Music and the Road

Essays on the Interplay of Music and the Popular Culture of the American Road

Gordon E. Slethaug

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501335273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul Simon-these familiar figures have written road music for half a century and continue to remain highly-regarded artists. But there is so much more to say about road music. This book fills a glaring hole in scholarship about the road and music. In a collection of 13 essays, Music and the Road explores the origins of road music in the blues, country-western, and rock 'n' roll; the themes of adventure, freedom, mobility, camaraderie, and love, and much more in this music; the mystique and reality of touring as an important part of getting away from home, creating community among performers, and building audiences across the country from the 1930s to the present; and the contribution of music to popular road films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, and O n the Road.

1

Introduction

Gordon E. Slethaug

In the past few years, several studies have appeared concerning the road in American culture, history, film, and literature, but none has been written about music and the American road, which is strange because this rich resource informs and colors the perception of the road and the experience of fans at every turn. Early on, before the twentieth century, folk songs celebrated the various modes of travel in America, but these were occasional and applicable to very specific groups of people. With the advent of the mass media in the twentieth century, road songs followed three main avenues—all of them recorded and broadcast to small and large audiences: blues reflected the pain and grief of those on the road; country-western music picked up on the dreams, possibilities, and anxieties of the road through Southern habitats and others with frontier ideologies; and, finally, the emergence and ongoing popularity of rock ’n’ roll extolled the speed and thrill of the road but also the heartbreak and despair that sometimes accompanied such travel. Altogether, these varieties of road music and more have been a formative part of the fabric of American society across the spectrum of race, class, gender, age, geography, and technology.

With the invention of the railroad in the nineteenth century and the automobile in the twentieth and their associated industries, new kinds of road experiences and music emerged with bands traveling by train, bus, van, car, and truck, and with passengers sitting privately or in groups listening to the radio, that wonderful 1930s invention of Motorola. Early performers of road music during the first half of the century included legendary blues singers such as Robert Johnson of the Mississippi delta, Blind Lemon Jefferson of Texas, and Buddy Moss of the Piedmont area. Some of their experiences and gigs were decidedly rural, but others were urban. This tradition continues into the present with many contemporary male and female African American blues artists. At the same time, mainly white country-western singers were taking the folk-song tradition and turning out some wonderful road songs. Later white rock ’n’ roll bands and singers as well as others with people of color in the second half of the century took their music from small country towns to big cities and even to foreign destinations, writing memorable road songs that included Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and “No Particular Place to Go”; The Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Long Promised Road,” and “California Dreamin’”; Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”; the Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow”; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “On the Road Again”; Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A,” “Born to Run,” and “Thunder Road”; and Paul Simon’s “America,” “Papa Hobo,” “Hearts and Bones,” and “Graceland.”

There were, of course, films that focused on singers and bands themselves, including such documentaries as Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan that lays out the trajectory of Dylan’s myth-making move from northern Minnesota to New York City and onto the road circuit. Then there are fictional films about singers and bands such as that of Clint Eastwood who “played a country singer in the sentimental Depression-era film Honkytonk Man as well as the impresario of a traveling show in Bronco Billy” (Cohan and Hark, 10). Early on, there were the various “Road To . . .” films that featured popular actor Bob Hope and singer Bing Crosby and fabricated romances of travel on the road. Then, too, there were later fictional films memorializing the lives of countercultural heroes and gangsters alike such as Bonnie and Clyde whose exploits were accompanied by tunes and lyrics that stayed with the audiences long after the big and small screens went dark. Various travelers, singers, bands, and listeners/viewers are as much tied to the road and vehicles as they are to the music, and this study will look at the semiotics of the road in American culture, the implications of the music of the road itself, and the experience of taking it on the road—in short: the interaction of the road, travelers, and music. As Kurt Jacobsen notes of road music and film, road music “either one, invokes the road as explicit theme, or two, is encountered while passing through strange regions, or three, heightens the road experience, whatever the origin of the song or subject of its lyrics” (Chapter 12). This road music, then, has something special to do with freedom, independence, rebellion, and mobility that are part and parcel of the experience and cultural understanding of the road, but it encompasses many other aspects of self and culture.

Scholarship of music and the road

Although there is growing scholarship available concerning the road, only limited research currently exists on the link between music and the road or even road music and road films. In Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s The Road Movie Book, of the 17 chapters in the book, music is alluded to in only two, and the only chapter that deals centrally with music and the road is Corey K. Creekmur’s “On the Run and on the Road: Fame and the Outlaw Couple in American Cinema.” This chapter, however, doesn’t address the music of films but follows Creekmur’s contention that the outlaw road film follows the structural and stylistic features of musicals (91). Creekmur does note that “the contemporary road film seems especially suited to the now dominant mode of constructing and marketing film soundtracks through a selection of semi-autonomous, nostalgic hits or newly recorded pop songs” (101). In exploring Easy Rider in the chapter called “The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider,” Barbara Klinger briefly alludes to the road music of Steppenwolf and the Byrds that is paired with and assists in the celebration of “panoramic point-of-view shots” of magnificent Southwestern wilderness landscape scenes that Wyatt and Billy travel through in the early part of Easy Rider compared to the use of Jimi Hendrix’s “nihilistic ‘If Six Was Nine’” paired with the road montage of the threatening culture of the Deep South that eventually destroys the two riders at the end of the film (in Cohan and Hark, 188, 192).

Similarly, in Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, David Laderman only once refers to “popular music” as an integral part of road films, though he does bring in rock ’n’ roll several times. As he notes, “the distinctive emergence of the road movie in the late 1960s is culturally interwoven with the advent of rock and popular music and the genre usually deploys the former as another aesthetic expression of the visceral and sensual thrill of driving, of moving at high speed” connected with “youth rebellion drive” (16, 19). He repeats such a comment in considering three American films and one German: the “mood-mixing, controversial banjo music” of Bonnie and Clyde, that conveys “the thrill of road travel for the counterculture” (69); the use of rock music to unleash “spiritual energy through a politicized driving” in Easy Rider (70); the “peripatetic mobility” of the countercultural figures and lifestyle suggested by Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” and “Break on through to the Other Side” in Two-Lane Blacktop (96); and the “visionary, rebellious energy,” “fiery feminist perspective,” and “rebellion” of the later German film Bandits (271).

Gordon E. Slethaug and Stacilee Ford’s Hit the Road, Jack: Essays on the Culture of the American Road does only slightly better in exploring music and the road. Two chapters focus exclusively on road music: Susan Kuyper’s “The Road in American Vernacular Music” goes into detail on road music’s early origins in folk music, and Paul Attinello’s “Assassin in a Three-Piece Suit: Slow Fire, Minimalism, and the Eighties” looks at the road as represented in Paul Dresher’s contemporary opera. Otherwise, the chapters do not reference the music that is talked about in road literature or that accompanies various road films.

There is, then, little in the way of criticism that explores the relationship between music of or about the road and various kinds and examples of literature and film. Of course, those in the popular music scene know that these links between song and literature and film are intrinsic but have never subjected them to critical analysis as indicated by the numerous sites where interesting road music is identified by the number of tunes without commentary, such as the Ultimate Classic Rock’s “Top 10 Road Songs,” Playlist’s “20 Essential Songs for Your Road-Trip,” Buzzfeed’s “The Only 39 Road Trip Songs You’ll Ever Need,” and Timeout’s “The 50 best road trip songs of all time.” These sites quantify and promote but do not analyze. That is the task of this book.

This compilation of essays, then, creates a unique and valuable collection that addresses a fundamental lack in the scholarship of the intersection of the road and popular music from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present time.

The theoretical and narrative framework of this study

In “The Semiotics of the Road,” Gordon Slethaug points out that the notion of the road in the United States is inextricably tied to the changing developments of American economics, politics, culture, and technology, so that, while key ideas of freedom, independence, and mobility may be relatively constant in the construction of the road over time, other factors such as individualism, identity, and rebellion are dependent on specific historical circumstances and social movements. Undergirding these historical changes are those in technology, such as development of the automobile, the availability of electricity and telephones at the end of the nineteenth century, and the rise of media and communications at the beginning of the twentieth century. Consequently, the music of the road that marks the focus of this volume depends on codes of the American road that developed in certain periods during that time. These include the development of “individual and national freedom, independence, and mobility; democratic space in a simultaneously present and vanished frontier; self-reliance and liberal individualism; diversity in ethnicity, race, class, gender, and culture; communal and personal transformation; [and] rebellious countercultural challenges to a complacent and conservative society . . .” (Slethaug and Ford, “Introduction,” 4). Consequently, this volume brings into focus the modern period in which technological developments radically changed modes of travel and networks of roads. It does not intend to represent all of the many forms of road music in the contemporary era because that would be a separate volume in itself, but this volume will explore the classic forms of recorded road music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while also exploring contemporary forms in movies as well as those of an LGBT singer.

Transitions: The disappearing frontier and rise of transportation and the media

When in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier had closed, he also identified the traits that had been necessary to settle the United States and which in his mind accounted for the characterization of present-day Americans as well. Key traits included:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier. (227–28)

Susan Kuyper’s “The Road in American Vernacular Music” paid close attention to these traits as evidenced in the American frontier itself and in the subset of road songs in folk vernacular music that was produced before the twentieth century, noting that they “resonate with the weariness of travel, tell stories of terrible challenges, but also never lose hope” in work, play, love, and worship (55). This was not a small subset, Kuyper notes, comprising roughly one-third of the 317 folk songs collected in Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America; so mobility, travel, and the road in all its forms has been an enduring part of American history and culture (57).

This present study of music and the American road begins where Kuyper’s leaves off, marked by the transition from anonymous folk songs to those written, played, sung, and increasingly copyrighted by particular artists and groups. In “Easy Riders and Hard Roads in the Early Recorded Blues,” Steve Knepper and Jim Tuten write about the early country-blues tradition that had such a profound influence on American popular music, including later blues and rock ’n’ roll. As they note, country blues first flourished in three seminal areas of the South—the Mississippi delta, Texas, and the Piedmont area of the East Coast (the Carolinas and Georgia) and was spearheaded by Robert Johnson (the rural Delta), Blind Lemon Jefferson (urban Texas), and Buddy Moss (Atlanta and surroundings) whose music helped to consolidate the blues as an art form and to shape the myth of road mobility. Theirs was African and American music to the core, the rhythms and patterns reflecting early roots in Africa as well as American folk songs, and the themes expressing their aspirations, values, and challenges in an American racialized South at the first half of the twentieth century.

In the Mississippi delta, Robert Johnson traveled in almost every conceivable way: he walked on dirt roads and highways; he sat on a pile of corn in a wagon pulled by a tractor; he rode freight trains and buses; he hitchhiked rides in pickup trucks—all to perform on street corners or in front of barbershops and restaurants in adjoining towns (Guralnick 20) An old-fashioned traveling minstrel, Johnson and his blues songs truly represented the rural Southern delta.

While Johnson traveled the dirt roads of the rural delta, blues musicians Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and Atlanta blues singer Buddy Moss traveled in the urbanizing areas of Texas and the Georgia Piedmont. In these locations the automobile gave musicians access to more commercial possibilities in both urban and out-of-the-way places of the South and, increasingly with the Great Migration, the North. Indeed, in Texas and the Piedmont the automobile came to be seen as a palpable object of desire—a sign of sexual possibility and potency, achievable luxury, and even conspicuous consumption for fortunate black musicians. Incarnated in the automobile, the road emerged in blues music as a promise of freedom, adventure, agency, and financial reward but also conveyed nostalgia for places and people left behind as well as anxiety about the perils of driving under the vigilant eyes and oppressive Jim Crow laws of Southern white communities. The earliest country blues, then, embrace contrary extremes of possibility, hope, and frustration and often position the musicians and their listeners on a knife’s edge of hope and existential despair.

As Knepper and Tuten note, however, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and Buddy Moss were not the only ones singing and recording blues during the first half of the twentieth century, but are representative of many of their compatriots and followers. Jefferson himself influenced Texas musicians Leadbelly, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and T-Bone Walker as well as leading blues artists from outside Texas, including such Delta blues luminaries as Chester Arthur Bennett (Howlin’ Wolf), McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), and Son House, while Buddy Moss influenced those such as Blind Blake. The influence does not stop there, however. As Knepper and Tuten note, musical techniques and themes in “Adia Victoria’s 2016 album Beyond the Bloodhounds” contain “a pervading Johnson-esque Gothicism” (Chapter 3).

In the explicitly racialized culture and politics of the South and indirectly of the North, the whites dominated the blacks, but whites also were divided by geography, economics, gender, and class. Virginia Shay’s study of early and late American country music, “Easy Street on Mud Tires: The ‘Heartland’ and the Frontier of the Road in Country Music,” notes the way in which road music has been shaped by, and responded to, the simple rural, white, blue-collar life of the South with real links to the Midwest heartland and more imagined links to manifest destiny and the Western frontier. While country music had roots in early folk music and the 1920s “hillbilly” Appalachia, and still waxes nostalgic about its common people and villages, these towns and their inhabitants have generally become more imaginary and mythic than real in connecting with the larger population across the country in their interrogation of urban corporate ways. “As Scherman remarks, ‘Country music was born of the trauma of rural people’s adjustment to industrial society. . . . Severed from its working-class origins, country music is becoming a refuge for culturally homeless Americans everywhere’” (Scherman qtd. in Peterson, Creating Country Music, 222). This country-western road music is marked as white, and culturally and politically conservative both in its inception and in the recent Nashville iterations. What black blues and white country-western musical traditions share is a common disdain for exploitative urban environments as well as a hope for ...