify historically asymmetrical power relationships through ref- erence to phenotypical characteristics and ancestry.”41 In order to understand how this process operates, however, it is necessary to make visible the often quite mundane forms it has taken on throughout its history – as in the racially informed categorization of pop- ular music.
2.2 Genre, Crossover, and the Mainstream The concept of ‘genre’ occupies an important place in the vocabulary that is routinely used to talk about music. The way we make sense of music frequently relies on these categories. One could argue, for example, that genres help to name what we like, therefore enabling us to seek out new, similar music. Processes of identity formation, in which music often plays a role, likewise depend on such categorizations. This also suggests that genres are fundamentally exclusive. While it seems intuitive that this is merely a logical consequence of the similarities between certain artists, thus making genres mostly a mu- sicological phenomenon, this neglects how genres came into being and how they were (and still are) being employed. At this point, it is useful to go back to Clover’s description of genres as “already at once musicological, ideological, and market categories.”42 While this might seem ob- vious to scholars of popular music, the systematic study of genre has received compara- tively little attention in the field.43 Its starting point is usually located in the publication of two articles by Franco Fabbri in 1982.44 Here, Fabbri lays out a theory that has in many ways set the terrain for later scholars.45 He argues that “a musical genre is a set of musical
40 Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 147. 41 Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” End- notes 3 (2013). Online:
This list already points towards both the strengths and weaknesses of Fabbri’s approach. On the one hand, it becomes clear that a genre cannot be defined by a mere description of its musical or lyrical contents. In addition, David Brackett emphasizes that although Fabbri “divides the musical and the social into separate categories for heuristic purposes” he nevertheless sees them as “indivisible.”49 On the other hand, Fabbri’s focus on rules and his introduction of the concept of a “hyper-rule,”50 which functions like an overarch- ing genre ideology, has been criticized as reinforcing a hierarchical and static approach.51 While criticism of the hyper-rule is certainly justified, Brackett convincingly argues that Fabbri understands the five rules as mere guidelines (which are possibly fluid). According to Brackett, Fabbri stresses their interconnectedness as well as their relative importance in different genres.52 It has also been suggested that Fabbri is not sufficiently attentive to audience expectations.53 For this reason, later theories of genre have also drawn on the work of film scholar Stephen Neale, who defines genres as “systems of orientations, ex- pectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject.”54 Conse- quently, genres are always (re-)constituted by a multiplicity of actors such as performers, industry executives, radio broadcasters, and audiences.55 A related issue that does not receive much attention in Fabbri’s approach is the alleged homological nature of genres. Since this thesis is concerned with genres that are often seen as exceedingly homological, it is important to consider this aspect more closely. As Jason Toynbee argues, the “link between text group and social formation” has “often been conceived in quasi-political terms as a form of representation. Genre is seen to ex- press the collective interest or point of view of a community.”56 Especially in the case of music associated with African Americans, this connection is mostly viewed in positive
46 Fabbri, “A Theory,” 52. 47 Frith, Performing Rites, 93. 48 Fabbri, “A Theory,” 65–74 (my explanations in brackets). 49 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 6. 50 Fabbri, “A Theory,” 55. 51 Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (London: Arnold, 2000), 106. 52 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 7. 53 Cf. Ibid., 15–16. 54 Stephen Neale, Genre (London: BFI Books, 1980), 19. 55 Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 103. 56 Ibid., 110. 11 terms. As my analysis will show, however, it also obscures the way racial segregation has fostered a view of musical genre that fundamentally limits the exploration of musical creativity as well as ‘cross-racial’ interaction. This limitation also characterizes arguments about the supposed purity of certain musical expressions, e.g. ‘black music.’ The foremost proponent of such “separatist”57 views is probably Nelson George, who has asserted since the 1980s that musical crossover is a dilution of black culture.58 The most problematic point about this may be that it as- sumes certain musical codes to be purely black (or white, or Hispanic) – a sort of cultural essentialism – and equates music that is popular in the ‘mainstream’ with dilution. This logic demands a number of critical responses. It can be reasoned, for example, that many of those allegedly ‘pure’ sounds are also the result of previous musical crossovers. Does this mean, then, that there are good and bad crossovers? To sidestep this rabbit hole of subjective taste, it is necessary to clarify both the notion of crossover and the ‘mainstream.’ According to David Brackett, the term crossover only gained popular attention at the onset of the 1970s when its meaning extended to “refer to boundary crossing that included a wide range of categories such as soul, Latin, classical, jazz, and MOR (middle- of-the-road).”59 It was thus broadly understood as “movement between musical catego- ries.”60 Before that, Brackett explains, its “continued and regular, albeit sparse, usage” mostly described “movement from the rhythm and blues and country categories to main- stream pop.”61 Theoretically speaking, this means that when a record was popular in one of these “minority categories,”62 it could eventually outgrow its assumed core constitu- ency and cross over into the pop charts. The interplay of processes that made this possible was often equally complex and nebulous.63 It usually involved the record receiving air- play on bigger and/or non-specialized radio stations as well as wider distribution (includ- ing placement on jukeboxes), all of which might further increase sales and airplay de- mand.64 At the same time, it is difficult to make any clear statements about the actual recordings that achieved this. This is hinted at by Joshua Clover, who laments “the regular
57 Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 119. 58 Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (London: Penguin Books, 2004 [1988]), ix–xiv. Toynbee contrasts this perspective with that of so-called “syncretists,” who approve of such musical ‘mixing.’ Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 120. 59 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 282. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 281. 62 Ibid., 282. 63 As the 1959 payola scandal showed, this procedure frequently included a number of seemingly unor- thodox promotional methods. Cf. Broven, Record Makers, 454–471. 64 At the time, sales, radio airplay, and jukebox plays were the categories that Billboard used to assess a record’s popularity. Brackett points out that the magazine has never disclosed how this worked in detail. See Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 28. From the time of their creation in 1942/4 until 1958, both spe- cialized charts consisted of up to three separate charts, each for one of the aforementioned categories. 12 treatment of ‘pop’ as genre rather than marker of popularity, a category self-evidently able to include any genre if it sells enough.”65 What constitutes the mainstream, then, is necessarily a heterogenous aggregation. On the one hand, it features those recordings from non-mainstream genres that have trans- cended their point of origin. On the other hand, it also refers to “music perceived […] to be marketed toward the largest, most heterogenous audience possible.”66 The latter point is at the heart of accusations of dilution, for it appears difficult to at the same time speak for a certain demographic while also appealing to no specific demographic at all.67 This argument notwithstanding, it should be clear that crossing over has no inherent musical meaning. For example, songs like John Lee Hooker’s “I’m in the Mood” (1951) or James Brown’s “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) (both of which might fulfill Nelson George’s criteria for ‘black music’) were able to reach the Top 30 or Top 10 on the pop charts (and thus be crossover hits) without compromising their artist’s sound. While crossover into the pop charts remained an important part of the word’s meaning, Brackett later quotes a 1980 Billboard article in which crossover is considered to “tak[e] place when the record gains acceptance in another (perhaps, neighboring) mi- nority-genre.”68 Apparently, this possibility is not a primary feature of the earlier under- standing. So, when Ray Charles released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), his take on contemporary country music, it follows that he could only make the transition from R&B to the pop charts, not, as one might assume, from R&B to country.69 This suggests that, at the time, the racialized perception of genre had already become common sense, figuring country and R&B as mutually exclusive rather than neighboring, and possibly overlapping, forms of expression. Interestingly, J. Lester Feder observes that “well into the 1960s”70 this segregationist logic was mirrored in the terminology to de- scribe genres like R&B and country. At that time, they were understood as ‘fields’: This spacial metaphor was made concrete when record retailers, concert promoters, and broadcasters began placing white and black music in different bins, venues, and time slots. Fields contained the relationships between listeners and musicians within racial borders: They shaped who could record what music, where musicians could perform the music they sold on record, to whom their music could be marketed, and how their music would be distributed.71
However, Brackett’s designation of both country and R&B as minority categories implies that there was something peculiar to that logic. This is the fact that both genres were associated with demographics that were often located outside the American mainstream,
65 Clover, “High Rise,” n.p. (emphasis added). 66 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 38 (fn. 48). 67 Cf. Ibid., 26, 282. 68 Quoted in Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 280. 69 See chapter 4.4. 70 Feder, “Song of the South,” 15. 71 Ibid., 14–15. 13 namely white working-class southerners and (mostly working-class) African Americans. Consequently, there is also a social aspect to crossover, particularly for African Ameri- cans, whose racist exclusion from and exploitation by the music industry has been well- documented.72 Brackett thus contends that crossover “has broad implications pertaining to social mobility, the formation of new audiences and social alliances, and shifts in the beliefs of producers and consumers of popular music.”73 This is certainly true, and it aptly summarizes developments that both country and R&B/soul music were going through in the 1960s and 70s. On the other hand, it is unclear whether this also applies to movement between different non-mainstream genres. How do we make sense of crossover between genres at a time when its existence lies outside the prevailing logic? This conundrum will be at the center of my later analysis of R&B/country crossover. Finally, to bring this discussion back to the alleged homological nature of genre, it is worth considering an aspect that scholars have identified as the main drive in devel- opments of genre: the reciprocal character of repetition and variation. As Toynbee points out, “Genre functions to control repetition and difference in such a way that desire is maintained across texts within a certain range of variation.”74 I would argue that this is also important in theorizing crossover between genres. Which elements, for example, may be repeated across genre boundaries, and what variation is seen to account for the ultimate difference between certain forms of expression? In a way, these questions echo Fabbri’s idea of the ‘hyper-rule,’ whose determinate character has rightfully been criticized. In- stead of trying to establish such a hyper-rule, however, it is instructive to pay attention to how different actors have tried to define the ‘core’ of a given genre. The ‘hyper-rule’ mirrors the concern for authenticity that plays a particularly important role in genres like R&B/soul and country music. Authenticity is, of course, also a socially constructed cate- gory.75 Consequently, instead of assessing who or what is authentic, it should be consid- ered “who needs authenticity” and “how authenticity [has] been used.”76 In addition, Re- gina Bendix notes that declarations of authenticity (an alleged “realness”) also imply the existence of its opposite, the “fake.” She contends that this is problematic because the creation of such dichotomies serves to “nostalgize the homogeneous.”77 Rather than em- phasizing the diversity of culture, such arguments will “uphold the fallacy that cultural
72 Cf. Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 17. 73 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 26. 74 Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 106 (emphasis in original). 75 Cf. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk’,” American Historical Review 97, 5 (De- cember 1992): 1400–1408, especially 1402–1403. 76 Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 21. 77 Ibid., 9. 14 purity rather than hybridity are the norm.”78 What all of this points to is that even – or perhaps especially – in genres that are thought to be homological it is crucial to examine how social and musical elements are put together, i.e. how they are articulated.
2.3 Articulation and Genre David Hesmondhalgh criticizes that the complexity of relationships that exist “between social experience of community and musical form or style”79 cannot be adequately cap- tured by the notion of genre. He suggests that this theoretical void may be filled by draw- ing on Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘articulation.’ Hall uses this concept to analyze the “com- plex character of social formations,”80 defining it as “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time.” 81 According to Hesmondhalgh, the term “registers some of the ambivalence and complexity needed to understand the relationship between music and the social.”82 David Brackett adds that it “suggests that the range of genre-identity relations does not arise as a natural or biological connection […] but rather must be sutured together through the repetition of social prac- tices in which a generic label brings together categories of people.”83 More importantly, though, the concept of articulation also draws attention to how these connections are being made. This is particularly crucial if we consider musical categories to not merely reflect a given reality (e.g. a demographic) but to play an active and recurring role in (re-)creating its social meaning.84 What appears as a natural and inevitable connection between, for example, white southern workers, country music, and traditionalism can thus be analyzed as a complex web of linkages that is anything but predetermined. As mentioned earlier, the genres that I analyze were, at the time in question, not only seen as “racial opposites”85 but therefore understood to be ideological adversaries as well. By emphasizing the significant overlap between artists working within and across these allegedly antagonistic genres, attention will be drawn to the internal tensions that such one-sided descriptions gloss over. These tensions are mostly located within what
78 Bendix, In Search, 9. 79 David Hesmondhalgh, “Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above,” Journal of Youth Studies 8, 1 (March 2005): 21–40, 33. 80 John Clarke, “Stuart Hall and the Theory and Practice of Articulation,” Discourse: Studies in the Cul- tural Politics of Education 36, 2 (2015): 275–286, 276. 81 Stuart Hall. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Commu- nications Inquiry 10, 2 (Summer 1986): 45–61, 53. 82 Hesmondhalgh, “Subcultures,” 35. 83 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 20. 84 Cf. Georgie Born, “Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural Identities,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, eds. Georgia Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 31–37, especially 31–32. 85 Hughes, Country Soul, 130. 15 Fabbri calls the “social and ideological” but may also permeate other aspects. Taken to- gether, they will throw into relief the possibility of different interpretations and articula- tions. They might also, as Nadine Hubbs argues, show up linkages “within and across society’s margins” that “[i]n current mainstream perspectives […] are unexpected or even incomprehensible.”86
2.4 On Hijacks, Covers, and Versions While the artists that I examine here share many stylistic characteristics, one of their most distinctive formal similarities is the regular (and successful) recording of songs that were originally written and performed by songwriters and artists associated with country music. This re-recording of existing songs is often referred to as covering. Michael Coyle argues that rather than “indiscriminately designat[ing] any occasion of rerecording,” a cover song should be seen as a specific phenomenon that “arises at a very particular moment in cultural history.”87 According to Coyle, confusion about the term stems mostly from its overlap with an older practice which, in industry parlance, was referred to as “hijacking a hit.”88 In the first half of the 20th century, particularly before the triumph of recorded media, publishers were interested in selling their songs to as many artists as possible. Since songs at the time were not principally identified with their performers, “the primary concern for any record company was [...] the timely release of its version so as to catch the wave of public interest before interest subsided.”89 This strategy increased with the sudden growth of and competition between independent record companies during the lat- ter half of the 1940s. Record labels also made use of such ‘hijacks’ to branch into different markets by, for instance, recording a pop version of a country hit. These practices only declined – but did not disappear – when audiences became more interested in a specific recording of a song. What is crucial, especially for future developments, is that ‘hijacking’ did not always (explicitly) revolve around, as Coyle puts it, “questions of identity.”90 Although it “exploited racist inequality,” it arguably “did not arise because of it.”91 Coyle posits that “[t]he cover record per se developed only when ‘race’ records began to have mass appeal on ‘white’ pop charts, and the key figure in that process was
86 Hubbs, “Cross-Marginal Solidarity,” 170. 87 Michael Coyle, “Hijacked Hits and Antic Authenticity: Cover Songs, Race, and Postwar Marketing,” in Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, eds. Roger Beebe et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 133–57, 134. 88 Ibid., 136. 89 Ibid., 139. 90 Ibid., 143. To be clear, any marketing and recording practice is fundamentally concerned with “ques- tions of identity,” but that is admittedly beyond the scope of Coyle’s argument here. 91 Ibid., 144. 16 none other than Elvis Presley.”92 This argument involves several aspects. On the one hand, Coyle explains that the newly discovered pop appeal of R&B records resulted in “a kind of exploitation that qualitatively differed from mere market opportunism.”93 Not only were there multiple versions of a given song, but record companies specifically sought white artists to record recent R&B hits. Significantly, in these cases there was frequently “one contender black and one contender white.”94 This practice is probably best exempli- fied by Pat Boone, whose career was established through such re-recordings of R&B hits by Fats Domino or Little Richard. Presley, on the other hand, only once ‘hijacked’ someone else’s hit during these years, namely Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956).95 His success actually built on songs that “had all long since disappeared from the charts, so long that,” as Coyle argues, “most of Presley’s young fans wouldn’t have recognized his records as remakes.”96 While it is not clear how Coyle combines this assertion with the idea that “[t]hose fans would […] have recognized much of the material as black,”97 he is nonetheless correct to assume this dynamic as crucial. Rather than wanting to “supplant the black originals, Presley’s remakes in a certain way depended on those songs first being identified as race records.”98 Consequently, Coyle contends that Presley needed to “be recognized as a white artist performing black music in a miscegenated style. To argue that this music is essentially white or black is wholly to mistake its charge.”99 Instead, Presley was using these songs to “perform for himself and for America a new identity.”100 Herein lies (part) of his legacy to later artists, for example those of the so-called British Invasion. According to Coyle, these “tended to cover older material and pay it homage as part of a tradition.”101 In the next decade, covers mostly “became a way for white artists to lay claim to an artistic origin outside the pop-consumer mainstream.”102 Thus, Coyle bases his differentiation of ‘covers’ from ‘hijacks’ and the historical break
92 Coyle, “Hijacked Hits,” 134. 93 Ibid., 136. 94 Ibid. 95 This is a rather weak example of a hijack, too, since Presley’s version (who knew Perkins from his time at Sun Records, which he had only recently left) was only released as a single after Perkins’s was already declining on the charts. Perkins’s version turned out to be a massive success, actually predating Presley and others as the first country song (which is where white rock and roll was seen as originating, chart- wise) to cross over into the pop and R&B charts. Cf. Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 132–133. 96 Coyle, “Hijacked Hits,” 145. The most recent one was Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman,” which, by the time Presley’s version was released as a single, had been off the charts for about one and a half years. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 153. 101 Ibid., 146. 102 Ibid., 149. 17 this represents on the former’s ability to “signify difference.”103 Unsurprisingly, given the way racial exclusion was used to exploit the works of African American artists during the early years of rock and roll, a large part of Coyle’s study is centered on white artists. Rather than serving as an explanation of how and why black R&B and soul singers rec- orded country songs – and black country artists like O.B. McClinton found success with soul songs – his analysis provides an instructive discussion of the complex racial dynam- ics at play in these situations. At the same time, it should be noted that R&B/soul and particularly country music have slightly different relations between performer, writer, and audience than those that emerged for rock bands during the 1960s. This may be among the reasons why Deena Weinstein argues that cover songs, “in the fullest sense of the term,”104 only appear in rock music. She notes that [a] cover song iterates […] a prior recorded performance of a song by a particular artist, rather than simply the song itself as an entity separate from any performer or performance. When the song itself (as opposed to the performance) is taken as the reference for iteration, each performer does a version or a rendition of the song, and none of these versions is a necessary reference. Forms of popular music other than rock, then, generally do not have covers as I have defined them; rather, they have versions.105
While so-called standards also exist in country music, it could be argued that Weinstein’s description is more fitting to jazz or folk music. Although R&B/soul and country have different criteria for authenticity than rock, songs in both genres are frequently identified with their (most successful) performer and their recording of it.106 Moreover, Weinstein does not expand on what happens when songs are performed across genre and racial boundaries and how this might affect the meaning of versions and covers. The intertextual and historical reference of a cover might reasonably extend to questions of social identity even if the song is not tied to a specific performer. Both Coyle and Weinstein are emblematic of the (admittedly small) field of theorists discussing cover versions in that their consideration of ‘race’ is mostly limited to white performers recording material associated with African Americans but rarely examines the other way around.107 Dai
103 Coyle, “Hijacked Hits,” 134. 104 Deena Weinstein, “The History of Rock’s Pasts through Rock Covers,” in Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, eds. Thomas Swiss et al. (Malden: Blackwell, 1997), 137–51, 138. 105 Ibid., 138 (emphasis added). 106 It is true that both country music and soul also show traces of the pre-1950s status quo, where “[p]ro- ducers recorded songs ‘on’ singers, rather than made recordings ‘of’ an artist.” (Coyle, “Hijacking,” 139) This understanding implies the importance of a song’s writer(s), which in country and soul music of the 1960s were often not their performers. The biggest soul labels at the time (e.g. Stax, Motown) employed full-time writers (and arrangers), while smaller labels depended on outside songwriters providing them with material. Meanwhile, the country music industry that arose in Nashville during the late 1950s has practically become synonymous with this division of labor. At the same time, David Sanjek notes that the implications of something that might formally be described as a ‘hijack’ can be far more intricate than this term implies. Cf. Sanjek, “What’s Syd Got to Do with It?: King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 306–38, 311. 107 A notable exception is Michael Awkward’s study on cover recordings in the work of Al Green and 18 Griffiths’s exploration of cover records as “the sound of identity in motion”108 provides a slightly different approach that focuses on the social aspects of this practice. By employing a rather broad definition of the term ‘cover,’ Griffiths directs attention toward the specific dynamics that a given recording may represent – regardless of its (possible) intent. Thus, instead of focusing on the terminological difference between ‘cover’ and ‘version,’ it appears more important for my analysis to critically examine the reception of such re-recordings and their possible meanings in the reproduction of genre and ‘race.’
3. “JUST OUT OF REACH”: LOCATING THE SOUL/COUNTRY BINARY 3.1 The South and the Geography of Genre(s) Although this thesis is not primarily concerned with questions of geography, it is not inconsequential that both country and soul music are related to the United States’ South. Charles L. Hughes, in a statement that is only slightly hyperbolical, stresses that the gen- res were intimately connected throughout the southern recording industry in [the 1960s and 1970s]. Country and soul records were made by the same people, recorded in the same places, and released by the same record companies. Indeed, even as the genres became opposites in the national consciousness, they were inextricably linked on the production level.109
Country music’s relation to the South has been widely commented on, both by people in the genre’s industry as well as by its scholars. Among the latter, Bill C. Malone has played a pivotal role in popularizing what has been referred to as the “southern thesis,” which posits country music to be uniquely rooted within the U.S. South.110 Malone claims that although the genre is heavily commingled with African American influences, it is funda- mentally expressive of the lived reality of (rural) working-class whites. Malone’s unpar- alleled status within country music studies – as well as the thesis’ surface plausibility – have led to its widespread acceptance in the field. Yet, as early as the 1970s, scholars started criticizing its validity and, perhaps more importantly, its usefulness. According to critics, focusing on country music in the South is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy since it invariably deters attention from other centers of (recording) activity. They contend that
Aretha Franklin in Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Also see his “‘The South’s Gonna Do It Again’: Changing Conceptions of the Use of ‘Country’ Music in the Albums of Al Green,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 191–203. 108 Dai Griffiths, “Cover Versions and the Sound of Identity in Motion,” in Popular Music Studies, eds. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (London: Arnold, 2002), 51–64. 109 Hughes, Country Soul, 2 (emphasis added). 110 Cf. Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music U.S.A, 50th Anniversary ed. (Austin: Univer- sity of Texas Press, 2018 [1968]). A good critical overview can be found in Patrick Huber, “The ‘South- ernness’ of Country Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Country Music, ed. Travis D. Stimeling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31–54. 19 this limited focus should have been reconsidered at least since the nationwide expansion of the country music audience that began in the 1950s.111 In addition, Malone’s thesis has arguably reinforced the idea of country music as an essentially white cultural expression. From this perspective, it is mainly the heritage of Scotch-Irish settlers. Mather points out that this goes as far as scholars tracking stylistic elements to specific regions on the British Isles, while non-white participation is mainly rendered as influence, and therefore simul- taneously vague and at the margins.112 The linkage between country music and the South is upheld by the former’s al- leged role as a pivotal expression of rurality in popular culture, a characteristic that also dominates what might be termed the imaginary landscape of the South. This connection has, over many decades, been reinforced to the point that one of the two can easily evoke the other. This leads to a more general problem that invocations of ‘the South’ often bring along, namely its perceived distinctiveness and homogeneity. 113 The multiplicity of voices that constitute the South – or rather, the many Souths – has long been emphasized by artists from and scholars of the region. Yet, in popular discourse, the South is still marked by rather monolithic characterizations.114 During the time under consideration in my analysis, this tendency was even more prominent. Depictions of the region frequently centered on its alleged backwardness, emblematized by poverty and reactionary social values. This not only branded the South as non-progressive, quite frequently it also ra- cialized the region in a peculiar way. Generalizations about the South often concentrated on the white population and excluded people of color.115 In addition, these portrayals commonly distorted the geography of the South to the detriment of urban and suburban regions. That is not to say that rural regions are not important when talking about the South or that racism does not play a significant role in understanding its history. Yet, a more even-handed history of the South and its cultures has to pay attention to the many complexities that are hidden beneath such depictions. In terms of the “southern thesis” my own analysis has slightly contradictory inter- ests since, on the one hand, most of the artists I focus on are from, or have at some point
111 Cf. Huber, “Southernness,” 32, 35–40. 112 Mather, “Race in Country Music Scholarship,” 331. 113 Christopher Alan Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts, The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 1–9. 114 Ibid., 7. 115 In addition, David R. Jansson highlights that “the specificity of the allegedly Southern traits provides an interesting contrast with the ambiguity of the actual physical borders of the South.” Jansson, “Internal Orientalism in America: W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American National Identity,” Political Geography 22 (2003): 293–316, 311. For a more personal exploration of this topic, see Zandria F. Robinson, “Border Wars,” Oxford American 99 (November 21, 2017). Online:
116 Of course, the predominance of country music in the South does not foreclose its importance in other regions of the United States or the fact that these regions have also shaped the genre. 117 Cf. Rob Bowman, Soulsville, U.S.A: The Story of Stax Records (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 51; Cf. Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 43. Cf. Ann Malone, “Charley Pride,” in Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez, eds. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 340–56, 343. 118 Based on personal observation, it seems that traditional country music (like blues) is often used as a marker of authenticity, particularly among white non-country artists. Cf. Barbara Ching and Pamela Fox, “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic – Toward a Theory and Critique of Alt.Country Music,” in Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music, eds. Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 1–27, especially 7-10, 19. 119 One example may be found in Mark Bego’s biography of Tina Turner, Break Every Rule. Bego calls Turner’s 1974 country album a “bizarre move” (124). He surmises that it might have been motivated by the Pointer Sisters’s very successful excursion into country music (“Fairtytale”). Their song, however, was released at the same time as Turner’s album, not before. Bego fails to account for, among other things, Turner’s previous success with country-influenced songs like “Proud Mary,” the previous years of crossover between country and R&B/soul, the entry of African American artists into country music at the time, or Turner’s upbringing in Tennessee. Mark Bego, Tina Turner: Break Every Rule (Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2005). 120 Andrew Flory, I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 78. 121 Zandria F. Robinson, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and “Listening for the Country,” Oxford Amer- ican 95 (December 8, 2016). Online:
3.2 Richard Nixon, “Okie from Muskogee,” and the Politics of Country Music Bill C. Malone asserts that it was “in the late sixties and early seventies” that “for the first time in its history, country music began to be identified with a specific political position, gaining a reputation for being a jingoistic and nativistic music.”128 He reports that “during the presidential campaign of 1968 virtually all country singers who made endorsements, or otherwise made their preferences known, supported either Wallace or Nixon.” 129
122 Robinson, This Ain’t Chicago, 43. 123 Ibid., 43. Likewise, Diane Pecknold analyzes Isaac Hayes’s use of country music as, among other things, a signifier of geographical origin on such quintessential soul/funk albums as Hot Buttered Soul and Black Moses. See Pecknold, “Travel with Me: Country Music, Race, and Remembrance,” in Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt, ed. Eric Weisbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 185–200. 124 Robinson, This Ain’t Chicago, 43. 125 Robert Pruter, Chicago Soul (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 18. 126 Another important factor is the audiences’ age. Bowman stresses that “in both genres writers tend to address the vagaries of adult as opposed to teen relationships.” Cf. Bowman, “Soul,” 446 (emphasis in original). 127 For a good overview, see Joli Jensen, “Nashville Sound,” in Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World 8, Pt. 3: Genres, ed. David Horn (New York: Continuum, 2012), 343–46. 128 Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 239. 129 Ibid., 239. 22 Malone is not clear on how many artists in the rather sizeable field of country music did not make any explicit commitments. Nevertheless, the connection between country music and political conservatism became so pronounced that, to this day, they are still often seen as mutually interchangeable.130 Peter La Chapelle points out that this articulation of country music to conserva- tism was “anything but inevitable.”131 He uses a number of historical examples to show that the genre’s main mode of politics has long been populism. Rather than being domi- nated by any specific outlook, country music’s history is instead characterized by the fact that its songs and themes can be used for different means and transport a wide variety of values. This becomes apparent when considering that, for example, Wallace’s mentor and model for using country music on the campaign trail, Alabama governor ‘Big’ Jim Fol- som, was one of the more liberal southern politicians at the time.132 Early in his career, Folsom argued that “[a]s long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity, the other poor people will be held down alongside them.”133 Although he later adapted more moderate positions, they were still a long shot from Wallace’s infa- mous proclamation “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.” Country music scholars generally trace the genre’s increased political visibility to George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign. Although the process was initiated by his own usage of country music stars, it was fortified by the way Wallace’s massively suc- cessful third-party campaign inspired his republican opponent Richard Nixon.134 Nixon’s resultant ‘southern strategy’ effectively mixed subtle appeals against, for example, the advances made by the civil rights movement with “superficially color-blind narratives of class mobility and meritocracy”135 as well as a culturally based call for traditional Amer- ican values. The latter triggered Nixon’s discovery of country music as the voice of the
130 An early scholarly example can be found in Paul DiMaggio, Richard A. Peterson, and Jack Esco Jr., “Country Music: Ballad of the Silent Majority,” in The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture, eds. R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson (New York: Rand McNally, 1972), 38–55. As Feder points out, this article also “provide[s] one of the few contemporaneous attempts to empirically study the country audience […] Though they have no data on race, they accept as axiomatic that country fans are white.” The lack of reliable data leads Feder to conclude that “[t]he portrait of the era’s country music audience is based largely on anecdotal evidence.” Feder, “Song of the South,” 202 (fn. 20). 131 Peter La Chapelle, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 194. 132 La Chapelle, I’d Fight the World, 191–207. 133 Quoted in Ibid., 193. 134 For a more detailed discussion of this moment in country music history, see Feder, “Song of the South,” 192–225; Also, see Mark Allan Jackson, “Introduction: Richard Nixon, Johnny Cash, and the Political Soul of Country Music,” in The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music, ed. Mark Allan Jackson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 1–23. 135 Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 242. 23 so-called silent majority.136 This connection was frequently symbolized by Merle Hag- gard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (1969), an apparent celebration of small-town values. The song’s alleged satirical intent notwithstanding, its popularity was emblematic of the shift- ing terrain of country music (and) politics.137 Soon, the genre “found favor with and began sometimes to cater to a new, upscale, politicized audience segment with a taste for so- cially and politically conservative messages.”138 Thus, on the one hand, Nixon’s championing of country music helped to homog- enize perception of the genre, emphasizing traditional interpretations and discarding with its critical elements, while on the other hand making it appear as if this was based on the natural expression of a large working-class constituency. Nadine Hubbs contends that [i]n the 1970s, country music became a cultural space where middle- and upper-class conservatives and the white working class shared common ground. Since then, ‘country music lover’ has served as a rubric under which these two socially, economically, and politically divergent groups have been conflated and sometimes rendered indistinguishable to outside observers.139
This confusion about country music’s social base reached its apex with a trend that his- torian Bruce Schulman describes as “demi-redneck.” He argues that the music’s new fanbase included millions of migrants to the South’s cities and suburbs, refugees from the rural South and the urban North. Most were not rednecks by birth, fewer still rednecks by social position. But they adopted the term redneck as a badge of honor, a fashion statement, a gesture of resistance against high taxes, liberals, racial integration, women’s liberation, and hippies. […] Millions of middle-class and upper-class Amer- icans became ‘half a redneck.’140
What was previously a derogatory term for poor southern whites now became a conserva- tive identity marker.141 The fact that this newly instilled pride in the term redneck was also massively popular among working-class white people played directly into the ongo- ing project of (re-)securing political alignment by ‘race.’ What is more, although the South figured prominently in this development, the craze for country music was visible throughout the nation. Consequently, country’s previous association with lower-class white southerners – signified by disparaging terms like ‘white trash’, ‘hillbilly’, and ‘red- neck’ – was not broken up, but inverted. As a result, both class and regional aspects be- came more ambiguous while country music’s whiteness was emphasized even more.142
136 Multiple authors have commented on the fact that Nixon did not seem to have any personal enthusiasm for the music. Cf. Jackson, “Introduction,” 5–6. 137 Rachel Lee Rubin has written an impressive contextualization of the song and its aftermath in Okie from Muskogee (33 1/3) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Peter La Chapelle also provides a de- tailed analysis of its impact in Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 180–207. 138 Hubbs, Rednecks, 67. 139 Ibid., 68. 140 Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cam- bridge: Da Capo Press, 2008), 117. 141 For a more sustained analysis, see Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 142 Cf. Jeremy Colin Hill, “Out of the Barn and Into a Home: Country Music’s Cultural Journey from Rustic 24 Notably, it was around the same time that Charley Pride and other African Amer- ican artists were first making successful showings on the country charts. Barbara Ching maintains that while Pride’s songs “resonated little but nostalgia or present-day bliss […] other, less successful black country artists made a point of dramatizing the connections and disjunctions between country music and their skin color.”143 In her analysis, Ching goes beyond the apparent wall of whiteness that country music permeates to consider its social tensions.144 She locates most of these black country artists “in the tradition of hard country predecessors such as Merle Haggard.”145 Ching explains that [s]lyly enacting what I have called ‘burlesque abjection,’ this tradition makes a spectacle of the failure to exert the privileges of white manhood. It takes country’s traditional working-class themes of eco- nomic hardship and familial failures and explicitly contrasts them to the suburban sublime. When a black man sings about such woes, however, the blend of ridicule and rage becomes more fraught, par- ticularly in the early 1970s.146
Building on this insight, my analysis will scrutinize how African American artists’ en- gagements with country music highlight such areas of conflict. Thus, it will reevaluate the genre’s articulation to Nixon-era Republicanism to consider what work goes into up- holding such linkages while also appreciating the possibility of different connections. At the same time, this thesis will show that these artists were far from the first African Americans to work with country music. Since the 1950s, a growing number of R&B performers, most famously Ray Charles, had attracted attention by covering country songs and thereby pointing toward the racial segmentation of American popular music. It appears that, even at the time, country represented a music that proclaimed to be ‘of the people’ while effectively disavowing its appeal to non-white audiences. Although, from today’s perspective, country music’s articulation to whiteness and political conservatism comes across as one piece, this development had multiple stages. Nixon’s claim for coun- try music was helped by the fact that the genre had already tilted its overt associations with blackness. Consequently, the more fundamental contradiction seems to be that soul and country were seen to represent not only ideological but also racial opposites.
3.3 The ‘Segregation of Sound’ and the ‘Common Stock’ While the juxtaposition of country and soul music foregrounds the fixedness of their boundaries, it is instructive to briefly consider the genres’ shared foundations as well as
to Suburban, 1943–1974” (PhD. diss., George Washington University, 2011), 6–7. 143 Barbara Ching, “If Only They Could Read Between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 263–282, 268–269. 144 Ching’s argument here builds on her earlier analysis in “The Possum, the Hag, and the Rhinestone Cowboy: Hard Country and the Burlesque Abjection of the White Man,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 117–133. 145 Ching, “If Only,” 269. 146 Ibid. 25 their erasure by the persistent segregation of musical productions. The commodification of what would become known as country and (much later) soul music started in the 1920s. Richard Peterson notes that [i]n 1923 millions of people in rural areas and towns all across North America sang and played the fiddle and the guitar, but ‘country music’ was not recognized as a form of music distinct from others, and this became obvious when record company executives tried to merchandise the music. They didn’t know what to include and what to exclude […] They did, however, make the strategic decision to market music by whites and African Americans separately.147
Historian Karl Hagstrom Miller describes this process as “segregating sound.”148 Focus- ing on the South as his site of inquiry, Miller argues that “a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice, southern music was reduced to a series of distinct genres associated with particular racial and ethnic identities. Music developed a color line.”149 Conse- quently, even before they became proper genres, these musical domains were inscribed with the ideology of Jim Crow racism. This division was reinforced by the fact that many record producers at the time were folklorists, who had a special interest in underscoring the uniqueness and Otherness of the artists they were recording.150 Accordingly, they tended to record only those parts of a musician’s often wide-ranging repertoire that best reflected their alleged (musical) essence. For them, it was particularly important to erase any traces of popular music styles to highlight the folkloristic nature of these artists. Thus, the famously versatile musician Robert Johnson was only documented playing the kind of deep blues songs that later, in the 1960s, provided the groundwork for his reputation as a tormented backwoods genius to young white musicians.151 At the same time – and quite paradoxically – (southern) rurality was commodified as ‘hillbilly’ music, a genre that was apparently only played (and consumed) by white people. In the long run, such classification practices served to uphold Jim Crow customs and to naturalize racial categories. They also influenced how we still make sense of music that does not fit these narrow parameters. Christopher A. Waterman analyzes the career of the Mississippi Sheiks, an African American string band, to describe what he terms the “excluded middle.”152 Playing for both black and white audiences, the Mississippi Sheiks adopted their material from a wide variety of sources, including ‘hillbilly’ music and Tin Pan Alley pop. Although they were among the most popular recording artists from the
147 Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1997), 4 (emphasis added). 148 Miller, Segregating Sound, 2. 149 Ibid., 2. 150 Jeffrey T. Manuel provides a crucial analysis of the reciprocal nature of genre formation vis-à-vis its ostensibly homological social background. Jeffrey T. Manuel, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk? Creating Country Music’s ‘Social Origins,’” Popular Music and Society 31, 4 (October 2008): 417–431. 151 Cf. Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2005), 105–189. 152 Waterman, “Race Music,” 177. For more information on this tradition, see Charles K. Wolfe, “Rural Black String Band Music,” Black Music Research Journal 10, 1 (1990): 32–35. 26 Mississippi Delta at the time, the Mississippi Sheiks were not well-represented in subse- quent histories of American music.153 Waterman argues that “[t]his empirical gap [...] illuminates the limits of scholars’ conceptualizations of the topography of American mu- sic.”154 While this development can also be linked to shifting tastes among African Amer- ican audiences, it is difficult to discern these changes from the way the record industry “codif[ied] and promot[ed] selective aural images of blackness”155 through the ‘race’ mu- sic market. Tony Russell’s Blacks, Whites and Blues (1970) was one of the first studies to pay attention to the mutual foundations of ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ music.156 Russell identifies what he calls a “common stock,” a shared repertoire of instrumental and lyrical themes and songs.157 Although Russell points out that some of these might be more associated with white or black performers, respectively, he contends that “[t]he great quality of the common stock was adaptability; its great power, assimilation; it was neither black nor white, but a hundred shades of grey.”158 This common stock continued to circulate widely at least until the 1930s. However, the overlap soon began to fade from public perception. Russell also addresses another crucial and controversial part of the connection between ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ music: its relation to minstrelsy.159 Starting to grow in pop- ularity around the 1840s, these theatrical performances of racist stereotypes remained among America’s most popular forms of entertainment for most of the 19th century.160 Reevaluating clear-cut assessments of this legacy, Eric Lott shows that the dynamic be- tween admiration and spite in blackface minstrelsy performances is more complicated
153 Except, one might argue, as writers of the highly successful “Sitting on Top of the World” (1930), which has been covered by artists as different as Frank Sinatra, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Grateful Dead. 154 Waterman, “Race Music,” 177. 155 Ibid., 180. 156 Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970). Archived online:
3.4 Charting Success; Or, the Segregation of Sound, Continued In a 2014 feature on the development of the Billboard R&B charts, music critic Chris Molanphy argues that [i]deally, any effective genre chart […] doesn’t just track a particular strain of music, which can be marked by ever-changing boundaries and ultimately impossible to define. It’s meant to track an audi- ence. This is a subtle but vital difference. If an R&B chart tries to cover whatever might be termed R&B music, you get into the subjective, slippery business of determining what, or who, is ‘black enough’ for the chart.165
161 Mather, “Race in Country Music Scholarship,” 336. 162 Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues, 18. 163 Lott, Love and Theft, 20, 154. 164 Feder, “Song of the South,” 13. 165 Chris Molanphy, “I Know You Got Soul: The Trouble with Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Chart,” Pitchfork (April 14, 2014). Online:
166 Peterson, Creating Country Music, 235 (fn. 2). 167 Feder, “Song of the South,” 11. 168 Ibid., 12. 169 Ibid., 13. 170 Peterson, Creating Country Music, 235 (fn. 2). 171 For an in-depth analysis of country music’s development during this time, see Samuel Jennings Parler, “Musical Racialism and Racial Nationalism in Commercial Country Music, 1915–1953” (PhD. diss., Harvard University, 2017). 29 time, Billboard’s “putative audience […] consist[ed] of record shop retailers, radio per- sonnel, jukebox operators, and others who [were] trying to maximize their profits in deal- ing with recorded products in one form or another.”172 Billboard instated its charts for African American audiences – the so-called “Harlem Hit Parade” – in 1942. Two years later, when the music industry registered an increasing interest in what came to be known as country music, the magazine followed with a separate chart for these recordings. Dis- agreements about what to include and exclude, as well as how to name the charts, re- flected the relative instability of these categories, especially country music. Going by the title “The Most-Played Juke Box Folk Records,” its chart “also initially included crosso- ver race artists”173 such as Louis Jordan, Lucky Millinder and Nat ‘King’ Cole. As Brack- ett notes, this was based on an “inclusive interpretation of folk that encompassed (poten- tially) all the marginal categories.”174 That definition was soon replaced by a more re- strictive version, which emphasized “the genres of hillbilly and cowboy (or western) mu- sic.”175 Accordingly, the chart was renamed to “American Folk” in 1945, while the Har- lem Hit Parade regained the older ‘Race’ designation. Then, in 1949, the charts received those names by which they became popular – “Country and Western”176 and “Rhythm and Blues.”177 It did not take longer than half a decade to bring these neat divisions into confusion. The rise of rock and roll showed how close those ostensibly distinct categories were and how easily they could be blended. Elvis Presley’s 1954 debut single, for example, fea- tured covers of black blues artist Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup and white bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe that made it hard to tell where one style ended and the other began.178 At the same time, the publicly bemoaned transgressiveness of rock and roll also demonstrated that a racialized perspective on musical categories had become deeply entrenched by the mid-1950s.179 While, quite rightfully, a lot of attention has been paid to the way white artists drew on and profited from the musical innovations of black artists, this has moved
172 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 27. 173 Ibid., 216. 174 Ibid., 217. Brackett’s tabular collection of names implies that, in 1945, ‘race’ and ‘hillbilly’ recordings were actually featured in the same chart, “American Folk.” Curiously, this fact seems not be mentioned anywhere else in the book. Cf. Ibid., 21 (table 2). 175 Ibid., 217. 176 Much more could be said about the development and contents of these terms. For example, the way the term ‘folk’ (which had previously included country and was the preferred self-designation of Hank Wil- liams) was suddenly dropped from music industry discourse in 1953 as a result of the Red Scare, which in turn distanced the field from left-wing politics. Cf. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 198–199. 177 These were slightly modified during the next decades, with C&W shortened to Country in 1962 and R&B changed to Soul in August 1969. Cf. Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 21. 178 Although the developments that my analysis tracks started before the rise of rock and roll and continued during and after, this moment in music history is too close to my own argument to exclude it. 179 Cf. Feder, “Song of the South,” 13 (fn. 18). 30 attention from the fact that rock and roll also provided room for black artists’ engage- ments with country music. One of the foremost examples in this respect is Chuck Berry, whose first single (and hit) “Maybellene” (1955) was adapted from Bob Wills’s western swing recording of the traditional “Ida Red.”180 While some white rock and roll artists were also popular on the R&B charts, Berry’s songs never even entered the country charts.181 Chris Molanphy offers an insight that, although not directly related to the matter at hand, shows how confusion about the category of R&B was apparently much more prevalent than about country music. In late 1963, Billboard discontinued its R&B charts without explanation; apparently, they had become indistinguishable from the mainstream pop charts. According to Molanphy, this was possible because “[r]etailers and radio sta- tions were reporting all manner of popular records with even a hint of a beat, by black or white artists, as R&B.”182 Although rock and roll and, soon after, the proliferation of the Nashville Sound also diversified the country music charts, it appears that what held them together was the genre’s coat of whiteness.
4. ANALYSIS, PT. 1: RHYTHM AND COUNTRY 4.1 “I’ve Always Been Country”: The Making of an Alternative Tradition Rob Bowman argues that the distinct phenomenon of R&B and soul artists covering coun- try songs has a much shorter history than what was described in previous chapters. Ac- cording to him, its contemporary roots lie “in the late 1940s and early 1950s recordings at King Records by balladeer Ivory Joe Hunter and jump blues artists Wynonie Harris and Bullmoose Jackson.”183 This rather precise origin story runs the risk of taking for granted the different social, political, and cultural processes outlined above. At the same time, pointing out the peculiarity of this development does not mean that it should be separated from that earlier history. Apparently, it is the wealth of such R&B/country ma- terial that marks a qualitative change. Bowman explains that the “practice increased in the soul era to the point where collectors, critics and historians often refer to a sub-genre termed ‘country-soul’.”184 In Bowman’s time line, “[t]he first soul cover of a country song was Ray Charles’s
180 Bruce Pegg, Brown-Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39. 181 Here, one might consider Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” which does not sound all that different from “Maybellene.” There are many other examples, most notably in Presley’s catalog. His version of blues artist Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” for instance, reached #1 in the pop, country, and R&B charts. 182 Molanphy, “I Know You Got Soul,” n.p. 183 Bowman, “Soul,” 246–247. For a discussion of (the white-owned) King Records and their African American producer and A&R (Artists & repertoire) man, Henry Glover, see Sanjek, “King Records.” 184 Bowman, “Soul,” 446–447. 31 1959 recording of honky tonk artist Hank Snow’s ‘I’m Movin’ On’.”185 Released right after his #1 hit “What’d I Say,” the song peaked at #11 in the R&B charts. Musically, it fit seamlessly into Charles’s other recordings for Atlantic Records, save for the fact that it featured a prominent steel guitar part. It was Charles’s last recording for the label and would remain his only foray into country music until Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music three years later. Still, the song remains an interesting choice for Charles, not least because it was readily identifiable as a country song. Hank Snow’s original ver- sion, released in 1950, had spent an impressive 21 weeks atop the country charts.186 However, we might also propose a different timeline, one which does not center on Ray Charles but instead zooms in on the career of Ivory Joe Hunter. Hunter is often mentioned alongside other R&B artists with an affinity for country music but is seldom discussed on his own. Yet, his career presents an interesting complement to more familiar narratives. After all, as Bowman mentions, Hunter was there ‘at the beginning,’ scoring an R&B hit (#5) with his recording of Jenny Lou Carson’s country song “Jealous Heart” on King Records in 1949.187 Hoskyns contends that this, as well as self-written songs like “Waiting in Vain,” “made him a pioneer of black country a decade before Ray Charles.”188 Indeed, during the 1950s Hunter not only continued to record (and chart with) country material, he also wrote a number of R&B songs that later became sizeable country hits. Among the former, there are his 1950 version of Eddy Arnold’s “It’s a Sin” (#10 R&B) as well as Ray Price’s “City Lights” (1959, #92 pop). The latter category includes two of his biggest hits, “Since I Met You Baby” (1956) and “Empty Arms” (1957). Both of these became #1 country hits for Sonny James in 1969 and 1970, respectively.189 Hunter himself spent most of the 1960s outside the spotlight, enjoying no national hits and rarely releasing more than three singles on the same label. Sonny James’s success might have reawakened interest in the aging singer: in 1972, Hunter started to regularly appear on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. A year later, Billboard reported that he had even opened a publishing firm in the city. In the article, Hunter is quoted as saying that
185 Bowman, “Soul,” 447. Ray Charles, “I’m Movin’ On / I Believe to My Soul” (Atlantic, 45–2043, 1959). 186 This record was only surpassed in 2013. Christina Vinson, “Florida Georgia Line’s ‘Cruise’ Sets All- Time Record on the Charts,” Taste of Country (August 2, 2013). Online:
190 This might be a transcription error in the original article and should perhaps read “categorized as blues.” Bill Williams, “Nashville Scene,” Billboard (March 24, 1973): 50. 191 Ivory Joe Hunter, I’ve Always Been Country (Paramount Records, PAS–6080, 1973). 192 Bob Palmer, “George and Ivory and Tammy and Isaac,” Rolling Stone 173 (November 7, 1974): 6–7. 193 Ibid., 6. 194 “Reviews of This Week’s Singles,” Billboard (October 19, 1959), 45. 195 “Record Reviews – Pick of the Week,” Cash Box (October 24, 1959), 8. 33 be into the pop charts. When Cash Box reviewed the song’s album release in 1961 it was slightly more perceptive, noting that “[a] surprise track is the hillbilly favorite, ‘I’m Movin’ On’, getting a complete new look by Charles here.”196 Reviews of Hunter’s latest recording of a country song, “City Lights” (1958), struck a similar chord. The Billboard entry simply stated that “[t]he country hit by Ray Price is sung with feeling by Ivory Joe. It has a chance for some pop action.”197 Cash Box offered a more enthusiastic assessment, arguing that “[v]eteran blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter makes a potent first showing under the Dot banner with a beautiful rock-a-ballad reading of one of the year’s biggest country hits, ‘City Lights’.”198 While ‘rock-a-ballad’ might suggest some proximity to rock and roll, Cash Box writer Ira Howard recollects that “deadline demands had [him] knocking [such designations] out mass-production style.”199 Therefore, it seems that the term reflected current trends at least as much as it was meant to hint at the interracial character of rock and roll. These reviews indicate that, in the 1950s, such cover recordings were usually not understood as a deliberate crossing of genre boundaries but rather as a consequence of record labels trying to branch into different markets – a logic that followed the ‘hijacking of hits’ described earlier. David Sanjek, in his analysis of Henry Glover’s work at King Records, argues against such cursory readings which make it appear “as though the pro- cess constituted little more than a sequence of musical magpies migrating from one sty- listic net to another.”200 He points to the “crucial ingredient of race”201 to highlight the complexity of social relations that are often contained in these recordings. Thus, Sanjek posits that even if the process of crossover might occasionally overlap with the extension of markets, it may also – even at the same time – open up perspectives that extend beyond the economic. This tension permeates large parts of my analysis. On the one hand, the lack of attention that R&B/country crossover has received may be informed by quick dismissals of such performances as mere novelties and financially motivated recordings without significant artistic merit.202 As my analysis will show, there is some legitimacy to such concerns. After all, R&B covers of country songs experienced a surge in popular- ity after Modern Sounds hit the charts and African American country artists were increas- ingly in demand following the success of Charley Pride.
196 “Album Reviews – Popular Picks of the Week,” Cash Box (September 30, 1961), 22. 197 “New Pop Records,” Billboard (December 12, 1958), 38. 198 “Record Reviews,” Cash Box (December 27, 1958), 8. 199 Other terms Howard mentions are “rock-a-rhythmic,” “rock-a-thumper,” or “rock-a-string.” Interest- ingly, this appears to be the source of the term ‘rockabilly,’ too. Quoted in Broven, Record Makers, 205. 200 Sanjek, “King Records,” 311. 201 Ibid., 311. 202 Cf. Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 53. 34 On the other hand, though, such readings tend to prioritize the (supposed) inten- tions of producers or record company executives to the detriment of the recording artists. While it is fair to point out that it often was the (white) producers who chose the songs these black artists recorded, this was equally true for white performers.203 It is noticeable that the important work of revealing and criticizing industry racism might at the same time reflect the force of naturalized and racially informed generic conventions. If a white producer chooses a song that affirms the black performer’s alleged cultural background, there may be no problem to accept this performance as ‘authentic.’ When the recording diverts from the audience’s expectations, it is – for any number of reasons – frequently deemed inauthentic or plain exploitative.204 In the end, this dichotomy encourages a rather limited perspective on the production of popular culture. When country producers were on the lookout for ‘the next Charley Pride’ in the late 1960s, many of them were hoping to cash in on what appeared to be a profitable novelty. Yet, this situation also allowed musicians like Stoney Edwards and O.B. McClinton to establish themselves in the indus- try. Thus, contradictory interests may coexist in, and benefit from, a single event.205 What is more, such arguments commonly rely on a false causality between artistic intention and cultural or historical significance.
4.2 Country Music and the Birth of Soul A common thread between Hunter, Charles and arguably the most remarkable early ex- ample of R&B/country crossover, Solomon Burke, is indeed their producer Jerry Wexler. The session that resulted in Charles’s version of “I’m Movin’ On” – a song that he had chosen himself – was supervised by Wexler.206 At the time, Wexler was already one of the most influential non-musicians in R&B – starting with the fact that, in 1949, when he was an editor at Billboard magazine, he had come up with the term ‘rhythm and blues.’207 After leaving that position, Wexler joined Atlantic Records, where he became vice-pres- ident in the mid-1950s. It was during this time that Ivory Joe Hunter was signed to the label and recorded songs like the aforementioned “Empty Arms” (1957). In his autobiog- raphy, Wexler remarks: I place Ivory Joe Hunter alongside Chuck [Willis]. They were both sweet balladeers leaning towards country singing – Ivory Joe a touch more than Chuck. I believe Ivory Joe, alongside Ray Charles, set the stage for the merger of black blues ballads and white country music in the sixties – and singers like
203 Coyle, “Hijacked Hits,” 141. 204 In addition to the examples here, this has been particularly noticeable when black performers tried to ‘go pop,’ like Sam Cooke in the late 1950s or B.B. King a decade later. 205 Of course, these are still organized by a power imbalance around hierarchies based on, among others, ‘race,’ class, and gender. 206 Cf. Daniel Cooper, “Take Me Down to That Southern Land,” liner notes to Ray Charles, The Complete Country & Western Recordings, 1959–1986 (Rhino, R2–25328, 1998), 18–20. 207 Cf. Broven. Record Makers, 188–189. 35 Solomon Burke, Arthur Alexander, Betty Lavette [sic], Dorothy Moore, Joe Simon, and Clarence Carter.208
In fact, Wexler himself was on the scene when the next step towards that “merger” was taken. Bowman recounts that, in 1960, “Atlantic Records’ first bona fide soul artist, Sol- omon Burke, launched his career with a cover of [the]209 country classic ‘Just Out of Reach (of My Two Empty Arms)’.”210 Released in late 1961, the song not only climbed to #7 on the R&B charts but also crossed over into the pop charts, reaching #24. Calling it “Rhythm-and-blues does the Nashville Sound,” country historian David Cantwell pro- vides a concise description of the song that is worth quoting at length: The backing choir that kicks off this soul music version of the country standard might as well have been the Anita Kerr Singers; the piano and vibes that double another throughout create an effect that’s remi- niscent of Floyd Cramer’s famous slip-note style; and when a sax takes the melody during Solomon Burke’s sober recitation, it does what a string arrangement would if Chet Atkins had produced the record instead of Jerry Wexler.211
In essence, “this soul music version” does not appear to be much different from what a contemporary country version might have sounded like. It is curious that Cantwell, in a book that tries to expand the traditional country music canon, nevertheless emphasizes the recording’s generic ‘non-countryness.’ Contemporary assessments were, unsurpris- ingly, even more conservative. Billboard, while enthusiastic about the record, did not explicitly comment on the fact that it was not only a country song, but also a recording sounding like country. Their reviewer merely stated that Burke “turns in a tremendous performance on this pop-styled reading of the persuasive country weeper.”212 Cash Box was more reserved but hinted at Burke’s country tendencies when they wrote that “[t]he touching country plaintive is understandingly conveyed by the songster. Soulful sax is included in the pretty soft-beat combo-chorus backing.”213
208 Jerry Wexler with David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music (New York: Knopf, 1993). Online:
4.3 The Impossibility of Black Country In hindsight, it is possible to see how close R&B and country were repeatedly – and quite casually – getting even before the release of Modern Sounds in April 1962. This was not only due to the adaption of existing country songs by R&B artists. In December 1961, Arthur Alexander released the self-written “You Better Move On.” Although the single eventually reached #24 on the pop charts, Alexander and his producer Rick Hall initially had difficulties getting it off the ground. Nashville labels were often interested in the song but usually thought that the singer sounded “too black”220 for country music or were oth- erwise unsure on how to sell his music.221 Hughes argues that “[a]pparently, these labels
214 Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Back Bay Books, 1999 [1986]), 72. 215 Ibid., 73. 216 Ibid., 83. 217 Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 53 (emphasis in original). 218 Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music, 85. Apparently, this led as far as Burke and band being booked for a Ku Klux Klan rally in Mississippi. Although Guralnick admits that the singer had a penchant for colorful stories, he also argues that “there is no story that Solomon has told me that does not appear to have a basis in fact” (87). 219 Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 53. Burke’s reluctance appears to stem from his religious background which made him wary of the profanity associated with R&B. Cf. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: UCL Press, 1998), 199. 220 Younger, Get a Shot of Rhythm and Blues, 42. 221 In Hughes’s words, “Alexander’s vocal most directly recalls smooth operators like country crooner 37 did not consider marketing Alexander as a country or pop artist, even though one of the few R&B labels that Hall approached told him that the song sounded ‘too white’ for black listeners.”222 This conundrum is central to Alexander’s story: while producers like Chet Atkins had been incorporating R&B sounds into country music for years, it seemed im- possible to imagine a black country(-pop) artist with R&B leanings. Still, Alexander made all of his recordings during the 1960s in Nashville, staying true to the country-soul hybrid of his first single. He was more successful, however, as a songwriter. In 1968, he even joined the songwriting collective Combine, which included “Dolly Parton, Kris Kristof- ferson, Ray Stevens [...] and others whose idiosyncratic writing style helped define coun- try in the 1970s.”223 While Alexander’s acceptance happened largely behind the scenes, the white instrumentalists who had played on “You Better Move On” eventually became some of the most sought-after session musicians in Nashville. December 1961 also saw the release of an equally influential but commercially unsuccessful song with William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”224 Although the song later became a staple of the country-soul canon – Hoskyns calls it “the first great Southern country-soul ballad”225 – it could be argued that its original release was, much like Alexander’s, curbed by the single’s interracial character. Music historian Robert Palmer states that “the song itself could easily pass for country and western, but the vocal, piano arpeggios, and organ-like chords played by the horns are in a black gospel vein.”226 These similarities become even more apparent when considering Bell’s version of the Hank Locklin country hit “Please Help Me, I’m Falling,” which was released as the b- side of his second single in 1962 and featured a very similar arrangement to “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”227 Bell himself says that he “was one of the first Stax acts with that pop-country crossover flavor, which was a good thing and a bad thing, because Stax was an R&B company.”228 While the company tried to record him on more distinctively R&B- sounding material, Bell was never quite satisfied with the results and the lack of chart
Eddy Arnold or R&B statesman Ben E. King (both of whom were among his major influences), and the aching accompaniment by the original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section also splits the difference between the textured honky-tonk of the 1950s Nashville Sound and the urbanized black pop of the Brill Building.” Charles L. Hughes, “You’re My Soul Song: How Southern Soul Changed Country Music,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 283–305, 287. 222 Hughes, Country Soul, 33. 223 Hughes, “You’re My Soul Song,” 294. 224 William Bell, “You Don’t Miss Your Water / Formula of Love” (Stax, S–116, 1961). 225 Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 61. 226 Quoted in Ibid., 62. How easily the song could be adapted to a straightforward country arrangement can be heard on O.B. McClinton’s 1973 version, which received an enthusiastic review in Cash Box who – in their country section – described it as a “slow trad[itional] tune.” “C&W Singles Reviews,” Cash Box (September 8, 1973), 36. 227 William Bell, “Any Other Way / Please Help Me I’m Falling” (Stax, S–128, 1962). 228 Quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 62. 38 success. Describing his sound as “a combination of gospel, country, and blues-ballad,”229 his aspirations were arguably similar to that of other artists previously mentioned, espe- cially Ivory Joe Hunter. It was only during the mid-to-late 1960s that Bell’s recording career took off, when his “Everybody Loves a Winner” (1967) reached the R&B Top 20. Although the ballad did not significantly differ from his earlier formula, it appears that his sound had by then become more commercially viable. A less frequently mentioned – though much more successful – recording than the previous two is Joe Henderson’s 1962 single “Snap Your Fingers.” Reaching #2 in the R&B charts (and #8 pop), the song bears more than a few stylistic marks of Nashville, where it was recorded.230 Henderson’s smooth baritone might betray the singer’s gospel roots, but he stays firmly in the lower register, thus suggesting Brook Benton as much as any deep-voiced country crooner. It is only with the sudden appearance of big band horns around the 45 second mark that the song prominently announces its R&B character. No- tably, “Snap Your Fingers” was recorded with legendary country producer Paul Cohen and co-written by one of the city’s most famous guitar players, Grady Martin. Although the song is typically classified as R&B, it might be more accurate to say that its generic fluidity shows how close R&B and country could get without upsetting genre boundaries. Coincidentally, Henderson’s ultimate failure to top the R&B charts was caused by a re- cording that appeared to much more fundamentally challenge such distinctions. Released as the lead single from Modern Sounds, Ray Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” reached #1 on both the R&B and pop charts and would become one of the most acclaimed perfor- mances of the year.
4.4 Modern Sounds and the Same Old Song Ray Charles’s country recordings occupy a somewhat contradictory position in this thesis as well as in the broader history and historiography of black (involvement in) country music. By vastly surpassing the sales records set by previous country-adjacent performers like Ivory Joe Hunter and Solomon Burke, Charles became the new – and, until Charley Pride, quite often only – reference point for African American engagements with country music. In subsequent reports, it regularly appeared as though black artists only started recording country(-influenced) music after Charles’s success. In addition, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is probably the one recording examined in this thesis that least sounds like country.231 By virtually transcending both country music and
229 Quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 62. 230 Joe Henderson, “Snap Your Fingers,” Snap Your Fingers (Todd ST 2701, 1962). 231 Ray Charles, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, ABC-Paramount, ABCS–410, 1962. 39 R&B, it situates crossover in a distinctively pop context.232 At the same time, the album’s commercial and cultural impact – including on the black musical landscape – was unde- niably profound. Interestingly, the main beneficiary of the album’s popularity turned out to be the country music industry. Bill C. Malone argues that, in addition to George Wallace’s pres- idential campaign, it was “Ray Charles’ [sic] astonishing commercial success in incorpo- rating [country music] into a decidedly integrationist musical statement” that enabled the “national ‘discovery’ of country music in the sixties.”233 According to Diane Pecknold, it is especially significant how “the country music industry both embraced and excluded the album.”234 This, she points out, “worked a special kind of alchemy that transformed a record most obviously about the porousness of racially marked musical boundaries into a record that comments primarily on class and region.”235 Consequently, the album did less to transform the possibilities for African American performers in country music than it did to bolster the genre’s mainstream respectability. Pecknold adds, though, that this “was consistent both with Charles’s performances on Modern Sounds and with his own confla- tion of race and class in discussing his reasons for doing the project.”236 Listening to the record today, it bears the influence of such R&B/pop crossover artists as Nat ‘King’ Cole at least as much as that of the Nashville Sound. It was recorded in Hollywood without the involvement of producers, arrangers, or musicians associated with country music. How- ever, all of the twelve songs were popular country songs, the most recent one being about four years old. In this respect, it echoes Coyle’s argument about Elvis Presley who needed to be “recognized as a white artist performing black music in a miscegenated style.”237 Yet, to paraphrase Coyle, Charles did not try to be anything other than ‘black.’238 What appears to differ, then, is where this leads the two artists. In her analysis, Pecknold identifies two types of arrangements on Modern Sounds. These are, on the one hand, “simple small-band string and vocal arrangements” and, on the other hand, “fuller, syncopated swing arrangements including horns.”239 Although Pecknold argues that “the former would have been understood by many listeners, partic- ularly those in the country music audience, as firmly situated within the countrypolitan
232 Cf. Feder, “Song of the South,” 150. 233 Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 237–238. 234 Diane Pecknold, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Duke University Press, 2013), 82–99, 82. 235 Ibid., 82. 236 Ibid., 83. 237 Coyle, “Hijacked Hits,” 145. 238 Ibid., 146. 239 Pecknold, “Making Country Music Modern,” 93. 40 style,” she also notes that Charles “exaggerated the elements of the original country ren- dition that were widely perceived as being [middle] class-based.”240 Meanwhile, his vo- cals stayed firmly within R&B conventions. Thus, his “performance combined the mid- dle-class trappings of the Nashville Sound with the conspicuous persona of the urbane, sophisticated soul crooner, and thereby connected class mobility and racial pluralism as the central elements of the ‘modern’ in Modern Sounds.”241 Pecknold suggests that this dynamic was even more salient in the other arrangements as big band swing had long become disconnected from its roots in African American culture and was instead associ- ated with a white, middle-class audience.242 Of course, this is not supposed to be a value judgement on the quality of Charles’s recording. Instead, it offers a useful perspective on what the album did and did not – and possibly could not – change. What clearly set Charles apart from his predecessors was his insistence to “so openly [claim] [country music] by name.”243 Apparently, he had “con- ceived the album as a concept statement” that was supposed to prevent its genre-crossing from “be[ing] misinterpreted simply as pop or ‘good music’.”244 In doing so, he seemed to point towards the fact that the strict segregation enforced by the music industry found a material basis in the processes of marketing and distribution. However, although the album was successful in what was then called ‘country markets,’ it was not played on most country radio stations and neither did it enter the country music charts. While this neglect certainly reflected industry racism, it was also, one could argue, the result of Charles’s musical strategy. Consequently, Feder contends that Charles’s recordings pro- posed “a profound critique of musical segregation – but critiques leveled from so far out- side the genre that they are not acts of generic integration in and of themselves.”245 In addition, Pecknold observes that, unlike Presley’s meteoric rise, Charles’s suc- cess was not understood as “pointing to the formation of a new listening audience with an appreciation for a particular blend of ‘black’ and ‘white’ styles.”246 It did lead a num- ber of African American performers to record country material or use Nashville’s record- ing studios. Some of them even shared Charles’s distinctively popular aesthetic. Accord- ingly, an early observation in Billboard all but evades the racial implications of this de- velopment, citing Brook Benton and Nat ‘King’ Cole as examples but clearly framing the
240 Pecknold, “Making Country Music Modern,” 93. ‘Countrypolitan’ was used as a marketing term at the time but designates the same as ‘Nashville Sound.’ Jensen, “Nashville Sound,” 343. 241 Pecknold, “Making Country Music Modern,” 93. 242 Ibid., 94. 243 Cooper, “Take Me Down,” 16. 244 Pecknold, “Making Country Music Modern,” 86. 245 Feder, “Song of the South,” 150. Feder’s comment is aimed at Modern Sounds as well as its second part, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume Two (1962). 246 Pecknold, “Making Country Music Modern,” 90. 41 story as one of pop artists recording country.247 As such, the article relates their recordings to Patti Page’s version of Pee Wee King’s “Tennessee Waltz” (1950) or Tony Bennett’s cover of Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart” (1951), both hugely successful pop singles. What goes unmentioned is that unlike Page, who reached #2 on the country charts, or Bennett, who performed on the Grand Ole Opry in 1956, none of the black artists dis- cussed here found even temporary entryways into country music.248 Other African American performers did not follow Charles’s musical direction, at least not as brazenly. Clearly, R&B/country crossover depended on an influential figure like Charles to affirm its viability. That did not, however, determine which form(s) this crossover might take in the future, nor did his approach exhaust the multiplicity of black engagements with country music. Although Charles and his record company anticipated criticism from (some) African American listeners, it is notable that many of those who followed in his tracks found R&B success with different, often more explicitly country- sounding, musical strategies. Consequently, Pecknold’s claim that the dominance of the “country-soul fusions produced at Fame, Stax, American, and other studios in Memphis and Muscle”249 was directly linked to the popularity of Modern Sounds appears to con- flate different developments taking place at the same time – including those that preceded Charles. The most frequently cited successor to Ray Charles is probably Esther Phillips’s recording of “Release Me.” Phillips had been a successful R&B singer in the early 1950s but had since stopped recording. In 1962, she was discovered performing in a Houston nightclub by future country star Kenny Rogers.250 Rogers recommended her to his brother Lelan, who signed Phillips to his newly founded Lenox label and brought her to Nashville to record. “Release Me” was a significant crossover success, reaching #1 on Billboard’s R&B chart and #8 in pop.251 While Charlie Gillett claims that Rogers “applied the same kind of treatment that Ray Charles had just given to ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,”252 there
247 Jack Maher, “Ray Charles Carried the Ball – Then Everybody Else Began Scoring Big,” Billboard (No- vember 10, 1962): 34–36. 248 For Bennett at the Grand Ole Opry, see Juli Thanki, “Tony Bennett has a soft spot for country, Music City,” The Tennessean (July 7, 2016). Online:
[1970]), 177. 253 Esther Phillips, “Release Me,” Release Me! Reflections of Country and Western Greats (Lenox Records, LX–227, 1962). Its reissue was titled The Country Side of Esther Phillips (Atlantic, SD 8130, 1966). 254 In fact, Freeland also emphasizes that Phillips’s “sensibility was profoundly country in orientation,” arguing that some of her best work can be found on “big-hearted country-ballads.” Freeland, Ladies of Soul, xxiii. 255 “Record Reviews – Pick of the Week: Newcomers,” Cash Box (October 13, 1962), 14. 256 “Reviews of New Singles,” Billboard (October 13, 1962), 40. 257 At the time, there were no album charts dedicated to R&B but Release Me did make it to #74 in the regular Cash Box album charts. “Top 100 Albums,” Cash Box (February 23, 1963), 21. 258 “Album Reviews – Spotlight Albums of the Week,” Billboard (December 15, 1962), 16. 43 Charles, is perfectly suited to the country idiom.”259 Apparently, the merging of genres does not present itself as a problem but neither does it bring Phillips much closer to coun- try success. In this respect, it is instructive to pay attention to the non-musical aspects of Charles’s and Phillips’s recordings. On the one hand, Phillips’s success is all the more impressive considering the fact that she was signed to a small and newly founded inde- pendent company. Although it is difficult to make any wide-ranging claims based on this, it appears that there was indeed a sizeable “market for a straightforward country song by an R&B singer.”260 On the other hand, Phillips’s producer and label were much closer to the actual Nashville scene than either Charles or ABC-Paramount. Yet, neither Phillips nor her label appeared to be interested in making an integrationist statement beyond the recordings – unlike Charles, they did not claim country music. Her album, for example, was subtitled Reflections of Country and Western Greats, which vaguely posited a con- nection to the genre while not actually positioning it inside like Charles had done. While her recordings were more explicitly country, Phillips’s implicit critique was arguably frail because it was never leveled as one.
4.5 Interlude: Race and Genre in the Early 1960s As the previous chapter has shown, Esther Phillips’s success amplified the affinities be- tween country and R&B and even pointed to, for example, a black audience interested in such R&B/country crossover. Among the rising social tensions of early 1963, we there- fore find R&B charts that are different than maybe expected. On January 14, George Wallace’s inaugural address as Governor of Alabama popularized his infamous procla- mation of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In the weeks before and after, the Top 10 R&B singles included not only Phillips’s “Release Me” but also Ray Charles’s version of pro-segregationist Jimmie Davis’s signature song “You Are
259 “Album Reviews – Popular Picks of the Week,” Cash Box (December 22, 1962), 30. 260 Jerry Wexler quoted in Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music, 72. During her time at Lenox, Phillips was also paired with Big Al Downing, a singer and pianist who had started out performing rock and roll and R&B but was, as he says, always more interested in country music. While their duets are in the style of Brook Benton and Dinah Washington’s recent R&B/pop recordings, Downing also issued a solo single, “Mr. Hurt Walked In,” that was recorded with the same musicians as Phillips’s releases and is similarly coun- try-sounding. Unlike most other R&B/country material at the time, the song was co-written by Downing himself. It received a very positive review in Cash Box – which noted the intermingling of genres when it stated that “[t]he blues stylist gets to the hurt of the countryish plaintive” – and an endorsement in Billboard but only entered the lower rungs of the latter’s pop charts. This might have been caused by the fact that soon after the single’s release, Lenox went bankrupt. Downing remained on the edges of the R&B/country borderlands for the rest of the 1960s, playing piano on country sessions but recording only sporadically under his own name. He briefly charted in the mid-70s with what might be the only disco hit to feature a banjo, “I’ll Be Holding On,” and finally ended up recording country music at the end of the decade, enjoying on-and-off success until the late 1980s. His country years are thus outside the parameters set by this thesis but his early excursions into the genre remain one of the great what-ifs in black country history. See “Record Reviews,” Cash Box (July 20, 1963), 12; Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 166; Foster, My Country, 93–94. 44 My Sunshine” as well as Brook Benton’s Nashville-recorded “Hotel Happiness.”261 This suggests that a retroactive understanding of musical genres – for example R&B devoid of country influences – does not always correspond to its historical development. What ap- pears counterintuitive today was not always so alien, although it certainly confounded social expectations even then. David Brackett explains that “in the study of genre, the components (be they mu- sical, social, material, expressive, et cetera) that may characterize a genre at a given point in time may also participate in other genres at the same time.”262 He proposes Dianne Warwick’s “Walk On By” (1964) as an example of what he calls “multiple participation.” In addition to R&B, the song participates in Brill Building pop, MOR (middle of the road) pop, and the girl group sound.263 What Brackett only hints at, however, is that such par- ticipation and its legibility also hinge on certain social rules. In the early 1960s, it appears difficult to conceive of a crossover between or multiple participation in country and R&B music. To be clear, I do not insist on describing any of the artists analyzed so far as coun- try musicians or asserting that the history laid out in this chapter applies to all R&B artists. It is crucial, though, that “[m]ost black artists did not share the privilege of alternating between country and R&B performances in the manner of white musicians.”264 An exception can be found in the music of Charles, Benton, and Cole, who had arguably outgrown their position as mere R&B performers before they recorded country music and were primarily identified as pop. Sometimes, artists like Arthur Alexander and Esther Phillips were also understood to participate in both genres, but these assessments were few and far between. As I have shown, this was not because the country aspects were not recognizable or because the performers did not see their music as (partly) coun- try. Rather, it was based on an inherently racialized conception of musical genre and a corresponding promotion and marketing machine. While white musicians like, most fa- mously, Elvis Presley could be categorized as country, pop, and R&B, black artists were rarely granted such liberties. If they were, it was because they had already transcended generic classification, thus making their genre-bending recordings the result of artistic genius or versatility.265
261 “Hot R&B Singles,” Billboard (January 12, 1963), 15; and Billboard (January 19, 1963), 16. Close behind these songs was Etta James’s country ballad “Would It Make Any Difference to You.” 262 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 10. 263 Ibid., 243–245. 264 Hughes, “You’re My Soul Song,” 289. Although Hughes’s argument here is based on the example of Arthur Alexander, it appears to be equally applicable to other performers in this chapter. 265 In the liner notes to a 1961 Brook Benton album, producer Shelby Singleton claims that Benton is “without a doubt the most popular, the best-selling, and most versatile singer in the world today.” Sin- gleton states that Benton “can be backed by a full symphony, a hill-billy band, dance band, just a piano, or any musical combination at all, and he always sounds great.” Singleton, liner notes to Brook Benton, The Boll Weevil Song and 11 Other Great Hits (Mercury, SR–60641, 1961). 45 Of course, these constraints on artistic freedom may also reflect the lack of African American executives in the record industry at the time, which was in turn representative of power relations in U.S. society at large. However, it is insufficient to reduce this topic to a matter of sympathetic industry connections. As mentioned earlier, Billboard tempo- rarily removed its R&B charts from 1963 to 1965. According to Brackett, this occurrence shows that “[w]hen detached from social identity and reduced to style traits, the category became illegible.”266 He furthermore claims that [s]uch discourse functions as a riposte to strict anti-essentialists, who often make the same mistake as Billboard by equating a part with the whole. This type of chainlike logic argues (often through implica- tion) that because a musical component appears in another assemblage, such an appearance contradicts the possibility that a musical category can have a homological relation with a category of people.267
The point, however, is not to deny that such homological relations exist, possibly not even why they exist, but rather how they are constituted and continually re-affirmed. Michael Awkward proposes that cover performances might encourage listeners “to see [race] – or, better perhaps, to hear it – as, amongst other things, a group of vocal behaviors from which talented singers of contemporary popular music choose in constituting their own style.”268 Accordingly, I would argue that the crossover between R&B and country as analyzed in this chapter shows the social construction of ‘race’ through the juxtaposition and mixing of ostensibly opposite musical traditions. The period immediately prior to the hiatus of the R&B chart was marked by stark incoherence, caused by the listing of nu- merous artists outside the tastes of African American audiences. That, in turn, must not imply that these tastes were not broader than suggested by Billboard’s (or Cash Box’s) charts. Although Brackett distances himself from such analyses, his argument implies a surprisingly fixed notion of musical authenticity that does not allow for meaningful par- ticipation in genres other than those prescribed by a narrowly racial understanding of ‘social identity.’269 This limits not only the available repertoire from which an artist may draw but also restricts the social legibility of such musical performances.
4.6 Country-Soul Flourishes The years after the success of Modern Sounds were characterized by the ascent of those southern recording studios that form the backbone of the histories told by Barney Hoskyns and Peter Guralnick and subsequently criticized by Hughes. In the formers’ accounts,
266 Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 272. 267 Ibid., 272. 268 Awkward, Soul Covers, 152–153. Cf. Sanjek, “King Records,” 328–329. 269 Brackett does mention that “the three categories existing on the same level as R&B – mainstream pop, country, and MOR – feature prominently as components of the different R&B subgenres.” However, it appears that country is only explicitly linked to one of his ten categories, namely the “6/8 gospel-country ballads.” He also points towards the seeming one-sidedness of this exchange, saying that such ballads “never appeared in the popularity chart for country music.” Cf. Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 243. 46 these collaborations between, most frequently, black singers on the one side and white session musicians, producers as well as songwriters on the other serve as a sign of racial reconciliation in an age of unprecedented social strife. From a musical perspective, the black performers are seen as bringing an R&B and gospel background to the proceedings while the white session musicians supply a – sometimes unwitting – country flair. Inter- estingly, the session musicians (and writers) are often the heroes of such narratives, for their sustained interest in R&B allegedly facilitated this bridging of racialized musical traditions. However, as Hughes’s analysis in Country Soul shows, all of these musicians had diverse musical backgrounds that included church traditions as well as the popular music of the day, including rock and roll, R&B, and country.270 In any case, it is certainly true that ever since Jimmy Hughes’s Top 20 pop hit “Steal Away” (1964), the recording studios in places like Memphis, the Muscle Shoals metropolitan era, as well as Nashville – what Hughes describes as the “country-soul triangle”271 – supplied an ever-growing number of hit recordings to the national R&B charts.272 On the other hand, one of the most high-profile R&B/country crossover perform- ers in those years continued to be Ray Charles. While popular histories often speak of Charles’s return to country music in the 1980s, it should be noted that he continued to release country songs throughout the 60s and 70s. On the cover of his 1965 album Coun- try and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues, Charles explicitly points towards this musical mixing with two pictures of himself shaking hands, one of them dressed in a western shirt and cowboy hat, the other in a more customary black tuxedo.273 In 1966, he went to the R&B Top 10 twice with recent hits by country musician Buck Owens, “Together Again” and “Crying Time” (#5 and #10, respectively). Shortly before his untimely death in 1964, Sam Cooke, too, reached the R&B Top 10 with “Tennessee Waltz,” although the most successful R&B/country crossover song that year was certainly Joe Hinton’s cover of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” which made #1 in Cash Box’s R&B charts and #13 pop in Billboard. Other (moderately) successful R&B/country recordings during these years include Bettye LaVette’s “Let Me Down Easy” (1965, #20 R&B) and Mighty Sam’s “Sweet Dreams” (1966, #31 Cash Box R&B). It is noticeable, though, that perhaps due to the overwhelming reliance on a new
270 In addition, Hughes notes that “the fact that southern soul fundamentally changed country music sug- gests that, contrary to uplifting narratives about the presence of whites in 1960s southern soul music, a full appreciation of the multifaceted ways in which black music and musicians engaged with country music suggests a richer, and perhaps more troubling, narrative.” Hughes, “You’re My Soul Song,” 303 (emphasis added). 271 Hughes, Country Soul, 2. 272 These included Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1966), Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” (1967), and Wilson Pickett’s “I’m a Midnight Mover” (1968). 273 Ray Charles, Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues (ABC-Paramount, ABCS–520, 1965). 47 generation of writers directly associated with studios like Fame in Muscle Shoals as well as Goldwax and American Studios in Memphis, there were fewer examples of R&B hits that originated with country performers or songwriters. That does not mean that country music vanished from the mix. Rather, these young artists produced an organic mingling of styles that had previously been seen as more distinctively white and black. African American artists continued to cover country songs, too, but these were rarely released as singles. While a closer reading of these dynamics in the mid-1960s would complement my analysis, it does not meet the criteria of explicit crossover outlined so far.274 Instead, I want to shift the time frame into the late 1960s. This is instructive for a number of reasons, one of which is the juxtaposition of R&B/country crossover and the ascent of country music’s first black super star, Charley Pride. Perhaps coincidentally, 1968 – the year that saw Pride cementing his country chart presence – also witnesses the chart return of the R&B country cover, most famously in O.C. Smith’s “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp” and “Little Green Apples” as well as Joe Simon’s “(You Keep Me) Hangin’ On.” Con- trary to popular perception – and the myth of Pride’s success kicking down doors for African American performers – other black country singers only started to reach the charts in mid-1969, when Linda Martell released “Color Him Father.” Indeed, Stoney Edwards and O.B. McClinton, who were second to Pride in chart performance during the 1970s, only made their first showings in 1971 and 1972, respectively – a full four to five years after Pride appeared on the scene. During the preceding years, the most visible engage- ments of African American artists with country music could still be found in the R&B and soul charts.
5. ANALYSIS, PT. 2: COUNTRY-SOUL 5.1 “Country Music Now Interracial” And suddenly it happened. At least that is what Billboard columnist Bill Williams would have readers believe. In the magazine’s August 17, 1968 issue, Williams points out that “[c]ountry music, long international in aspect, is now becoming interracial as well.”275
274 For an extended analysis of this situation, see Hughes’s Country Soul, especially chapters two to four. Other authors who have focused on these years include Hoskyns, Say It One Time; Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music; Ward, Just My Soul Responding; Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America, rev. and updated (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006 [1998]); Roben Jones, Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 275 Bill Williams, “Country Music Now Interracial,” Billboard (August 17, 1968): 1, 106. Numerous schol- ars have written about country music’s international audience, including its rapport among listeners in the black diaspora. For an overview, see Nathan D. Gibson, “What’s International About International Country Music?” in The Oxford Handbook of Country Music, ed. Travis D. Stimeling (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 2017), 495–518, especially 502–504 and 517 (fn. 57). 48 Apparently, this development was important enough to make the front page. Williams’s numerical evidence is scarce but implies how successfully country music’s whiteness had been asserted. “There are currently three Negro performers in country music,” Williams claims, “and the feeling is one of total acceptance.”276 It is difficult to imagine a critic pointing out that R&B was becoming interracial based on three white people playing such music. Williams’s framing suggests that, on the one hand, white musicians have always been participating in styles linked to African Americans. On the other hand, it is also clear that the pop mainstream had become increasingly integrated during the 1950s and 60s. What is different is that now a ‘minority population’ was making its way into the music associated with another ‘minority population.’ In this respect, Williams’ pronouncement of “total acceptance” is telling, implying country music’s association with white southern racism while also evoking the industry’s attempts to modernize its image. Aside from Charley Pride, Williams talks about two performers who have not en- tered the genre’s history books. These are Junior Norman, who had recently been “signed as a regular member of the WWVA ‘Jamboree’ live Saturday night show in Wheeling, W. Va.”277 as well as Welton Lane. At that point in 1968, Lane had already made demo recordings with his manager Paul Fetter but they were finding it difficult to secure a re- cording contract. The article mentions plans for both a contract and a recording session, but no further evidence of these can be found. It was only in 1971 that Lane signed to Epic Records, where he released three singles, none of which charted.278 Interestingly, Williams describes Lane’s style as “Soul Country.”279 It is not clear whether this is based on any performance traits or merely results from the fact that Lane is African American. It does, however, provide a link to an earlier passage in the report, where Williams notes that “[t]his crossover of the black man into country music is not unmerited; r&b perform- ers have long adopted country music songs and the Negro has always been present at country music concerts.”280 Williams’s rather condescending affirmation that black en- gagements with country music are not unmerited is striking. In addition, it is curious how he deflates the depth of such engagements (“have long adopted country music songs”) as well as the importance of, for example, country music radio while simultaneously over- stating the case for racial integration at country concerts. The latter were arguably among the most segregated avenues of participation in the genre.281
276 Williams, “Country Music,” 1. 277 Ibid., 1, 106. The WWVA Jamboree is a show similar to the Grand Ole Opry. 278 Cf. Foster, My Country, 161–162. 279 Williams, “Country Music,” 106. 280 Williams, “Country Music,” 106. 281 In 1975, Ann Malone cautiously inquired, “Who knows how many black people, in the early days and now, listen to country music on the radio – or perhaps buy records – who would feel ill at ease among 49 What stands out most, however, is how stridently the boundaries between R&B and country music continued to be drawn. Although Williams cites Lane’s “Soul Country” style and country songs in the repertoire of R&B performers, he does not use this oppor- tunity to address, for example, Joe Tex’s recently released album Soul Country or the fact that Joe Simon’s version of the country song “Hangin’ On” had just been a successful R&B hit. Yet, it could reasonably be argued that either Lane or Williams (or both) were aware of Tex’s album and adapted the designation from him.282 After all, Tex was not only one of the most popular performers in R&B music at the time, he was also signed to a record label in Nashville, Dial Records.283 This label belonged to Buddy Killen, who co-owned Tree Music, one of the biggest publishing firms in the city. Williams appears hesitant about emphasizing such continuities between country music and R&B and in- stead relies on vague allusions. Conversely, a contemporary interview with Joe Simon suggests how acutely aware R&B performers were of these genre boundaries. Quite suc- cinctly, he notes that “I’ll sing country, but in order to be successful, I guess I’d have to change my colour [sic].”284 Consequently, this chapter will examine whether subsequent years brought any changes in the popular perception of possible overlaps between R&B/soul and country.
5.2 Crossover at the Outskirts of Town The first R&B/country hit of 1968 was actually released by a then little-known performer called O.C. Smith. Although Smith had spent some time as Count Basie’s lead singer in the early 1960s, his own recordings so far had brought little commercial success.285 In January, his record company released the singer’s version of Johnny Darrell’s “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” which was at the time climbing up the lower ranks of the country charts. Darrell’s single peaked at #22 in late February, shortly before Smith’s version entered the R&B charts in March. Since Darrell’s recording did not even come near the pop charts, this can hardly be described as an instance of hijacking a hit. It shows, however, how such material could attract ostensibly different audiences. It also demon- strates industry understandings of how such appeal could most successfully be enhanced through, for example, a song’s arrangement. Curiously, both the song and Smith more generally have largely been absent from soul music histories as well as works concerned
white audiences at live performances.” Cf. Malone, “Charley Pride,” 343. 282 Neither Billboard’s nor Cash Box’s archives suggest that the term was used widely (if at all) before Tex’s album. 283 Tex’s albums were distributed by Atlantic Records. Cf. Billboard (August 3, 1968), 11. 284 Joe Simon interviewed by R&B World in 1968. Quoted in Hughes, Country Soul, 138. 285 Cf. “Sometimes It Takes Years to Become an Overnight Success,” Billboard (May 25, 1968), 5. 50 with black country music.286 Perhaps this has to do with Smith’s unusual background as a jazz singer, the fact that his repertoire drew equally on pop, soul, and country music, or that his music was mostly recorded in Los Angeles, far away from the southern soil that is usually seen as yielding these crossovers. In any case, Smith’s output during the late 1960s and early 70s was ripe with country songs, including such singles as “Little Green Apples” (1968) and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (1971) as well as album tracks like “Long Black Limousine” (1968).287 The lyrics of “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp” feature a family saga that can hardly be imagined in any genre outside of country music. Right during harvest time, “daddy’s” alcoholism and womanizing take over, he runs off, leaving “momma” to tend to their fourteen children.288 She promises that they will “never see a hungry day,”289 consequently turning to prostitution to make ends meet. Although the neighbors scorn her, the children are thankful for everything she gives them. At the end, it is revealed that the occasion of this narrative is the mother’s recent death. Its mixture of exaggerated home- liness on the one hand and a social realistic depiction of society’s outcasts on the other makes it an excellent distillation of country music’s decidedly populist but often fuzzy morals. It addresses the economic necessity that frequently motivates prostitution without turning it into social criticism; it highlights the importance of family values in what con- servatives would decry a broken home. Alas, it is probably not a song that Richard Nixon would have requested. Interestingly, Brian Ward’s appraisal shows the close proximity of such country narratives to soul songs of the era, particularly in addressing topics like prostitution. Call- ing it “[p]erhaps the most remarkable of all soul’s depictions of prostitution,”290 he also inadvertently implies the way the two genres intermingled. A comparison of Darrell’s and Smith’s recordings reveals how such similarities were both reflected and obscured in the actual recordings. On the one side, Darrell’s version begins with an acoustic guitar mel- ody over a full band backing, which is followed by an introduction of the song’s chorus in Darrell’s somewhat drawled, laid-back vocals. 291 This arrangement changes little throughout, thus emphasizing the song’s storyline. Musically, it sits firmly in the middle between classic honky-tonk and more recent Nashville recordings, largely eschewing
286 Foster mentions Smith in passing, but Hoskyns does not address him at all. 287 Smith’s versions of “Little Green Apples” and “Long Black Limousine” are similar to those Elvis Pres- ley recorded for his From Elvis in Memphis album in 1969, which went to #2 in the country charts. 288 O.C. Smith, “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” Hickory Holler Revisited (Columbia, CS 9680, 1968). It was written by the country songwriter Dallas Frazier. 289 Smith, “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp.” 290 Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 378. For other soul songs on prostitution, see 377–378. 291 Johnny Darrell, “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp (United Artists Records, UAS 6634, 1968). 51 both the steel guitars and fiddles of the former as well as the strings of the latter. On the other side, Smith’s version also starts with a short intro, although this one consists of a small riff played only by the bass and electric guitar. Then, listeners are introduced to the singer’s warm, yet assertive, and slightly southern-tinged baritone vocals. Arguably evok- ing Joe Henderson’s “Snap Your Fingers” (1962), it is only after the introductory chorus that the generic arbiters of R&B, horns, appear in the song. Although the tempo is slightly faster than in Darrell’s version, the band substantially funkier, Smith’s voice stays firmly within the lower range and largely abstains from the kind of melismatic decoration and timbral variation associated with soul music.292 By centering the voice mostly as a vehicle for the lyrics, Smith’s version retains Darrell’s sense of narrative. Although the backing track could be a different song altogether, the vocal performance suggests a direct lineage to the song’s country origins. Interestingly, the accompanying album, Hickory Holler Revisited, also empha- sizes Smith’s role as a “storyteller.” The liner notes, written by jazz and gospel singer Della Reese, proclaim that this era of storytelling has brought “a new approach” with “songs honoring the real unsung heroes, ‘everyday human beings.’ The struggle just to exist …”293 Reese asserts that such storytellers “record history and protest injustice.”294 This framing, as well as Smith’s own vocal performance on many tracks, in significant ways echo popular country music of the day – except for the fact that he is speaking as an African American, which might be hinted at by the fact that he is “protest[ing] injus- tice.”295 The songs themselves are drawn from three different strands. There are covers of recent southern soul hits (“Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” “Take Time to Know Her”), covers of mostly Nashville-oriented country(-pop) songs (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Long Black Limousine”) as well as new tracks, largely written by Smith’s producer Jerry Fuller and arranger H. B. Barnum. These lean toward either one of the aforementioned styles. The music reflects these influences but also features a notable MOR sheen. Reviewers at the time appeared to be fond of the album and noted its reliance on “story-songs,”296 although none commented on the fluid blend of country and soul styles underneath. The music industry was arguably more aware of this overlap – which did not mean, however, that styles were being desegregated. This is especially obvious in the success of the album’s most popular single, “Little Green Apples,” which had recently been a Top 10 country hit for Roger Miller. Smith’s version, originally not intended as a
292 Cf. Bowman, “Soul,” 440. 293 Della Reese, liner notes to O.C. Smith, Hickory Holler Revisited (Columbia Records, CS 9680, 1968). 294 Ibid. 295 Cf. Hill, “Out of the Barn,” 126. 296 “Album Reviews – Pop Picks,” Cash Box (June 1, 1968), 38. 52 single but apparently released after significant demand from Chicago radio stations, reached #2 in the R&B and pop charts.297 In 1969, its writer Bobby Russell was awarded a Grammy for “Song of the Year.” At the same time, “Little Green Apples” also won Russell the award for “Best Country Song.”298 Since Miller’s version barely entered the pop Top 40 and Smith’s did not come near the country charts it can be assumed that the respective awards were based on two distinct performances.299 Although the arrangement on Smith’s recording is more embellished, it does not depart from the sound of current country-pop hits by artists like Glen Campbell.300 Consequently, it can be argued – as Diane Pecknold does in regard to Ray Charles’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” – that Smith’s version “would have been understood by many listeners, particularly those in the country music audience, as firmly situated within the countrypolitan style.”301 It appears, though, that the easiest way to make sense of this was to position Smith, like Ray Charles and Brook Benton before him, as a pop artist able to transcend generic conventions.
5.3 Introducing Soul Country If Smith’s trajectory in the late 1960s is reminiscent of R&B/country crossover earlier that decade, most soul/country hits during this time were recorded by artists firmly iden- tified as soul. They were usually recorded in the South, mostly in Muscle Shoals, Nash- ville, and Memphis. In terms of commercial success, some of the most popular were Joe Tex and Joe Simon. Interestingly, both of them also recorded albums that made this con- nection explicit. As Hughes explains, These albums were designed not just to spotlight the singers’ versatility but also to assert a specific affinity between country and soul (and country and African Americans) that the racially polarized music industry did not always acknowledge. They had evocative titles like Simon Country (Simon) and Soul Country (Tex), and the cover art often depicted the performers in identifiably ‘country’ settings.302
In addition, Hughes claims that these were “clearly meant to duplicate the crossover suc- cess of Ray Charles’s 1962 Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music.”303 While these albums surely drew on Charles’s example, even a cursory listen suggests that their ar- rangements were not explicitly tailored for pop success – in fact, they were frequently of a piece with previous recordings by these artists. If they were indeed targeting crossover
297 Cf. Heikki Suosalo, “O.C. Smith Story,” Soul Express (n.d.) Online:
304 For how this promotional strategy was also applied to African American country singers, starting with “Country Charley Pride,” as he was billed early in his career, see Hill, “Out of the Barn,” 161–162. 305 Hughes, Country Soul, 138. 306 Songwriter and session player Spooner Oldham, for example, notes that “I can still hear that nasal coun- try sound in Percy’s voice […] He had it more than most country singers!” Quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 103 (emphasis in original). 307 Interestingly, Sledge’s producer, Quin Ivy, argues that after Sledge’s first hit “When a Man Loves a Woman” “not many blacks bought his records.” In addition, Ivy contents that “I used to tell Atlantic, you should see the people who come to his shows – they’re white country people, almost exclusively.” Of course, Sledge never charted in county music, but this assertion would certainly be worth investigat- ing. In 1974, Sledge, too, recorded an album that featured mostly country material (I’ll Be Your Every- thing, on Capricorn Records). Ivy quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 105. 308 “Spotlight Singles – Top 60 Pop Spotlight,” Billboard (May 11, 1968), 60. 54 over my eye / You know I love my pie / And I love my eye, baby / So you know I’ll never do you wrong”309) with a mid-tempo arrangement by the American Sound Studio band (who had also played on many of Tex’s previous recordings). Such parallels, however, were not even noticed when the song was selected as the opener of Soul Country. In Billboard, the album was described simply as a “top program of country tunes given the r&b soul treatment.”310 Cash Box was slightly more observant, stating that “[t]he idea of transposing songs from one field into another may not be new, but it has seldom worked as well as on this new set by R&B-oriented hitmaker Joe Tex.”311 The reviewer also commented that the song “Set Me Free” “sound[ed] as if it had been written with Tex in mind.” The album’s liner notes, written by former Billboard editor and vice president of Atlantic Records’ PR department, Bob Rolontz, tried to pro- vide a more insightful perspective, proposing that [t]he similarities between R&B and country music are deeper than generally realized by adherents of either field. Country songs, like R&B songs, are about events that touch the minds and hearts of ordinary people. The main subject matter for both forms of music is love: love that brings joy or love that brings pain, love requited and love unrequited, young love, jealous love, true love. Country songs may be more descriptive, R&B songs are more emotional. But both tell it like it is – without pretense, without adorn- ment.312
While the rest of the liner notes features a rundown of Tex’s career so far, establishes his connection to the Nashville country scene as well as his upbringing on country music (“One of his earliest idols was Hank Williams”), Rolontz’s description stands out as a fitting encapsulation of statements given by performers, executives, and fans on the two genres’ stylistic similarities. Unsurprisingly, it only hints at the racial implications of this divide and does little to deconstruct that narrative any further. Although it is not known who selected the songs for Tex’s album (probably his producer Buddy Killen), they are more suggestive in this respect.313 Contrary to what reviews implied, the ten tracks do not only “[transpose] songs from one field into another” but consist of 1) a self-written song by Tex, 2) recent traditional country songs like Curly Putman’s “Set Me Free” or Henson Cargill’s “Skip a Rope”, 3) current country-pop hits by performers like Bobbie Gentry (“Ode to Billie Joe”) and Bobby Goldsboro (“Honey”), as well as 4) the country-soul favorite “The Dark End of the Street,” which had been a hit
309 Joe Tex, “I’ll Never Do Young Wrong,” Soul Country (Atlantic, SD 8187, 1968). Also, see Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 137. 310 “Album Reviews,” Billboard (July 6, 1968), 83. The same page also features a review of Don Gibson’s The King of Country Soul, which was lauded for its “smart and soulful arrangements.” Since the album is basically a good though indistinctive country album for the time, it is curious that reviewers appar- ently were quicker to latch on to such crossover implications by white performers than they were to comment on the country tendencies in Tex’s work, which were perceived to be merely in the material. 311 “Album Reviews – Pop Best Bets,” Cash Box (July 13, 1968), 50. 312 Bob Rolontz, liner notes to Joe Tex, Soul Country (Atlantic Records, SD 8187, 1968). The artwork is rather unremarkable and features a picture of Tex similar to that on his album The Love You Save (1966). 313 Killen says that Tex “wasn’t really prepared for the album.” Quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 137. 55 for James Carr the previous year. From this perspective, Soul Country presents a rather wide-ranging overview of (possible) intersections between soul and country music. How- ever, this also means that it lacks some of the coherence which for example Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds had shown. Rock critic Robert Christgau noticed such (dis-)similarities in a 1968 column, ar- guing that as Ray Charles made clear when he began recording country music almost seven years ago, c&w and r&b have much in common […] Joe Tex […] recently tried to reify that spiritual kinship with an album called (naturally) Soul Country. A great idea, if done for love; unfortunately, other considerations appear to have interfered, and the result, though not without its amenities, is Tex’s poorest LP.314
Christgau’s review is helpful since, in spite of its overall disapproval, it tries to more closely investigate claims like Rolontz’s while also moving beyond the basic dichotomy of R&B and country music. He suggests that a connection between country music and Tex’s own style is mostly visible in the more traditional country songs, positing that “[f]or Tex, country music is a refuge for the rugged, and beleaguered, individualist – trucker, cowboy, outlaw – (‘Green Green Grass of Home’), for traditional family values (‘Set Me Free’), and for simple decency (‘Skip a Rope’). It is direct and adult.”315 Although his readings are sometimes reductive (“trucker, cowboy, outlaw” is little more than a series of clichés) and sometimes idiosyncratic (in “Set Me Free,” a person asks their partner in an evidently loveless relationship to break up with them), Christgau does notice some important resemblances. In fact, he is the only reviewer to single out “Skip a Rope,” which, even more than “Set Me Free,” suggests Tex’s own writings. Henson Cargill’s original recording had spent five weeks atop the country charts in early 1968, eventually crossing over into the pop charts, where it reached #25. It presents an interesting alterna- tive to the articulations forged through songs like “Okie from Muskogee,” denouncing the hypocrisy of American society and the way it is passed onto coming generations. The song asks listeners to pay attention to children’s conversations, highlighting topics like (verbal) domestic abuse, tax evasion, and racism: “Never mind the rules, just play to win / And hate your neighbor for the shade of his skin.”316 Finally, it states that “[s]tab ‘em in the back, that’s the name of your game / And momma and daddy are who’s to blame,” thereby pleading for social progress in a decidedly individualist fashion. Such sentiments are rather close to Tex’s own down-home lectures on songs like “Hold What You’ve Got” or “The Love You Save.” In a way, “Skip a Rope” even went beyond that since Tex’s material usually focused on love relationships.
314 Robert Christgau, “November 1968,” Esquire (November 1968). Online:
5.4 “The Chokin’ Kind” Explores New Territory Of these soul/country crossovers, the most consistently successful were recorded by Joe Simon. Like Tex, Simon was based in Nashville, where he was signed to the Sound Stage 7 (SS7) record label, headed by former DJ John Richbourg.323 He had entered the music
317 Christgau, “November 1968,” n.p. (emphasis added). 318 Ibid. 319 Half of the tracks were either Top 10 pop crossover hits or only charted in pop: “Ode To Billie Joe,” Roger Miller’s “Engine Engine Number Nine,” “Green Green Grass Of Home” (as recorded by Tom Jones), Glen Campbell’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” and “Honey.” 320 Rolontz, liner notes to Joe Tex, Soul Country. 321 Cf. Foster, My Country, 231. 322 Foster, My Country, 231. 323 Richbourg is a curious example of the racial dynamics in American music, having started his career as 57 business singing gospel music but changed to R&B in the early 1960s. In 1965, he had begun working with Richbourg, but the most successful phase of their collaboration came when they began recording Simon on country songs. From 1968 onwards, these covers repeatedly made the R&B Top 10 and were among his most popular recordings.324 During that summer, his version of the Gosdin Bros.’ “Hangin’ On” (1967, #37 country) reached #11 in Billboard’s R&B charts and #25 pop – in Cash Box, it went as far as #7 R&B and stayed on the charts for 20 weeks.325 Just like Tex’s album, it was recorded at American Studios in Memphis. The song itself was a mid-tempo ballad that was well suited for Simon’s plaintive baritone vocals. Chips Moman’s understated arrangement – likely in- spired by Waylon Jennings’s version of the song – consists mostly of bass guitar, a subtle piano part, drums as well as strings.326 During the chorus, Simon is joined by backing singers that sound neither distinctively black nor white. The most obvious difference to Jennings’s version, aside from Simon’s vocal, is the absence of acoustic guitars, which is balanced by the greater presence of strings. It could have probably been played on country radio next to Marty Robbins’s #1 hit “I Walk Alone” (1968) without causing too much of a stir. Unsurprisingly, it was not. Reviews were positive but generally followed the pattern established earlier that decade. Billboard proclaimed that “[t]he strong country ballad is given an exceptional and soulful blues reading by Simon that should bring him right to a high spot on the Hot 100 as well as the r&b chart.”327 The generic origins of the song are recognized but the possibility of the song entering that chart is not even entertained. Likewise, Cash Box pointed out that the “[s]low ballad here packs a blockbuster potential that should put the
a very popular R&B DJ with a put-on accent that apparently led some African American listeners to believe that he was, in fact, black. Cf. Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 128–129. 324 From 1968 to 1971, ten of Simon’s singles reached the R&B/soul Top 20. Of these, five were written and previously recorded by country artists, one was written by Joe South (himself an example of coun- try-soul), one by Taj Mahal and his band (whose genre-busting approach at the time established his popularity in what has since become known as ‘Americana’; notably, his band included the Native American guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, who started his career playing country music with Conway Twitty) and three were written by Simon himself. For Joe South, see Hughes, Country Soul, 149–155. For Mahal and Davis, see Dan Forte, “Jesse Ed Davis: Guitar Hero’s Guitar Hero,” Vintage Guitar Magazine (Au- gust 2005). Online:
328 “Record Reviews – Picks of the Week,” Cash Box (March 30, 1968), 20. 329 Cf. Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 125. 330 Joe Simon, “The Chokin’ Kind,” The Chokin’ Kind (Sound Stage 7, SSS–15006, 1969). 331 “Spotlight Singles – Top 60 Pop Spotlight,” Billboard (March 1, 1969), 85. 332 “Country Music Gets More Complicated,” Billboard, The World of Country Music 1969–70, October 18, 1969: 40. 333 Ibid. 59 gives you a bigger area to work in and more room for creativity.”334 The report mentions that in the “short time since ‘The Chokin’ Kind’” (roughly six months), White had already arranged songs for such popular performers as Waylon Jennings and Chet Atkins. It saves the best for last, though. Apparently, “White is mixing his own creativity with the current sound of country music to produce the kind of material that is in demand so much to- day.”335 That his breakthrough came by working on the R&B/country recording of a black performer – whose chances in country music did not advance through this – appears to be less relevant.336 Even earlier, in April, Billboard had already dedicated a short piece to the song’s composer, Harlan Howard. Under the headline “‘Chokin’ Kind’ Goes to R&B,” it notes that “Howard’s success as a country songwriter now has moved into the field of rhythm and blues.”337 With some astonishment the article explains that “[p]aradoxically, there is no change of style; not even a change of material.”338 It even speaks of a “pattern which Howard’s songs seem to be following,”339 based not only on Ray Charles’s 1963 hit “Busted” but, more recently, on Ella Washington’s 1968 recording of “He Called Me Baby,” which was nominated for an R&B Grammy in 1969.340 The article is a prime ex- ample of the way generic boundaries were ignored and upheld in a rather ambiguous fashion. According to Billboard, “Howard insists he does not deliberately write anything but country-oriented music, and it just falls into other fields.”341 Likewise, the article quotes Richbourg as saying that “the lyrics to Howard songs lend themselves to r&b mu- sic.”342 This is not to doubt what both men claimed. Rather, their opinions unwittingly reflect the fragility of generic boundaries and a possible overlap between country and R&B that may be, as Bob Rolontz puts it, “deeper than generally realized by adherents of either field.”343 Fittingly, though, Joe Simon’s position in this process was being ignored.
5.5 “Blacks Sing Country Music”344 By the time Joe Simon’s cover of “The Chokin’ Kind” hit the charts, it was getting more
334 Quoted in “Country Music Gets More Complicated,” 40. 335 Ibid. (emphasis added). 336 How easily White’s arrangement could make it in (at least the lower rungs of) the country charts was seen when the aforementioned Diana Trask covered “The Chokin’ Kind” in 1971, reaching #59. 337 “‘Chokin’ Kind’ Goes to R&B,” Billboard (April 12, 1969), 42. 338 Ibid. 339 Ibid. 340 Ibid. “Busted” had previously been a hit for Johnny Cash, “He Called Me Baby” for Patsy Cline. Candi Staton’s 1970 recording of the latter reached #9 on the R&B charts. 341 “Chokin’ Kind Goes,” 42. 342 Quoted in Ibid. 343 Rolontz, liner notes to Tex, Soul Country. 344 Arnold Shaw, “Flipside Blacks Sing Country Music,” Billboard, The World of Soul (August 16, 1969): S-5. 60 crowded in the realm of soul/country crossover. That same year, 1969, Johnny Adams recorded what might be the first soul or R&B Top 10 hit with a steel guitar in the mix (“Reconsider Me”) and former R&B singer Linda Martell rose to #22 on the country charts with a cover of the soul group the Winstons’ “Color Him Father.”345 During the summer, producer Wayne Shuler even ventured to pair soul performer Bettye Swann with the country star Buck Owens to record the first interracial country-soul duet. Their version of “Today I Started Loving You Again,” however, never left the recording studio.346 Ap- parently, Owens’s producer Ken Nelson was less than enthusiastic about the idea. While their recording – as Gayle Wald argues about a similar encounter between country singer Red Foley and gospel pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe – is probably “more important as event than as artefact,” 347 it nonetheless hints at the different direction country and R&B/soul music’s development could have taken in the late 1960s. At the time, some artists and producers were increasingly showing awareness of the genres’ overlaps. This included recognizing the commercial appeal of recordings that transcended traditional ideas about, for example, sounds and audiences. Yet, in spite of this continued crossover, both genres were also winning appeal as signifiers of ideological difference. Only a few weeks after the discarded duet between Owens and Swann, Merle Haggard recorded “Okie from Muskogee.”348 Of course, the musical exchange did not suddenly stop after that song came out; neither did country material fall out of favor with African American audiences. But the ongoing success of such musical boundary crossing arguably did not increase its social legibility. Critical reception mirrored such confusion, alternatively trivializing its history and overstating its importance as an indicator of social progress. In August 1969, Billboard published an article by white music critic Arnold Shaw that is emblematic of such tendencies. Shaw starts his discussion with Jackie Thompson’s “Daddy Sang Bass,” a song that did not, in fact, become a hit but received strong promo- tion by Columbia Records. As Shaw emphasizes, “what mattered was that his record was
345 Ted Taylor’s version of “It’s Too Late” (1970) also featured a subtle pedal steel part. An even more pronounced example of this rather rare instrument in R&B and soul can be found on Parliament’s “Little Ole Country Boy” from their Osmium album, also released in 1970. 346 The unfinished recording was only released in 2015. See Buck Owens, Buck ‘Em! Volume 2: The Music of Buck Owens (1967–1975) (Omnivore Recordings, OVCD–135, 2015). 347 Their duet was recorded in Nashville in 1952 but was relegated to a b-side. Gayle Wald, “‘Have a Little Talk’: Listening to the B-Side of History,” Popular Music 24, 3 (October 2005): 323–37, 336. 348 Much has been written about what could have been if Haggard had followed up “Okie” not with the more straightforwardly patriotic “The Fightin’ Side of Me” but, as he had originally planned, with “Irma Jackson,” a ballad about an interracial love affair. Haggard told David Cantwell that his producer “Ken Nelson never interfered with my music […] But this one time he came out and said, ‘Merle … I don’t believe the world is ready for this yet.’” Although it is usually claimed that Capitol Records refused to release the single, Cantwell argues that Nelson convinced Haggard to take a different course. See David Cantwell, Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 162–163. 61 a black cover of a country song.”349 The article then provides a short historical rundown that features the usual suspects (Pride, Charles, Glover) and even mentions Chuck Berry’s country influences (including the country origins of “Maybellene”). According to Shaw, this should be “no surprise since Berry was a southerner from St. Louis, Missouri, and could not possibly have avoided hearing the Grand Ole Opry”350 and other country radio programs. Yet, Shaw then inadvertently shows how naturalized the racialization of musical genres had become. A brief look at the respective histories of country music and R&B leads him to claim that “[i]n its origins, country music evolved from a wasp [White An- glo-Saxon Protestant, H.B.] tradition” 351 while “[t]he negro tradition was […] Afri- can.”352 Finally, he posits: In short, the singing of country material by a black man represents a merger of two completely con- trasting, if not conflicting traditions […] Black nationalists are doubtless not too happy about this ad- aptation of an alien tradition. But that black singers are today relaxed about working with material from an opposing musical tradition can be taken as a sign of the new sense of dignity, self-respect and confi- dence that they feel about the future.353
Shaw’s argument thus ignores the long history of musical exchange between black and white Americans as well as the racialized commodification of popular music by the re- cording industry (of which he presents ample evidence). Although well-intentioned, Shaw’s essentialist perspective on culture says more about the historical moment from which it springs than the way that led there. Around the same time in 1969, Record World published a review in its country section that was less sure what to make of such crossovers. Describing Johnny Adams’s recent single, “Reconsider Me,” the magazine argued that “Johnny has a country-pop de- livery that will mean much on all sorts of charts.”354 Until then, Adams had usually been classified as an R&B singer.355 He had started his career in New Orleans in the early 1950s, initially singing gospel music before switching to R&B at the turn of the decade. In 1968, his recording of “Release Me” became a local success and was leased to Shelby Singleton in Nashville for national distribution, who signed Adams to his own SSS Inter- national label shortly after.356 Singleton frequently recorded the singer on songs penned by country songwriters. Even among these, Adams’ version of “Reconsider Me” stands
349 Shaw, “Flipside,” S-5. 350 Ibid. Curiously, Shaw misidentifies Joe Tex as an artist who built his career on “white country material.” 351 Ibid. Shaw reassures readers that he is “not using the term politically or emotionally.” 352 Ibid. 353 Ibid. 354 “Country Singles Reviews,” Record World (June 7, 1969), 52. 355 In fact, in the same issue his song was also described as an “excellent blues.” “R&B Beat,” Ibid., 36. 356 Jeff Hannusch, “Masters of Louisiana Music: Johnny Adams,” OffBeat Magazine (December 1, 2002). Online:
357 In this respect, it could be considered a precursor to Singleton’s recordings with Linda Martell, see chapter 6.1. Johnny Adams, “Reconsider Me,” Heart & Soul (SSS International, SSS–5, 1970). 358 It is noticeable that Singleton made a point of playing with such generic classifications by, for example, publishing the same advertisement (for Adams, Martell as well as other country and soul performers) in both the country and soul sections of Billboard. See, for example, Billboard (July 26, 1969), 40 and Billboard (August 2, 1969), 27. 359 Jeannie Seely, “Don’t Touch Me,” The Seely Style (Monument, SLP 18057, 1966). 360 Tammy Wynette, “Stand by Your Man / I Stayed Long Enough” (Epic, 5–10398, 1968). While country music is often chastised for its traditionalism, the abundance of cheating songs as well as stories of lost love and broken homes also provides a sizeable resource of material that (inadvertently) questions het- eronormativity, especially by emphasizing the failures of monogamy. For a similar argument that also points to analogous perspectives in soul music, see Edward G. Armstrong, “The Rapprochement of Country and Soul Music,” Popular Music and Society 6, 4 (January 1979): 316–23, especially 320–321. 361 Cf. Colin Escott, liner notes to Dim Lights Thick Smoke & Hillbilly Music: Country & Western Hit Parade, 1968 (Bear Family, BCD 17263 AR, 2013), 63–64. 63 were “not even thinking of a hit record, just a filler,”362 and the arrangement – modeled on Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” – was apparently improvised on the spot. Yet, the re- cording was an instant hit. Reaching #4 soul upon its release in 1970, it became Staton’s most successful chart entry until 1976 and was nominated for an R&B Grammy a year after Wynette’s original won the award in country music.363 When Staton appeared on the legendary TV show Soul Train, one of the two songs she performed was “Stand by Your Man.”364 Although Staton’s assertive delivery is different from Wynette’s more reserved approach, her reading of the song does not suggest an ironic approach to its message. While it is surely difficult to deduce any straightforward meanings from this instance of soul/country crossover, it is nonetheless notable how close the genres repeatedly came during this period – and not always in expected ways. Although the fruits of this interac- tion even received institutional recognition, this was rarely explicitly commented on by critics or industry executives.
5.6 “Wherever You Go, It’s Simon Country”365 During the next two years, Joe Simon, too, continued to successfully record country ma- terial, as in “Yours Love” (#10 soul, 1970) or “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (#13 soul, 1971). Shortly after the latter’s release, though, he halted his cooperation with Rich- bourg and signed with (and, apparently, became co-owner of) Spring Records in New York.366 The subsequent period brought him success with, among others, the Philly soul- styled “Drowning in the Sea of Love” (1971) and the funky “Theme from Cleopatra Jones” (1973). This does not mean that Simon abandoned his country-soul stylings. 1973 also saw him release a soul/country album, Simon Country.367 Recorded with Richbourg in Nashville, it was explicitly aiming for crossover success in the country charts. A few months before the album’s release, Billboard informed readers that “Poly- dor Records [Spring Records’ distributor, H.B.] is mapping a crossover merchandising campaign – in both pop and country – for Spring artist Joe Simon’s new album.”368 The short piece notes that “[m]erchandising not only will consist of television spots and ad
362 Quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 115. Candi Staton, “Stand by Your Man / How Can I Put Out the Flame” (Fame, 1472, 1970). 363 It also reached #8 on Jet’s “Soul Brothers Top 20” charts (which was not restricted to male artists or votes by male readers). Jet (December 31, 1970), 65. 364 Internet Movie Database (IMDb), “Soul Train (1971–2006).” Online:
369 “Polydor Goes Country & Pop in Simon Push,” 4. 370 Ibid. 371 “Inside Track,” Billboard (May 19, 1973), 70. 372 Spring records advertisement for Simon Country, Cash Box (September 29, 1973), 23. 373 Co-written by Jerry Williams Jr. (aka Swamp Dogg) and Gary U.S. Bonds, the song was first released by soul singer Freddie North, whose version reached #10 R&B. Shortly after, producer Billy Sherrill became interested in the song and “found the magic mix when Johnny Paycheck applied his twangy vocals to an arrangement essentially identical to North’s original.” (148) Typically, the horns were ex- changed for a pedal steel guitar. Reaching #2 on the country charts, Paycheck’s version led to Williams being “honored as country songwriter of the year by Broadcast Music International (BMI).” (149) See Hughes’s insightful analysis of Swamp Dogg’s music in Hughes, Country Soul, 145–151. Also, see Paycheck’s “Keep on Lovin’ Me” (1974) for additional evidence on how purposefully Sherrill and him (with Bergen White as the arranger) kept targeting the melting of country and soul styles. 65 tie, and cowboy boots. When Simon Country was released in September 1973, Billboard featured it among its “Top Album Picks.” Their review (in the soul section) is worth quoting in full, for it brings together many of the aspects already mentioned during the previous chapters: A masterful set of country tunes done in Simon’s soulful style, featuring some of today’s top country hits as well as several standards. What Simon and his co-producer John Richbourg have done is used [sic] traditional country arrangements, instruments and backup vocals in a fusion with his deep and resonant voice. Simon makes no conscious attempt to sing ‘country,’ and this is what makes the set so excellent. The elements of soul and country are woven together and Simon avoids the pitfalls of so many non-country singers who ruin material through obvious attempts to change their styles. Special credit to the production as well as arrangements of Bergen White. Simon may have opened the door for a lot of singers with this ambitious project.374
In addition, a short note to record store owners advised that “Simon is always a solid soul seller but give this one a shot in the country section as well.” It is noticeable that, even in a record that so thoroughly mixes country and soul, the reviewer tries to make sense of it by separating the alleged country elements (arrangements, music, backup vocals) from the soul (Simon). In fact, many of the arrangements do not sound distinctively country. Conversely, Simon’s phrasing often suggests country as much as soul music. What could have been a subversion of dominant ideas about soul and country music ends up as a reinforcement of their constituent parts. After all, what appears to establish the album’s excellence is merely how these are woven together. Arguably the most interesting comment, however, appears in the conclusion, where the reviewer suggests that “Simon may have opened the door for a lot of singers with this ambitious project.” Compared to Simon’s previous output, the only aspect that makes this project more ambitious in musical terms is its casual use of country signifiers like unamplified harmonica and pedal steel guitar. Not mentioned in the review, and ar- guably more striking, is its thematic coherence and claiming of country music by the artist. Therefore, its ambitiousness might be more accurately summarized by the fact that it was an African American artist pushing into country music with a style that did not sound like traditional country music but was in keeping with the times. Accordingly, it also hinted at the genre’s continued incorporation of sounds associated with other styles – a develop- ment pointedly symbolized by the respective careers of Joe Simon and Bergen White. While Ray Charles adapted country music to his own ‘modern sounds,’ Simon’s record arguably drew attention to the ‘modern sounds’ that recordings like his own had brought into the genre. Yet, it was country staff like White who profited from this modernization process. Black musicians like Simon (mostly) remained outside. Unfortunately, this was also reflected in the record’s subsequent history. It briefly showed up in the soul charts,
374 “Top Album Picks – Soul,” Billboard (September 8, 1973), 83. 66 but never even made its way into country.
6. ANALYSIS, PT. 3: BLACK COUNTRY 6.1 “Country Music Gets Soul”375 In some ways, Linda Martell’s career parallels that of Esther Phillips, who had also started out performing R&B but was spotted singing a song by a country(-adjacent) performer, which changed her path. While Phillips’s excursion to Nashville was enabled by the re- cent success of Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds, Martell’s discovery came in the wake of Charley Pride’s rise to country fame. Billboard’s review of her sole album, Color Me Country, argued that “Linda impresses as a female Charley Pride. She has a terrific style and a true feeling for a country lyric.”376 Today, Martell is mostly remembered as a trail- blazer that no one managed to follow.377 In 1969, she became the first female black singer to enter the country charts with her cover of the Winstons’ “Color Him Father” as well as the first black woman to perform on the Grand Ole Opry.378 In addition, she made appear- ances on TV shows like Hee Haw and the Bill Anderson Show.379 Less often mentioned is that Martell was also the first singer to completely, if only briefly, cross over from R&B into country. During her three years in the spotlight, she was strictly identified as a country performer. In this respect, Martell provides a curious intermediary case that exploited the racial connotations underlying generic classification as much as it subverted them. Diane Pecknold points out that “[f]ar from obscuring her race,” Martell’s producer Shelby Sin- gleton “expressly sought to capitalize on her ability to surprise the racial homologies that organized the music industry.”380 This does not mean that Singleton and Martell worked out a new blend of allegedly black and white styles. Like the recordings of Charley Pride, Martell’s mixture of traditional honky-tonk sounds (including generous helpings of fiddle and pedal steel guitar) and country-pop appeal was firmly within the genre’s boundaries.
375 “Country Music Gets Soul: Linda Martell is the First Black Female to Sing at Grand Ole Opry,” Ebony (March 1970), 67–72. 376 “Album Reviews,” Billboard (September 26, 1970), 62. 377 Black country songwriter Alice Randall emphasizes Martell’s legacy as a source of inspiration in “Linda Martell’s ‘Color Him Father,’” Oxford American 67 (April 4, 2010). Online:
381 Linda Martell, “Color Him Father,” Color Me Country (Plantation Records, PLP–9, 1970). 382 Hughes, Country Soul, 144. 383 Randall, “Linda Martell,” n.p. 384 Hughes, Country Soul, 144. 385 Cf. Ibid., 132. 386 Pecknold, “Negotiating,” 153. For ‘color,’ see Ibid., 148. 387 Ibid., 152. 388 Ibid., 152. 68 be read as an “act of defiance against white nostalgia that suppressed the realities of south- ern history.”389 Therefore, Pecknold suggests that this leaves open the “possibility that the real joke was on the stance of naïve whiteness that country culture had enacted.”390 When Martell’s album, Color Me Country, was released in 1970, its title treaded the same ambiguous linguistic terrain. Its material, however, is a perfect encapsulation of this moment in soul/country history. Many of the songs were penned by Margaret Lewis and Myra Smith, whose services Singleton utilized for both his country and soul artists (like Johnny Adams). Another track, “San Francisco is a Lonely Town,” originated as a country song but was most successful in a version by Joe Simon.391 In the song, an opti- mistic young couple moves to San Francisco but breaks up soon after, their love soiled by the diversions of the city. Taken at a slower pace than previous versions, it gives Mar- tell space to stretch her vocals, thus showing how seamlessly a trained R&B singer could fit into country music.392 Lyrically, “San Francisco is a Lonely Town” relies on a set of associations that contrasts the apparent privilege and jauntiness of the counterculture to the often more sobering experiences of working-class migrants. Alice Randall argues that Martell’s performance portrays “the kids who arrived not in beat-up Volkswagens but on the bus; the kids who weren’t white, who were brown; the kids who came not from East- ern cities, but from Southern towns.”393 Accordingly, its depiction of San Francisco is more pessimistic than that of, for example, Scott McKenzie’s freewheeling 1967 hit “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Like other country songs of the era, “San Francisco Is a Lonely Town” suggests that such liberties were only available to a select few. At the same time, Pecknold contends that Martell’s critique is more open- ended because it is “not racially exclusive” and therefore underlines the “continuities be- tween racial and class disadvantage.”394 Ultimately, though, Martell’s example also demonstrates the power inequalities between white producers and black performers. Apparently, the fact that her husband tried to assume a more direct role in managing her career led Singleton to drop Martell from his label. Although it seems that this was not overtly related to racial reasons (similar
389 Pecknold, “Negotiating,” 157. 390 Ibid., 153. 391-Linda Martell, “San Francisco Is a Lonely Town,” Color Me Country (Plantation Records, PLP–9, 1970). 392 Ebony’s claim that Martell had a “gutsy, emotional soul sound” might be exaggerated but it does imply that she did not try to shed off her previous musical experiences. “Country Music Gets Soul,” 67. 393 Randall, “Linda Martell,” n.p. While country music’s standards of authenticity suggest a close proximity of the singer to their persona or a song’s speaker, it is important to distinguish these roles. The interpre- tation of a song’s ‘meaning’ relies on the persona/speaker as well as on performative, intertextual, con- textual, or biographical aspects. 394 Pecknold, “Negotiating,” 159. 69 incidents affected white performers who worked with the producer), the fact that her fir- ing also meant the end of her career undoubtedly was. According to Pecknold, Martell “was unable to create a space for herself without Singleton’s sponsorship, and she left Nashville shortly thereafter.”395 Martell occasionally continued to perform live with a mixed repertoire of R&B, gospel, and country but never recorded again.
6.2 “I Wanna Go Country”: Otis Williams In February 1971, Otis Williams, former lead singer of the R&B group the Charms, re- leased an album called Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys. The first single from the album, “I Wanna Go Country,” was a stop-and-go ditty whose lyrics might not have attracted much attention in the hands of a white singer. They centered around the fact that, after successful early careers in rock and roll, artists like Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty had become popular country entertainers: “Well I can see what happened to Jerry Lee / And I want the same thing for me / I know exactly what I wanna do / Conway did it and I can, too.”396 What made it so striking was that Otis Williams, too, had long been fond of country music but apparently could not make this switch that easily. Williams’s recorded engagement with country music started when the Charms were signed to DeLuxe Records (a subsidiary of King) in the 1950s. Although they usu- ally charted with other material, the group also covered country songs like Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight.” As previously mentioned, these were only some of “the series of R&B-country cross-pollinations produced by the label under the direction of Henry Glover.”397 In addition, Williams apparently sang back-up vocals on many country ses- sions there.398 After leaving King, Williams was signed to Epic, where he continued to record R&B with future country producer Billy Sherrill. Here, too, he sometimes covered previous country hits. Most of his songs were written by Sherrill and Ray Pennington, the latter of whom was also a country producer. Musically, these recordings remained firmly within traditional R&B boundaries. In 1969, Williams was signed to country musician and producer Pete Drake’s Stop Records, where a country-soul version of Marty Rob- bins’s “Begging to You” moved him closer to regular country territory. In was only two years later, however, that Billboard reported of a new album on which “Williams does it all country.”399 From that point on, his new releases were filed under country music.
395 Pecknold, “Negotiating,” 152. 396 Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys, “I Wanna Go Country,” Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys (Stop Records, STLP 1022, 1971). 397 Pecknold, “Making Country Music Modern,” 85. 398 Cf. Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 141. 399 “Nashville Scene,” Billboard (January 23, 1971), 43. 70 From today’s perspective, it is not clear what circumstances actually led to the recording of Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys. Information on the album is scarce and most mentions of it merely comment on its existence as well as its (to some, surpris- ing) quality. If taken at face value, Drake’s liner notes make it out as the culmination of Williams’s career thus far, although there is also a clear novelty element involved. Quite self-consciously, Drake begins by asking: “Otis Williams … another black country singer?”400 To establish a proper back story, he then chronicles Williams’s previous en- gagements with country music. Yet, it appears that this was not enough for Drake, who explains that “I wanted something a little different, more than just another black singer, so Otis formed an all black country band.”401 According to Drake, this band consists of “musicians that played beyond a lot of the country artists in the Cincinnati, Ohio area.”402 He ends by once more emphasizing Williams’s rightful place as a country musician by declaring that “[n]o, this isn’t just another black country singer, it’s a man who has done what he has been trying to do for many years, and he does it as well as any country singer I’ve heard.”403 It is astounding that as early as 1971, when just two African American singers had made a dent on the country charts, their mere existence was already treated as a fad.404 While Drake’s narrative suggests that there might indeed be understandable reasons for black artists to be performing country music, his description includes all the usual hang- ups. Like Charley Pride before him, Williams is positioned not as a black country singer, but simply as “a man who has done what he has been trying to do for many years.” Such colorblind rhetoric was frequently employed at the time.405 However, the fact that many black musicians who turned to country music in the late 1960s and early 70s had indeed been fans of the genre for a long time was never channeled into a proper critique. Instead, as Drake’s back story implies, it was merely treated as a standard talking point to be offset by something more interesting, like an actual black band. Consequently, it is noticeable how Drake simultaneously seeks to establish Williams’s country authenticity while also amplifying the apparent novelty factor.
400 Pete Drake, liner notes to Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys, Otis Williams and The Midnight Cowboys (Stop Records, STLP 1022, 1971). 401 Drake, liner notes (emphasis added). 402 Ibid. 403 Ibid. 404 One noticeable instance that at best reflects linguistic carelessness is Bill Williams’s note, in Billboard magazine, that “[t]he Shelby Singleton corporation has signed still another black country artist, Eddie Burns. This brings to four the number of such singers in Shelby’s group.” Bill Williams, “Nashville Scene,” Billboard (March 14, 1970): 48 (emphasis added). 405 Cf. Hughes, Country Soul, 130. Drake’s assertion that Williams sings “as well as any country singer I’ve heard” expresses racial undertones as well, even if in this case it might reasonably be connected to his prior career in a different genre. 71 In addition to such dubious framing, it is not clear who played on the recordings. An article by R&B historian Marv Goldberg states that it was mostly Nashville studio musicians with only some overdubs being done by a soul band from Cincinnati who had relocated to Nashville, the Endeavors.406 It was them who posed as the Midnight Cow- boys on the back cover of the album, propped up with traditional country instrumentation and red western suits. Of course, the ‘Midnight Cowboys’ moniker is itself an example of the heavily racialized discourse around black country performers at the time. Until Stoney Edwards’s “Blackbird (Hold Your Head High)” appeared in 1975, such designa- tions were usually based on ostensibly ‘playfully suggestive’ language and refrained from more assertive words like ‘black.’ They often featured a juxtaposition of seemingly ‘black’ and ‘white’ words or traditions, as in ‘Midnight Cowboys,’ Martell’s album Color Me Country or Edwards’s Down Home in the Country.407 The album itself consists mostly of previous country hits, both old and new, in- cluding three drawn from Charley Pride’s catalog. Like Pride’s early recordings, the mu- sic is rather traditional honky-tonk that steers clear of overt allusions to Williams’s prior career. Robert Christgau describes Williams’s vocals as a “slightly melismatic tenor,”408 thus implying Williams’s R&B socialization yet making no effort to put his vocal perfor- mance outside of country traditions. Indeed, although his singing was slightly less embel- lished than on his earlier recordings for Drake, Williams sounded very comfortable in the setting. Apart from “I Wanna Go Country,” none of the tracks allude to the performer’s blackness, although Christgau points out the “sarcastic relish”409 in Williams’s voice upon delivering the line “come here boy” in “Mule Skinner Blues.” The most obvious clue lies, as often, in the album’s artwork, which shows Williams dressed in a western suit and cowboy hat, playing an acoustic guitar.
406 Goldberg is mostly concerned with Williams’s early career and continually downplays his connection to Nashville’s R&B and country scenes. Although the article appears to be based on interviews with Williams, there are few direct quotes, making it difficult to estimate Goldberg’s degree of interest. Marv Goldberg, “Otis Williams & the Charms” (n.d.). Online:
6.3 The Return of the Country Repressed: Stoney Edwards Frenchy ‘Stoney’ Edwards virtually embodies country music mythology. Born in rural Seminole County in Oklahoma, Edwards grew up on a farm listening to the Grand Ole Opry. Since he never went to school, he started working early, saying that “when I was small I would plow or do any kind of farmwork, really. We used to hunt, fish, we caught rabbits, we used to walk barefooted in the snow.”416 After his parents split up, Edwards “lived on and off with his father and various ‘uncles and aunties’ all through his teenage years. His father remarried and kicked him out of the house.”417 He never learned to read or write and, in his youth, extended his activities to bootlegging alcohol. In the early 1950s, Edwards moved to California for work. Musically, he emphasizes his affinity for
410 “C&W Singles Reviews – Picks of the Week,” Cash Box (March 20, 1971), 39. 411 “Country LP Reviews,” Cash Box (February 13, 1971), 40. 412 Ibid. 413 “Album Reviews – Special Merit Picks,” Billboard (February 13, 1971), 45. 414 “Country LP Reviews,” Cash Box, February 13, 1971, 40. 415 Williams only recorded one more single in 1973. It did not have any success and is difficult to track down today. It was recorded by Pete Drake, but it is unclear what genre they were working in. Appar- ently, Williams retired afterwards but there is generally little information on his time immediately after the Midnight Cowboys album. Goldberg, for example, ends his article at that point. 416 Peter Guralnick’s profile “Stoney Edwards: A Simple Little Dream” is the most extensive source avail- able on Edwards. See Guralnick, Lost Highway: Journeys & Arrivals of American Musicians (New York: Back Bay Books, 1999 [1979), 264–275. 417 Ibid., 268. 73 storytelling, stressing that “[m]y songs are true […] Every fucking song I write comes from my own experience.”418 Although he had been creating songs ever since his child- hood days, Edwards’s professional recording career only started after a workplace acci- dent in 1968 that nearly killed him and left him unemployed. Apparently, Edwards then “decided to concentrate more seriously on his music.”419 In 1970, he organized and per- formed at a tribute show for western swing legend Bob Wills where a local lawyer heard him and established contact with Capitol Records. Shortly after, Edwards was signed to the label. While this back story would arguably stick out as is, it is made even more notable by the fact that Edwards was born to parents of African American and Irish as well as Native American descent. It seems that he always harbored a strong affinity for country music, which was played by several members of his family.420 In this sense, Edwards’s story is remarkable because he personifies the rural, southern, hard-working underdog that the genre’s mythology has long claimed its own. In his songs, he often drew on the same topics that had long been popular in the genre, including manual labor, financial problems, and ‘being country.’ At a time when the country music industry was pushing more and more toward pop crossover, Edwards both ideologically and sound-wise re- claimed the genre’s roots while at the same time criticizing how its industry had system- atically excluded non-white voices. Stoney Edwards made his debut on the country charts with the self-written “A Two Dollar Toy” (#68, 1971). The lyrics tell of how a man tried to leave his family one night “[b]ut in the hallway stumbled and fell over a toy,”421 thereby waking his daughter who convinces him not to go. Thus, as the song’s catch line has it, “a two dollar toy made a million dollar daddy out of me.”422 While the song only hints at the economic hardships that befell Edwards after his accident, his next single more explicitly drew attention to this. Reaching #61 on the charts, “Poor Folks Stick Together” (1971) quickly became a fan favorite and is today often cited as one of the centerpieces of Edward’s repertoire.423 The song places its speaker “stranded on the highway,”424 apparently on the move to find a new job and support his family. Quite strikingly, the speaker does not only point out his own class position but also contrasts this with the “Cadillacs and limousines” passing him
418 Guralnick, Lost Highway, 267. 419 Ibid., 271. 420 Ibid., 269. Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 169. 421 Stoney Edwards, “A Two Dollar Toy,” A Country Singer (Capitol Records, ST–741, 1971). 422 Ibid. 423 It was written by the white John Schweers, whose “Dixie Boy” Edwards also recorded. Schweers later penned several (non-political) #1 hits for Charley Pride and Ronnie Milsap. 424 Stoney Edwards, “Poor Folks Stick Together,” A Country Singer (Capitol Records, ST–741, 1971). 74 by, arguing that “their half of the country has the gold.”425 It is only when a truck comes by that the driver, whose ‘race’ remains unknown, stops to help. Unlike some of country music’s more nebulous class-based criticisms, the song’s disapproval takes on a more confrontational character, saying that “if you jump on one you fight ‘em all / Just ask the folks down at City Hall / Poor folks stick together till the end.”426 As Nadine Hubbs puts it, Edwards’s song spoke of “finding compassion, trustworthiness, loyalty, and camara- derie […] in apparent cross-racial antibourgeois solidarity, with long-distance truckers and other ‘poor’ folks, ‘the kind that never let ya down.’”427 While the country music industry was steadily working toward mainstream acceptance – in 1970, Richard Nixon had become the first president to pronounce October “Country Music Month” – Edwards appeared to speak for a different strain of country.428 When Edwards’s first album came out in March 1971, it took up the kinds of promotional trends previously noted. As Jeremy Hill states, the title 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.”429 The ones who did buy it certainly could not miss it. After opening with Edwards’s previously released singles, the album continues with his own up-tempo “An Old Mule’s Hip,” a song that takes up the theme of “Poor Folks” but gives it an even more autobiographical spin. A skillful ode to the genre’s frequent never-to-be-realized country boy dreams and playful class-based revenge fantasies, the song juxtaposes field work with being a movie star. Split between humor and indignation, its speaker concedes that “the rear end of a mule don’t take pictures / And a plow handle ain’t no script / And I spent darn near whole my life / Looking at an old mule’s hip.”430 The speaker’s tone becomes sharper after that, pointing out that “the only prize that I ever got / Was a big ol’ pat on the back / And when it came’ a-pickin’ time / I got a brand new cotton sack.”431 Although the song’s anger never overtakes its humor, it doubles down on the exploitative nature of wage labor and how it disproportionally benefits other, usually white, people in the final verse. Here, Edwards sings that “I wish I had a dollar for the dust I swallowed /
425 Edwards, “Poor Folks Stick Together.” 426 For a (flawed) overview of country’s apparent lack of class consciousness, see Richard A. Peterson, “Class Unconsciousness in Country Music,” in You Wrote My Life: Lyrical Themes in Country Music, eds. Melton A. McLaurin and Richard A. Peterson (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 35–62. Hubbs criticizes Peterson’s tendency toward class reductionism in Rednecks, 115–118. While Peterson’s argument is certainly overstated, Hubbs’s criticism engages much more with his conceptual framework than with the evidence Peterson presents. 427 Hubbs, “Cross-Marginal Solidarity,” 177. 428 For “Country Music Month,” see La Chapelle, I’d Fight the World, 226. 429 Hill, “Out of the Barn,” 161. 430 Stoney Edwards, “An Old Mule’s Hip,” A Country Singer (Capitol Records, ST–741, 1971). 431 Ibid. 75 on every inch of ground I plowed / I had Rockefeller and Howard Hughes / shinin’ my shoes right now.”432 Contrasting the speaker’s own poverty to the inconceivable wealth of these American business magnates, the song’s fantasy puts them into a position often occupied by African Americans. In these songs, Edwards dramatizes the connections and disjunctions between country music and his skin color, to paraphrase Barbara Ching.433 His example not only indicates how traditional country themes might equally appeal to African Americans but also how their racialized subjugation was mirrored in the genre’s lack of representations of black life. Of course, this was itself a result of the marginalization of the role played by black musicians in the genre’s development.434 Since Edwards rarely explicitly men- tioned his blackness in his songs, unfamiliar listeners on the radio might have missed this level of criticism. Yet, his presence in the industry certainly spoke to the tension between country’s ostensible concern for ‘ordinary’ people on the one hand and its continued ex- clusion of African Americans on the other.435 Indeed, it can be argued that Edwards as- sertively claimed country as the voice of rural black southerners. This also showed in his music and singing, both of which reflected an approach much less smooth and more colloquial than that of Charley Pride. Of Edwards’s first album, Billboard said that “[h]is vocal style and arrangements are essentially in the tra- ditional style and he sings with sincerity and conviction.”436 His vocals were frequently compared to that of Merle Haggard – whose family had also been from Oklahoma – with Robert Christgau noting that Edwards “has Haggard’s swing and melismatic burr.”437 This does not mean that Edwards made an effort to sound ‘white.’ Rather, it suggests how a certain type of vocal performance (featuring informal language and, commonly, a south- ern accent) became primarily identified as ‘white’ rather than merely ‘rural.’438 Unlike many performers discussed earlier, Edwards did not have a background in gospel or R&B music, which might have led him to incorporate less tonal attributes explicitly marked as ‘black.’ At the same time, it is striking that Christgau’s description of Haggard, one of the genre’s most popular artists, also features characteristics that are frequently linked to
432 Edwards, “An Old Mule’s Hip.” 433 Ching, “If Only,” 269. 434 Cf. Mather, “Race in Country Music Scholarship,” 328–329. 435 Cf. Hill, “Out of the Barn,” 127. 436 “Album Reviews,” Billboard (March 27, 1971), 48. 437 Robert Christgau, review of Stoney Edwards, Mississippi, You’re on My Mind, 1975. Online:
439 Here, one could also consider the neither-nor descriptions used for singers like Percy Sledge, who, ac- cording to Hoskyns, had a “rich, nasal baritone” that was “clearly African American but just as clearly redolent of country singers from Lefty Frizzell to Charlie Rich.” Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 103. 440 Stoney Edwards, “Hank and Lefty Raised My Country Soul / A Few of the Reasons” (Capitol Records, 3671, 1973). 441 Ching, “If Only,” 269. 442 Cf. Mather, “Race in Country Music Scholarship,” 334–336. 443 Friskics-Warren and Cantwell, Heartaches, 29 (emphasis in original). 444 The depth of this racialized misapprehension is quite acutely and appallingly captured in a real-life encounter between Frizzell and Edwards that the latter recounted to Jeff Woods. It was two years before Frizzell’s death that Edwards met the performer drinking alone in a Nashville tavern. According to Ed- wards, “Lefty was sitting there crying and he was listening to that song […] He said, ‘Boy, I tell you, that song just tears me up. That song’s a tribute to me. I didn’t think anybody cared nothing about me anymore. I thought everybody had forgotten about me.’ And then out of the clear blue, Lefty says, ‘And wouldn’t you know it? It had to be by a ni**er.’ Well, then he shook my hand, but I don’t think he ever did know who he was talking to.” Quoted in Jeff Woods, “Color Me Country: Tales from the Frontlines,” Journal of Country Music 14, 2 (1992): 9–12, 9 (asterisks added). 77 pedal steel guitar, Edwards sings that “I think I hear a noisy old John Deere / In a field specked with dirty cotton lint / And below that field runs a little country stream / Down there you’ll find the cool green leaves of mint.”445 Edwards’s biography mirrors that of numerous other black and white southerners who left the region in the first half of the 20th century to find jobs in the cities of the North and West. After two decades in California, he moved back to a farm in Oklahoma. As mentioned earlier, in the 1970s many African Americans either moved or returned to the South or used its rural landscape to portray an alternative to the crime and poverty of the urban North.446 Although a nostalgic paean to the South by an African American singer might at first seem irritating, the region was at the time increasingly construed as a “black American homeland,”447 a development that continues to this day. While some scholars have linked country music’s whiteness to its nostalgia – “a trope that speaks powerfully to white Americans who feel besieged by social changes since World War II”448 – Edwards’s recording implies that these readings underappreciate the appeal of such lyrical tropes to African American listeners. Accord- ingly, it is important that attention to conservative impulses in country music does not lose sight of black audiences’ and musicians’ agency to re-articulate traditional country music themes to their own experiences.449 Ultimately, though, Barbara Ching stresses that “[t]he claim to shared territory […] couldn’t be made without struggle.”450 Released in late 1975, Edwards’s last Top 50 single, “Blackbird (Hold Your Head High),” was, as Ching states, “a musical manifesto for African American country.”451 Told retrospectively by the titular “blackbird,” it is the story of a young boy growing up on a “small tobacco farm in Carolina” whose father instills him with a love of music, building his first guitar “out of orange crates and sticks.”452 Together with his cousin, the father makes a living touring the country playing string band music.453 Peter Guralnick vividly describes his first encounter with the song, which might mirror the experiences of other listeners: Then a drumbeat signaled the beginning of the chorus … And he said, It won’t be long, son / Til I rosin up my bow … The other instruments fell in, a lonesome fiddle echoed the second line, Donnie Brook’s
445 Stoney Edwards, “Mississippi You're On My Mind,” Mississippi You're On My Mind (Capitol Records, ST–11401, 1975). 446 Cf. Robinson, This Ain’t Chicago, 49. At the same time, Robinson emphasizes that this narrative usually “said nothing of the South’s still disproportionately lower spending on education or its enduring poverty or high levels of incarceration” (48). 447 Ibid., 49. 448 Mather, “Race in Country Music Scholarship,” 340. Cf. Mann, “Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” 449 See also Ching’s analysis of Alice Randall. Ching, “If Only.” 450 Ibid., 269. 451 Ibid. In Cash Box’s country charts, it went as far as #31. The song was written by Edwards’s white producer, Chip Taylor. 452 Stoney Edwards, “Blackbird (Hold You Head High),” Blackbird (Capitol Records, ST–11499, 1976). 453 This is itself an important reclamation, for awareness of the black string band tradition had at that point time already become marginalized. 78 harmonica hooted – You and me and cousin Jesse going to ride the train – and I almost drove off the road. For the next few lines contained a phrase I’d never heard on the radio before: Just a couple of country ni**ers / Stealing the radio / From Georgia / On up to Bangor, Maine.454
Hubbs summarizes that the song “assert[s] a message of racial pride in a bold anti-euphe- mistic gesture,”455 thus actually predating similar engagements by hip-hop musicians by at least half a decade. In the second part of the chorus, the father cautions his son to “understand the good in every man,”456 yet alerts him to the racialized poverty into which he was born. Anticipating “resistance from the ‘scarecrows’ in the music industry”457 he nevertheless urges his son and, by implication, all other blackbirds to hold their head high and persevere. Unlike Charley Pride’s insistence that “I’m Just Me,” as his 1971 hit put it, the song explicitly portrays a collective of African American musicians at the core of country music history. Quite indignantly, Edwards later recalled that “[n]obody heard the message of that fucking song,”458 pointing to the fact that it was censored by numerous country radio sta- tions. Critical reviews were in fact very positive, with Billboard calling it Edwards’s “best performance ever.”459 Praising “the honest, optimistic philosophy of the lyrics,” the re- view provided a surprising twist when it argued that this made the song “the anthem of Southern blacks and the Dixie sons and daughters of all colors who grew up the country way. Pride is universal, and the message will be understood by those who buy, and love, country music and the men who make it great like Stoney Edwards.”460 Whether this re- ferred to the recent success of Mexican-American country singers like Johnny Rodriguez and Freddy Fender or was merely an attempt to smoothen the song’s message into one more palatable to white audiences is not clear.461 While the song provided an unprece- dented intervention into the popular perception of country music’s racial affiliation, its reception likewise shows how this could be misconstrued by turning it into a “universal” message of pride. Edwards kept performing into the early 1980s and briefly returned in the early 90s but had his last chart entries at the turn of the decade. However, he was not
454 Guralnick, Lost Highway, 264 (emphasis in original). Although the song’s impact is emphasized by its uncensored use of the n-word, I have edited Guralnick’s original quote. Readers are advised to look up Edwards’s recording for full dramatic effect. In the recording, the word “radio” sounds more like “rodeo” and has been quoted as such by other writers. Apparently, Guralnick uses the song’s official lyrics (with the publisher’s permission), so the exact reasons for this discrepancy remain unclear. 455 Hubbs, “Cross-Marginal Solidarity,” 177. 456 Edwards, “Blackbird.” 457 Ching, “If Only,” 270. 458 Quoted in Guralnick, Lost Highway, 264. 459 “Top Single Picks – Country,” Billboard (November 22, 1975), 76. 460 Ibid. (emphasis added). The latter interpretation was taken up by other writers, for example Gerry Wood. Talking about the “barrier-busting” “Sepia country” – a term that fortunately never caught on – of artists like Pride and Edwards, he calls the song “the anthem of all poor blacks and whites” (MR-60). See Wood, “Nashville Cats,” Billboard (July 4, 1976): MR-18, MR-60. 461 For an analysis of Freddy Fender, see Curtis Márez, “Brown: The Politics of Working-Class Chicano Style,” Social Text 48 (Autumn 1996): 109–132. 79 the only artist to more explicitly address the genre’s racial make-up during the 1970s.
6.4 “Black Speck”: O.B. McClinton In July 1976, about half a year after “Blackbird” turned heads, O.B. McClinton released the song “Black Speck.” Here, he recounts the story of a country singer who finds himself causing a stir – not only because of his talent but also because he “didn’t sound like he was supposed to.”462 The fact that the singer is African American leads the presumably white audience members to exclaim – in shock, tears, and eventual awe – that “he’s a black speck, a ni**er singing like a redneck.”463 Their admission that in spite of this, he truly sang “a good song” points to a paradox that defined McClinton’s and many other black country singers’ careers. By the early 1970s, listeners had become so used to white faces performing country music that the juxtaposition of country twang and black musi- cians created a cognitive dissonance. Yet, a few of these performers – like Pride, Edwards, and McClinton – nevertheless found public acceptance. Throughout the 70s, McClinton used this somewhat unique position to “[draw] attention to the contrast between his black- ness and the cultural expectations surrounding country music.”464 Although Hughes is correct to point out that McClinton’s “career ultimately demonstrated the limitations of country’s embrace of black artists in this period,”465 I would argue that McClinton was more adapt at navigating this terrain than such readings imply. Again, it is important to point out the alternatively hidden and overt racism that shaped African American engagements with country music during this time. Yet, this does not mean that the interpretation of such musical debates should be limited to the perspectives that were dominant then (or afterwards). Although writers have repeatedly pointed to the size of country music’s audience at the time – as well as the different, often counter-cultural, scenes that sprang up all over the country – this has rarely included con- sideration of the fact that country music, like all culture, is what Stuart Hall describes as a “sort of constant battlefield.”466 J. Lester Feder is among the few country music histo-
462 O.B. McClinton, “Black Speck” (Mercury, 73817, 1976). 463 Ibid. Asterisks added. The single’s promo version omitted the n-word from its chorus, although the official release left it in place. Apparently, the little radio airplay that the song received was split between the two. 464 Hughes, “O.B. McClinton,” 122. 465 Ibid., 123. 466 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–40, 223. For country music outside of Nashville, see for example Travis D. Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Olivia Carter Mather, “‘Cosmic American Music’: Place and the Country Rock Movement, 1965–1974” (PhD. diss. University of California, 2006). 80 rians to acknowledge that his study “largely accepts a canonic version of country his- tory.”467 Meanwhile, the unquestioned acceptance of dominant readings tends to suggest the country music audience as a surprisingly monolithic and frequently backward block. For this reason, Nadine Hubbs criticizes that “presentist perspectives and prejudices”468 continue to limit the range of possible readings. This becomes particularly obvious when considering McClinton’s song “Obie from Senatobie,” the title track to his second album. McClinton’s entry into the country music industry was, to put it mildly, not with- out hurdles. He was the first artist to be signed to Stax’s newly founded country division and his first album – recorded in Nashville to “make sure the country authenticity is there,”469 as Billboard put it – had been soiled by severe disagreements between him and producer Jim Malloy. Afterwards, McClinton managed to convince Stax’s chief execu- tive, Al Bell, to let him self-produce his next record.470 This change was noticeable on many levels. Instead of virtually disguising McClinton’s blackness like the cover of his first album had done, Obie from Senatobie clearly displays the performer and his Afro hairstyle. While the album’s success is disputed, it did spawn McClinton’s most success- ful singles.471 Interestingly, considering McClinton’s success as a songwriter, he decided to include only one self-penned song: “Obie from Senatobie.” The song is a clear refer- ence to Haggard’s earlier “Okie from Muskogee,” although the nature of this relation has been a matter of some disagreement. Hughes calls it a “fascinating parody of Merle Hag- gard’s backlash anthem” which “demonstrates McClinton’s ability to simultaneously sub- vert and affirm country’s dominant racial narratives.”472 However, the fact that Hughes sees the song as a parody of “Okie” and not a reply leads him toward a rather critical reading that arguably misses a set of possible references. The story related in “Obie from Senatobie” takes place during the speaker’s stay in the military, where the commanding officer repeatedly mocks those who come from the (rural) South. As McClinton sings, “One from Mississippi you could bet he’d call ‘em Memphis / Now everybody knew that was in Tennessee.”473 Instead of “[telling] him some important place,” as the other “fellas” suggest, the speaker stands up for his hometown and plainly says: “You can just call me Obie from Senatobie / And you’d better
467 Feder, “Song of the South,” 20. 468 Hubbs, “Cross-Marginal Solidarity,” 170. 469 “Stax Now Represents All Forms of Music,” Billboard (June 3, 1972), M-2. 470 Cf. Rob Bowman, “O.B. McClinton: Country Music, That’s My Thing,” Journal of Country Music 14, 2 (1992): 23–29, 26–27. 471 There is a curious discrepancy in that the album did not enter Billboard’s country album charts but climbed up to #28 in Cash Box. “Top Country Albums,” Cash Box (July 21, 1973), 33. 472 Hughes, “O.B. McClinton,” 132. 473 O.B. McClinton, “Obie from Senatobie,” Obie from Senatobie (Enterprise, ENS–1029, 1973). McClin- ton’s country compositions during this time were often credited to his wife, Joann Bullard. The specific reasons for this are unknown, although such practices were not unusual at the time. 81 believe that’s a Mississippi town.”474 Hughes notes that such “[s]tatements of rural or small-town pride in the face of derision from elitist city folk is one of the most common tropes in country music.”475 The crux of the matter is that McClinton follows with what Ching calls “derogatory stereotypes about southern blacks,”476 asserting that “[w]e still eat watermelon at the Tate County gin house / And we drink home brew when the sun goes down.”477 According to Ching, this “can be easily interpreted as irony,”478 or, as she more recently put it, “lampoon[ing] stereotypes” and “burlesqu[ing]”479 racism. Hughes, on the other hand, states that Ching is “correct to note the multiple readings possible” but claims that she “underestimates the possibility that McClinton’s lyrics were (at least in part) a conscious attempt to appeal to the backlash audience through an easy racial stere- otype.”480 Here, the song’s relation to “Okie from Muskogee” comes into play. Rather than a parody of that song, “Obie from Senatobie” can more productively be read as an homage to “Okie from Muskogee” and a parody of its often literal-minded reception. A number of writers have focused on the possibly ironic intentions of Haggard’s song. Aside from its alleged humorous origins and its singular nature among his record- ings up to that point, the song’s exaggerated lyrics provide obvious clues to such an in- terpretation.481 Indeed, Peter La Chapelle shows that, from the beginning, “audiences found contradictory and overlapping meanings and responded with a variety of reac- tions.”482 While the dominant meanings were “supported by the prevailing social order […] in this case the local military-industrial complex and music industry,”483 Shuja Haider suggests that “the overlooked element in this commentary on the New Left by an imagined small-town skeptic is class.”484 This reading is taken up by Rachel Lee Rubin, who insists that McClinton makes very clear the central politics of both songs – his and Haggard’s – by mentioning in the very first words of the song that the moment he declares himself to be ‘Obie from Senatobie’ is while he is serving in Vietnam. McClinton is thereby adding a sharp reference (and joining other musi- cians who did so) to the question of who ended up in Vietnam because they didn’t have options to get out: black people and working-class people (with a great amount of overlap, of course).485
474 McClinton, “Obie from Senatobie.” McClinton’s actual hometown is spelled Senatobia, Mississippi. 475 Hughes, “O.B. McClinton,” 132. 476 Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43. 477 McClinton, “Obie from Senatobie.” “Gin house” refers to the place where the cotton gin was. 478 Ching, Wrong, 44. 479 Ching, “If Only,” 269. Confusingly, Ching misquotes the lyrics twice (first as eat watermelon “down on Main Street,” later as “down at the courthouse” – both lines that feature in Haggard’s song), Hughes adopts the latter misquotation. As mentioned above, McClinton sings “at the Tate County gin house.” 480 Hughes, “O.B. McClinton,” 133. 481 Cf. Rubin, Okie, 64–67. Cf. Hubbs, Rednecks, 65. Cf. La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 197–206. 482 La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 182. 483 Ibid., 182. 484 Shuja Haider, “A World That Draws a Line: Interracial Love Songs in American Country Music,” View- point Magazine (March 1, 2017). Online:
Although the lyrics do not, in fact, state that the song is set in Vietnam, Rubin is correct to note the song’s concern with the politics of the draft during the Vietnam war. From this perspective, McClinton (and his song) may be seen as part of the country music audience who did not take “Okie from Muskogee” to be a “statement of ultraconservatism”486 but instead regarded it as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on stereotypes based on region, class, and, by extension, ‘race.’ Thus, “Obie from Senatobie” not only ridicules simple-minded perceptions of rural southerners but also reaffirms McClinton’s belonging to this group.487 On his next album, If You Loved Her That Way (1974), McClinton uses a more confrontational approach to address such questions about ‘race’ and region. With “Dixie (She Was Mama to Me),” McClinton not only preempts Stoney Edwards’s ode to Missis- sippi by about a year but also offers a much more assertive reclamation of southern pride.488 In the first verse, the song’s speaker addresses an unknown man, saying “[m]ister, I just heard you talking about Dixie / And I don’t like the things you said / If you can’t say something good about Dixie / Then you just better keep it in your head.”489 As Hughes summarizes, the song finds its speaker defending the honor of his mother, a woman named Dixie, who struggled to raise him after his father abandoned them. This sentimental story of maternal love and struggle doubles as an extended metaphor that puns on the name’s other meaning to assert the South’s value and independence.490
Unfortunately, Hughes offers a reading of the song that, although not entirely wrong, again leaves little discursive space for McClinton’s attempted re-articulation. Calling it a “startling affirmation of Old South nostalgia,” Hughes argues that, like “Obie from Sen- atobie,” “this song can be considered a capitulation to a language and ideology that was built on the historical refusal of black equality.”491 According to him, it is “tempting to […] underestimate its place within a broader set of neo-Confederate paeans from this period.”492 At the same time, it is not quite clear how Hughes defines “this period,” since two of his three (undated) examples are from the early 1980s.493 By tying McClinton to artists
486 La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 182. 487 In this respect, it would also be interesting to compare McClinton’s country performances to his songs written for other performers, like the Staple Singers’s “Back Road into Town” (1974). Unfortunately, this is outside the scope of my analysis here. 488 The song was written by (the presumably white) Johnny Koonse, but little is known about him. Accord- ing to Discogs, most of his released compositions date to 1973. Judging from the record labels with whom he worked as a performer and producer, he might have been from Louisiana. Cf. Discogs, “Johnny Koonse.” Online:
South’s Gonna Do It” (1974), and Hank Williams Jr.’s “The South’s Gonna Rattle Again” (1982). 494 Tanya Tucker, “I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again,” Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone) (Columbia, KC 32744, 1974). 495 Michael Awkward points out that Al Green, too, declared that “the South’s gonna do it again” in his 1978 song “Georgia Boy.” Awkward, “Changing Conceptions,” 198–199. 496 Stoney Edwards, “Dixie Boy,” Down Home in the Country (Capitol Records, ST–834, 1971). 497 McClinton, “Dixie (She Was Mama to Me).” 498 Hughes, “O.B. McClinton,” 135. 499 Ibid. 84 McClinton’s “ability and willingness to confront these complicated tropes,”500 as Hughes writes, it is instructive to fully acknowledge the often ambiguous ideological terrain on which such re-articulations of rural black southern identity built at the time. Beyond such lyrical debates, McClinton also used his creative freedom at Stax to confront the racialized perception of musical genres. In an interview with Rob Bowman, McClinton emphasizes that he “cut a lot of those songs to prove a point to a lot of people at Stax and a lot of other people that a song is not either country or r&b. It’s the artist himself who sets the mode of the song.”501 In order to do this, he did not write new genre- blending songs but instead decided to rely on recent soul hits to which he applied a coun- try arrangement. Of the twelve songs on Obie from Senatobie, four were originally per- formed by artists identified as soul. Aside from Wilson Pickett’s “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” and William Bell’s “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” McClinton also recorded Luther Ingram’s “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” and the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain.” If chart performance is any indication, it ap- pears that McClinton’s instincts were right. His covers of Pickett and Bell became the most successful singles of his career, reaching #37 and #36 on the country charts. In the aforementioned interview, McClinton quite explicitly refers to the confla- tion of racial and generic markers when he notes that “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” “had been recorded by Wilson Pickett, and that’s very, very black. But I knew the first time I heard the song, the title itself was country.”502 It is not difficult to see what he means. The song’s title fits perfectly into the array of homespun wisdom endemic to country music while the lyrics present a more pessimistic companion piece to other soul/country hits like “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road.” In the first verse, the speaker implores his “girl” to “try to remember when we didn’t have no shoes / We stuck together just me and you / It took a long time to get what we got today / Now you wanna give it all up for another guy.”503 Invoking the couple’s road out of poverty, the speaker appears to nevertheless be unable to provide any substantial improvements over their possibly still moderate situation (or general unhappiness). Thus, he simply claims that “[i]t may be greener on the other side, baby / But right in my arms is where you belong.”504
500 Hughes, “O.B. McClinton,” 136. 501 Quoted in Bowman, “O.B. McClinton,” 27. 502 Ibid. 503 Wilson Pickett, “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You,” In Philadelphia (Atlantic, SD 8270, 1970). 504 McClinton sings it “might look greener.” Interestingly, he also changes the second verse. Instead of emphasizing the speaker’s dependence on his partner (Pickett sings that “if you leave, leave me this way, baby / You know what, I may not live to see a brand new day”), McClinton’s version emphasizes the speaker’s own caregiving qualities by extending the pattern of the first verse. Thus, the speaker asks his addressee to “try to remember, when you was on your sick bed / I was the one to see you through / And I know he’s feeding you a whole lot of sweet talk / But everything shiny, girl, sure ain’t gold.” The implied wordplay on the dual meaning of feeding as well as the variation on the titular wisdom underline 85 Less bouncy than Pickett’s original, the music in McClinton’s cover features many of the generic signifiers mentioned before. The electric guitar figure in the intro is sup- planted by a pedal steel guitar while the horn section is removed entirely. Instead, McClinton’s verses are accentuated by a dobro. His vocals, meanwhile, are far more laid back than Pickett’s and feature a more conversational tone. McClinton later implied that this approach reflected a more wide-ranging philosophy, arguing that “[t]he only differ- ence between [R&B and country] is the back-up instruments.” He adds that “[i]n R&B, it’s the music that’s predominant; in country it’s the words.”505 As if to prove his point, the second single from the album, “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” was another song that could have sprung from the pen of a Nashville writer as much as from its actual composer, Stax artist William Bell. Its depiction of a person after a breakup is an excellent example of the distinctive mixture of drama and irony that often informs country music. In the first verse, McClinton sings: “I wake up in the morning, I think I want a drink / I can’t even get water from the kitchen sink / The dog that we both loved and raised from a pup / Tried to bite my hand, Lord, every time I pick him up.”506 After professing that “[b]ecause I did you wrong / My whole world is falling down,” the second verse offers a pun on the speaker’s tears that substantiates the close proximity of humor and melodrama: “The roof must have a leak, Lord / It’s raining in my bed.” In contrast to Bell’s mid-tempo rendition, the faster pace in McClinton’s cover accentuates this duality, too. Instead of the strings and choir in Bell’s recording, McClinton’s cover begins with an upbeat honky-tonk piano before bringing in more ge- neric markers via prominent fiddle and pedal steel parts.507 As this exposition shows, McClinton seemed to have a clear conception of which stylistic traits connected R&B or soul and country and which signified difference. By juxtaposing and conflating them in a counter-intuitive manner – a black artist in country music singing R&B or soul material that comes across as country – he did not, and prob- ably did not intend to, transcend the idea of genres but brought forth a persuasive critique of its racial connotations. Unlike many R&B and soul artists before him, who drew on or explicitly covered country music but were never granted official inclusion into the genre, McClinton appeared to use his unusual position as a black country artist to turn this tra- dition upside down. In doing so, he not only introduced a noticeably black aesthetic into
the song’s place in country music. O.B. McClinton, “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You,” Obie from Senatobie (Enterprise, ENS–1029, 1973). 505 Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 167–168. 506 O.B. McClinton, “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” Obie from Senatobie (Enterprise, ENS–1029, 1973). 507 William Bell, “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” Bound to Happen (Stax, STS 2014, 1969). 86 country music at a time when the genre was becoming increasingly white in association. More importantly, he made visible the frequently unacknowledged musical and racial crossover that was (and arguably still is) a constant feature of American popular music.
7. CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK Ironically, O.B. McClinton’s song about the strange experiences of an African American country singer, “Black Speck,” became the performer’s sole recording to enter Bill- board’s soul charts, where it spent seven weeks and reached #86.508 McClinton later ex- plained: “I did the song because I wanted blacks to know that I relate to being black. When I first went to Stax, I made it clear that if being black and proud would hinder me from succeeding, then I didn’t want to succeed.”509 Like other musicians analyzed in this thesis, McClinton did not see country music as inherently alien to African American cul- ture. Yet, he was acutely aware of the racialized boundaries around musical genres and the way these structured the possibilities of cultural production. In her introduction to Hidden in the Mix, Diane Pecknold suggests that “one reason race has remained so central to genre definitions is that racial crossover destabilizes the very concept of genre, reliant as it often is on homological conceptions of audience cul- tures.”510 As this thesis has shown, the assumption that African American audiences and performers were not interested in country music does not prove true. Indeed, especially in the South, many of them considered country part of a diverse musical mix that also included pop and R&B. In spite of such persistent overlaps, contemporary critics often ended up reinforcing a naturalized perspective of musical and racial difference. Thus, at least during the 1960s, observers often found it more plausible to imagine the end of R&B and country music (through a post-racial, middle-class mainstream) than to picture an R&B artist sincerely integrating country into their repertoire or even integrating the genre’s social base. Although the early years of rock and roll had demonstrated a popular appetite for musical productions that defied easy (racial) categorizations, it was difficult for African American artists to benefit from these dynamics. In the mid-1960s, the term “blue-eyed soul” emerged to describe R&B made by white musicians. However, no sim- ilar designation was created for black performers who played country music. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, such restrictions were even more noticea- ble. Although R&B/soul and country music grew closer both on a musical and production
508 It was featured in Cash Box’s “Looking Ahead” country chart but entered neither their nor Billboard’s country Top 100. Cash Box (July 10, 1976), 33. 509 Quoted in Hoskyns, Say It One Time, 169. 510 Pecknold, “Introduction,” 12. 87 level, popular perception of this circumstance remained slight. At the same time that black musicians released very successful covers of country songs, generic boundaries were in- creasingly interpreted as signifiers of racial and ideological difference. Consequently, such recordings were often seen as the work of great interpreters, not artists. This made it possible to exaggerate soul/country crossover as a sign of social progress (a meeting of opposing traditions) while at the same time underestimating its historical and social foun- dation. Meanwhile, it was mostly white country musicians and staff who reaped the fruits of such musical boundary crossing. In this regard, two aspects have become especially noticeable during my research. On the one hand, although some of the most popular soul/country crossover recordings were made by female artists, critical evaluations mostly focused on male performers. This observation is in line with stereotypical ideas about male creativity. On the other hand, it is evident how these ideas intersected with other social hierarchies, especially those around ‘race.’ Much more than the African American singers, it was white producers, songwriters, or musicians who were perceived to be genre-bending geniuses.511 In light of the persistent overlaps between R&B and country, it is not surprising that a number of those African American artists who managed to actually move into the country field in the early 1970s had started out as R&B performers or writers. Yet, few of these made explicit musical references to their prior career. At the same time, their pro- ducers often emphasized the apparent novelty factor of the alleged opposition between country music and blackness. Ultimately, though, such framing could not hide the poten- tial instability that the presence of African American artists brought to country music’s ostensibly homogenous racial politics. As this thesis has shown, there is a common thread linking different artists through the years, from Solomon Burke to Linda Martell: Even if the intentions of producers and other industry executives were mostly economical, this did not curb the transgressive potential of black country recordings. In fact, they always at least carried the possibility for a re-articulation of the country genre’s constituent parts. However, it has also become clear that even concerted efforts at denaturalizing difference were often frustrated by the durability of racial and generic boundaries. In addition, it is notable that although soul/country crossover recordings were of- ten very commercially successful, the releases of most black country artists – except for Charley Pride – rarely managed to enter even the Top 20 of Billboard’s country charts. This was not for lack of critical appraisal. Although O.B. McClinton, for example, en- joyed his most successful chart entries during the early part of his career, his releases
511 Cf. Kelley’s assertion that “critics of African-American music have long ignored or played down its cultural hybridity.” Kelley, “Notes,” 1402–1403. 88 continued to receive enthusiastic reviews in the trade press long after. Yet, the first black musicians to receive a Grammy in country music after Charley Pride were the soul/jazz group the Pointer Sisters, who were awarded for their 1974 hit “Fairytale.”512 Coinci- dentally, this also made them the first black artists to (briefly) cross over from soul into the country charts. Indeed, the fact that my analysis ends in the mid-1970s is not the result of a lack in material or because the cross-pollination of and boundaries between country and soul ceased to exist. On the contrary, there was a steady stream of country(-influenced) releases by black artists like Tina Turner, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Dorothy Moore, and Bobby Womack during the 70s. None of these were success- ful in the country charts, however. Rather egregiously, Ray Charles’s first country chart entry came through a duet with Clint Eastwood from the film Any Which Way You Can (1980). Although Barney Hoskyns sees the popularity of disco as the endpoint of the more overt forms of exchange between country and soul music, Hughes shows that during these years, too, the picture was more complicated. The fact that producer Buddy Killen mod- eled the backing track for Bill Anderson’s country success “I Can’t Wait Any Longer” (1978) on Joe Tex’s disco/soul hit “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)” (1977) is only one striking example.513 At the turn of the decade, Big Al Down- ing had a string of Top 20 country hits after twenty years on the borderline of rock and roll, R&B, and country. Performers like Dobie Gray and Ray Charles also found late suc- cess in country music during the 1980s. While Downing, Charles, and O.B. McClinton retained a low-key chart presence throughout the decade, no successor emerged. All of this suggests that a continued analysis of black engagements with country music and of the role of ‘race’ in generic classifications would be instructive. Indeed, although it has become clear that Lil Nas X is actually part of a long-standing tradition, there is no straight line that goes from the mid-1970s into the late 2010s. Accordingly, there are a number of aspects that could be explored at greater length, for instance country music’s racial politics in the intervening decades. While this thesis has highlighted the persistence of a racialized distinction between R&B/soul and country, more extensive case studies of specific musicians might further illuminate different approaches to trans- cending this divide. Moreover, it appears worthwhile to examine in detail different per- formers from a particular city. Since the policing of racial boundaries varied throughout the U.S. and even the South, this would allow for a closer inspection of the local dynamics
512 Foster, My Country, 194–195. 513 Hughes, Country Soul, 167–188, especially 167–169. 89 that informed the possibilities of musical crossover. Instead of focusing on trade publica- tions like Billboard and Cash Box, a survey of magazines specifically dedicated to coun- try music or aimed at African American readers might present a broader picture of black country performers’ popular reception. Finally, it is conspicuous that the study of country music’s racial politics is frequently structured in the alleged binaries of black and white. Yet, the mid-1970s also brought Mexican American singers like Johnny Rodriguez and Freddy Fender into the spotlight.514 It was these two, not Stoney Edwards or McClinton, who trailed Charley Pride as the most successful country performers of color during the decade. However, their careers have received even less attention than the artists analyzed here, although (Tex-)Mexican traditions and country music also have a long, shared his- tory. As this thesis has shown, it is not only important to make visible the different ways in which black performers have engaged with country music, but also to reflect how these engagements were understood to either confirm or destabilize dominant industry narra- tives. If one focused only on the late 1960s, it might seem paradoxical that the crossover between country and soul music was so artistically fruitful and commercially successful during the same period in which parts of the country industry tried to fasten the genre’s articulation to whiteness and political conservatism. However, both of these aspects were only the latest stages in a development that had been going on for decades. Country mu- sic’s longstanding but deceptive connection to whiteness not only provided the foundation for its appropriation by Richard Nixon, it was also the shell that covered a more compli- cated truth about its musical origins and popular appeal. Accordingly, the reproduction of ‘race’ and genre does not consist of separate units that just happen to meet by chance. Instead, they are actually mutually constitutive. In this respect, it is also vital to consider the remaking of ‘race’ through genre. The connection between ‘race’ and authenticity in the evolution of musical genres thus appears as one of most intriguing but also potentially misleading aspects of popular music history.
514 Nadine Hubbs is currently working on a project about this topic. See “Country Mexicans: Sounding Mexican American Life, Love, and Belonging in Country Music,” University of Michigan. Online:
Discography
ADAMS, Johnny. “Reconsider Me.” Heart & Soul. SSS International, SSS–5, 1970.
BELL, William. “You Don’t Miss Your Water / Formula of Love.” Stax, S–116, 1961.
______. “Any Other Way / Please Help Me I’m Falling.” Stax, S–128, 1962.
______. “My Whole World Is Falling Down.” Bound to Happen. Stax, STS 2014, 1969.
BURKE, Solomon. Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms) / Be Bop Grandma.” Atlantic, 45-2114, 1961.
CHARLES, Ray. “I’m Movin’ On / I Believe to My Soul.” Atlantic, 45-2043, 1959.
______. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. ABC-Paramount, ABCS–410, 1962.
______. Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues. ABC-Paramount, ABCS–520, 1965.
DARRELL, Johnny. “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp.” The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp. United Artists Records, UAS 6634, 1968.
DAVI S, Jimmie. “There’s a New Moon Over My Shoulder / Love Please Don’t Let Me Down.” Decca – 6105, 1944.
EDWARDS, Stoney. “A Two Dollar Toy.” A Country Singer. Capitol Records, ST–741, 1971.
______. “An Old Mule’s Hip.” A Country Singer. Capitol Records, ST–741, 1971.
______. “Poor Folks Stick Together.” A Country Singer. Capitol Records, ST–741, 1971.
______. “Dixie Boy.” Down Home in the Country. Capitol Records, ST–834, 1971.
______. “Hank and Lefty Raised My Country Soul / A Few of the Reasons.” Capitol Records, 3671, 1973.
______. “Mississippi You're On My Mind.” Mississippi You're On My Mind. Capitol Records, ST–11401, 1975.
______. “Blackbird (Hold You Head High).” Blackbird. Capitol Records, ST–11499, 1976.
a HENDERSON, Joe. “Snap Your Fingers.” Snap Your Fingers. Todd ST 2701, 1962.
HUNTER, Ivory Joe. I’ve Always Been Country. Paramount Records, PAS–6080, 1973.
MARTELL, Linda. “Color Him Father.” Color Me Country. Plantation Records, PLP–9, 1970.
______. “San Francisco Is a Lonely Town.” Color Me Country. Plantation Records, PLP– 9, 1970.
MCCLINTON, O.B. “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You.” Obie from Senatobie. Enterprise, ENS–1029, 1973.
______. “My Whole World Is Falling Down.” Obie from Senatobie. Enterprise, ENS– 1029, 1973.
______. “Obie from Senatobie.” Obie from Senatobie. Enterprise, ENS–1029, 1973.
______. “Dixie (She Was Mama to Me).” If You Loved Her That Way. Enterprise, ENS– 7506, 1974.
______. “Black Speck.” Mercury, 73817, 1976.
OWENS, Buck. Buck ‘Em! Volume 2: The Music of Buck Owens (1967–1975). Omnivore Recordings, OVCD–135, 2015.
PHILLIPS, Esther. “Release Me.” Release Me! Reflections of Country and Western Greats. Lenox Records, LX-227, 1962.
______. The Country Side of Esther Phillips. Atlantic, SD 8130, 1966.
PICKETT, Wilson. “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You.” In Philadelphia. Atlantic, SD 8270, 1970.
SEELY, Jeannie. “Don’t Touch Me.” The Seely Style. Monument, SLP 18057, 1966.
SIMON, Joe. “You Keep Me (Hangin’ On).” No Sad Songs. Sound Stage 7, SSS–15004, 1968.
______. “The Chokin’ Kind.” The Chokin’ Kind. Sound Stage 7, SSS–15006, 1969.
______. Simon Country. Spring Records, SPR 5705, 1973.
SMITH, O.C. “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp.” Hickory Holler Revisited. Columbia, CS 9680, 1968.
_____. “Little Green Apples,” Hickory Holler Revisited. Columbia, CS 9680, 1968.
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______. “Skip a Rope.” Soul Country. Atlantic, SD 8187, 1968.
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v Newspapers and Periodicals
BILLBOARD
CASH BOX
EBONY
JET
RECORD WORLD
v Articles and Liner Notes
ARMSTRONG, Edward G. “The Rapprochement of Country and Soul Music.” Popular Music and Society 6, 4 (January 1979): 316–23.
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c
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______. “If Only They Could Read Between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music.” In Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 263–282.
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d
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v Films
COUNTRY MUSIC. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS, 2019.
n DEUTSCHSPRACHIGE ZUSAMMENFASSUNG DER ARBEIT
Obwohl Country-Musik in ihren Ursprüngen häufig als die Musik schottisch-irischstäm- miger Amerikaner gesehen wird, ist sie doch seit Beginn ihrer kommerziellen Existenz ein Produkt der amerikanischen Multikulturalität. Dieser kulturellen Diversität zum Trotz wurde amerikanische Popmusik für große Teile des 20. Jahrhunderts in drei Ströme un- terteilt: den Pop-Mainstream sowie R&B (Rhythm and Blues, später: Soul) und Country- Musik. Im Gegensatz zum eher undifferenzierten Mainstream gelten letztere als Sammel- becken für die Musik zweier distinktiver Gruppen. Das Publikum von R&B/Soul ist aus dieser Sicht die afroamerikanische Bevölkerung, während Country überwiegend von wei- ßen Südstaatler*innen konsumiert wird.1 Eine verbreite Annahme ist, dass die beiden mu- sikalischen Kulturen keine substantiellen Überschneidungen haben, weder auf Seite der Hörerschaft noch hinsichtlich musikalischer Attribute. Dennoch gibt es diverse afroamerikanische Musiker*innen, die sich in ihrem Werk mit Country-Musik beschäftigt haben. Hierzu zählen sowohl Künstler*innen aus dem Bereich des R&B/Soul, die regelmäßig als Country identifizierte Stücke coverten, als auch jene, die tatsächlich in der Country-Industrie aktiv waren. Spätestens seit den 1950er Jahren, besonders aber in den 60ern und 70ern, nahm diese Dynamik ein größeres Ausmaß an. Das scheinbare Paradox, das dieser Entwicklung zugrunde liegt, wurde zu jener Zeit noch intensiver wahrgenommen, da Country-Musik zunehmend mit konserva- tiven weißen Politikern wie Richard Nixon assoziiert wurde. In meiner Analyse geht es somit darum, wie das Zusammenwirken von Genre und dem sozialen Konstrukt „Rasse“ (race) die Interpretation sowie das Verständnis von Populärmusik beeinflusst. Letztlich beinhaltet dies auch die Frage, wer eigentlich country sein darf und wieso. Ge- genstand der Analyse ist dabei jene heterogene Gruppe an Musiker*innen, die ich als black country bezeichne – ein Sammelbegriff für die verschiedenen Arten und Weisen, auf die sich schwarze Künstler*innen mit diesem mutmaßlich von Grund auf weißen Genre beschäftigt haben. Zunächst wird diese Arbeit auf theoretische Grundlagen zu den Themen Genre und race eingehen. Bei beiden handelt es sich keineswegs um statische Konzepte, sondern vielmehr um soziale Konstruktionen, die einer stetigen Neuverhandlung bedürfen. Um der Komplexität der häufig implizit im Genrebegriff angedeuteten sozialen Praktiken und
1 In meiner Arbeit werde ich trotz deren irreführender Konnotationen auf die vereinfachenden Begriffe „schwarz“ und „weiß“ zur Bezeichnung der verschiedenen Akteure zurückgreifen, da die Debatte über R&B/soul und Country gerade von solch reduzierenden Haltungen und Gegenüberstellungen definiert wird. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist letztlich jedoch, ebendiese „Rassifizierung“ (racialization) von Popmu- sik kritisch zu beleuchten. o Zusammenhänge gerechnet zu werden, wird ebenso das von Stuart Hall popularisierte Konzept der articulation vorgestellt. Außerdem werden die Vorgänge des crossover und des Coverns beleuchtet – unterschiedliche Prozesse, die für die Sichtbarmachung und In- terpretation der Überschneidungen zwischen R&B/Soul und Country eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Die Gemeinsamkeiten der scheinbar gegensätzlichen Musikrichtungen werden im nächsten Kapitel behandelt. Hierunter fallen sowohl die Bedeutung des Südens der Ver- einigten Staaten in der (parallelen) Entwicklung beider Genres als auch ihre (mutmaßli- che) Verbindung zur Arbeiterklasse. Der zentrale Moment für die bis heute anhaltende Annahme ihrer grundsätzlichen Differenz wird in den späten 1960ern verortet, als die konservativen Präsidentschaftskandidaten George Wallace und Richard Nixon Country- Musik als Wahlkampfmittel entdeckten. Dies war jedoch nur möglich, weil die Musikin- dustrie bereits in den 1920er Jahren begonnen hatte, die Musik schwarzer und weißer Südstaatler*innen gemäß der rassischen Aufteilung ihrer mutmaßlichen Zielgruppe zu unterscheiden. Obwohl viele Musiker*innen Wert auf ein breitgefächertes Repertoire leg- ten und, wie der Musikhistoriker Tony Russell zeigt, ein common stock an instrumentalen und lyrischen Themen existierte, setzte sich die auf Jim-Crow-Ideologie basierte Eintei- lung durch. Diese Entwicklung wurde mit der Einführung entsprechender Popularitäts- Charts (von Zeitschriften wie Billboard) fortgesetzt. Obwohl anfänglich auch inklusive Definitionen bestanden (bei denen sich unter der Bezeichnung American Folk sowohl weiße als auch schwarze Interpret*innen fanden) und die Hörgewohnheiten der Ameri- kaner*innen sich oftmals jenseits dieser musical color line (Karl Hagstrom Miller) be- wegten, dominierte letztlich eine strikte Trennung. Der erste Teil meiner Analyse befasst sich mit verschiedenen Musiker*innen, de- ren Schaffen einer solchen Einteilung bereits widersprach, als die Kategorien sich gerade erst gefestigt hatten. Hierzu zählt zum Beispiel Ivory Joe Hunter, ein besonders in den 1950er Jahren erfolgreicher R&B-Sänger, Pianist und Songwriter. Obwohl Hunters Mu- sik spürbare Country-Einflüsse zeigte – und mehrere seiner Lieder später (durch weiße Künstler) zu Country-Hits wurden – blieb es ihm zunächst versagt, sein Interesse deutli- cher auszuleben. Erst in den frühen 70ern fand Hunter in Nashville ein neues Publikum und nahm dort das Album I’ve Always Been Country (1973) auf. Andere Künstler*innen, allen voran Ray Charles, versuchten durch das Covern von Country-Songs eine re-arti- culation der sozialen Bedeutung dieses Genres. Da Charles durch seine vorherigen Er- folge im Bereich des R&B, Jazz und Pop zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon als genreübergrei- fendes Talent wahrgenommen wurde und sich seine Interpretation von Country am Pop-
p beeinflussten Nashville Sound orientierten, wurden seine Country-Werke letztlich mehr als Hinauswachsen über Genregrenzen empfunden denn als Kritik an der racialization von Musik. Zur selben Zeit gab es Musiker wie William Bell und Arthur Alexander, deren Werke aus dem musikalischen Mix der Südstaaten erwuchsen und ebenso Spuren von R&B wie Country und Pop zeigten. Obwohl diese Künstler später eine breite Anhänger- schaft fanden, hatten sie zunächst Schwierigkeiten, sich zu positionieren und einen klar definierten Absatzmarkt zu finden. Anders als der unter anderem von Elvis Presley ver- breitete Rock ’n’ Roll wurde diese Musik nicht als Hinweis auf ein neues Publikum, des- sen Geschmack sich jenseits traditioneller Klassifizierungen befindet, gesehen. Zwar wird in der hier betrachteten Zeit, den späten 1950ern und frühen 60ern, bereits sichtbar, dass ein „rassifiziertes“ Verständnis von Popmusik der deutlich komplexeren Realität nicht gerecht wird. Dennoch zeigt sich ebenso die Beständigkeit der wechselseitigen Wir- kung von race und Genre. In der Mitte der 1960er führte die andauernde Interaktion zwischen R&B und Country schließlich zu einem später als Country-Soul bezeichneten Genre. Dessen Ent- stehung wird gewöhnlich angesehen als das Produkt einer neuen Generation an Aufnah- mestudios in Orten wie Memphis, Nashville und Muscle Shoals. Aus den Country-Ein- flüssen der häufig weißen Studiobands, Produzenten und Songwriter sowie dem R&B/Gospel-Hintergrund der schwarzen Sänger*innen, so die gängige Lesart, wurde ein musikalischer Hybrid geschaffen. Dieser Austausch war tatsächlich deutlich komplexer. Er fand zudem größtenteils unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit statt. Somit wurde die Interaktion zwischen R&B und Country vorübergehend weniger offensichtlich. Beson- ders gegen Ende des Jahrzehntes gab es allerdings wieder eine wachsende Zahl afroame- rikanischer Künstler*innen, die mit Country-Songs große Erfolge in den R&B- bzw. Soul-Charts verzeichneten. Joe Tex und Joe Simon sind zwei solcher Musiker*innen, die in Nashville mit Produzenten arbeiteten, die sowohl für Soul- als auch Country-Perfor- mer*innen zuständig waren und somit den bereits regen Austausch weiter förderten. Dass dabei zumeist trotzdem darauf geachtet wurde, die traditionelle Einteilung in Soul und Country nicht zu unterwandern, zeigt sich als Drahtseilakt mit teils unerwarteten Ergeb- nissen. Zugleich fungierten Soul und Country zunehmend als ideologisch aufgeladene Signifikanten eines größeren Konflikts zwischen Civil Rights Movement und sogenann- tem white backlash. Diese Dualität zeichnete auch die frühen 1970er aus. Dieser historische Moment erhält zusätzliche Bedeutung dadurch, dass es eine wachsende Zahl an schwarzen Country-Künstler*innen gab, die die segregation of sound (scheinbar) überwinden konnten. Während Charley Prides bemerkenswerter Aufstieg
q mutmaßlich den Weg für andere Afroamerikaner*innen ebnete, dauerte es doch einige Jahre, bis zuerst Linda Martell und später Stoney Edwards und O.B. McClinton (relativ) dauerhaften Erfolg verzeichneten. Während die Karrieren dieser Interpret*innen zeigen, dass sich an der grundsätzlichen Ordnung der Musikindustrie tatsächlich nur wenig ge- ändert hatte, boten sie doch eine unerwartete Intervention in die racial politics der Country-Musik. Zum Beispiel brach Martell die im Genre zuweilen vorherrschende Idylle der weißen Südstaaten-Nostalgie, als sie bei der Plattenfirma Plantation unter Ver- trag genommen wurde. McClinton hatte seine größten Hits mit Covern von Soul-Hits wie Wilson Picketts „Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You“ (1972) und machte somit darauf aufmerksam, wie gering – und arbiträr – die Unterschiede zwischen Soul und Country teils waren. Stoney Edwards zeigte sich als regelrechte Verkörperung einer traditionellen Vorstellung von Country-Musik: Ein Südstaatler aus armen Verhältnissen, der früh die Schule verließ und sich seitdem mit Landarbeit und Schnapsbrennerei durchschlug, nur um letztlich doch in den Fabriken des Westens sein Glück zu suchen. Edwards’ Vorliebe für Country-Musik erscheint bis dahin nicht außergewöhnlich – wäre er nicht als Kind nicht-weißer Eltern geboren. So finden sich in Edwards’ Schaffen ebenfalls diverse Be- arbeitungen klassischer Country-Themen, die durch die soziale Bedeutung seiner Haut- farbe eine Umdeutung erfahren. Die vorliegende Analyse findet Mitte der 70er Jahre ihr Ende. Dies liegt nicht daran, dass der beschriebene musikalische Austausch zu jener Zeit aufhörte oder gar die racialization der Genres ihre Bedeutung verlor. Es gab weiterhin diverse Veröffentli- chungen, zunehmend im Album-Format, in denen sich Künstler*innen dem Verhältnis von R&B/Soul und Country widmeten. So zeigt sich abschließend, dass die festgestellte wechselseitige Reproduktion von race und Genre für eine weiterführende Untersuchung reichlich Anhaltspunkte bietet. Zudem wird deutlich, dass, obwohl die Vermarktung schwarzer Country-Musiker*innen immer auch den Reiz des (mutmaßlich) Neuen betont hat, es sich hierbei keineswegs um einen nur kurzzeitigen – und historischen unbegrün- deten – Trend handelte. Es ist jedoch festzustellen, dass für eine umfassende Analyse der racial politics von Country-Musik auch den Beiträgen anderer people of color nachge- gangen werden sollte. Die diversen kulturellen Einflüsse, aus denen letztlich nicht nur Country, sondern auch R&B/Soul gewachsen ist, lassen sich keineswegs auf ein schlich- tes Schwarz-Weiß-Schema herunterbrechen – selbst wenn die Geschichte der amerikani- schen Popmusik auf den ersten Blick etwas anderes zu sagen scheint.
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