Sounds and the City

Popular Music, Place and Globalization

B. Lashua, K. Spracklen, S. Wagg, B. Lashua, K. Spracklen, S. Wagg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137283115
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

This book explores the ways in which Western-derived music connects with globalization, hybridity, consumerism and the flow of cultures. Both as local terrain and as global crossroads, cities remain fascinating spaces of cultural contestation and meaning-making via the composing, playing, recording and consumption of popular music.

Part I

Cities of Origin?

1

Heart of the Country? The Construction of Nashville as the Capital of Country Music

Diane Pecknold

On his 2013 album Two Lanes of Freedom, Tim McGraw offered a wistful paean to the enduring impact country music has had on the city of Nashville. Without country, he sang, Nashville ‘would be just another river town, streets would have a different sound, there’d be no honky tonks with whiskey rounds, no dreamers chasin’ dreams down, no tourists takin’ in the sights, no Stetsons under Broadway lights’. In other words, Nashville without country music wouldn’t be Nashville. But the reverse is said to be equally true. Although country music emerged as a set of vernacular styles and then a commercial genre well before Nashville dominated its production, the city is understood to have played an indispensable role in the development of country music.

Despite contemporary notions about the identity between Nashville and country music, the relationship between the two resulted from a relatively recent and very contingent process. In 1950, when WSM radio announcer David Cobb first dubbed Nashville ‘Music City’, he had more than country music in mind (Havighurst, 2007, p. xiv). While the Grand Ole Opry was already the genre’s leading show, it was not the city’s only claim to musical fame. Across town, WLAC, which had joined WSM as a clear-channel station eight years earlier, had become one of the nation’s most influential broadcasters of R&B. Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop, the largest mail order distribution house for country music, was matched in the R&B and gospel fields by Randy Wood’s Record Shop. In keeping with its cherished self-appointment as ‘The Athens of the South’, Nashville also boasted a thriving community of musicians who played light pop, dance, and classical – or, as WSM management sometimes called it, ‘good’ music (Broven, 2009). Dinah Shore, who made her musical debut on WSM, had gone on to pop stardom, and Snooky Lanson seemed (deceptively, as it turned out) poised to do the same as a featured vocalist on Your Hit Parade, a position that had helped to launch Frank Sinatra’s career. Local bandleader Francis Craig and his orchestra had enjoyed 17 consecutive weeks atop the charts with Near You. The reconstituted Nashville Symphony – whose members later provided the soaring strings that came to define the Nashville Sound – was in its sixth season, having taken up the legacy of the civic symphony orchestra that had fallen victim to the Great Depression.

Nor was Nashville the only – or even the clearly dominant – centre of country music performance, broadcasting, or recording. Throughout World War II and the immediate post-war period, southern California and the Bay Area boasted far richer country music subcultures than relatively sleepy middle Tennessee. Migrants from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana joined newly urbanizing Okies to take advantage of the explosion of blue-collar jobs in West Coast wartime industries, and they brought the Western swing and honky-tonk of their home states with them, nourishing a thriving network of dance halls.¹ The artists associated with this scene, rather than the stars of the Grand Ole Opry, produced the biggest cross-over hits of the 1940s, such as Tex Williams’ million-selling Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette). And, while the Opry was the most prestigious country radio broadcast of the day, dozens of other barn dances and deejay shows across the country exerted greater influence on the stylistic development of the genre in those years; the Louisiana Hayride, a recent upstart on Shreveport’s clear-channel KWKH, was much more innovative than its Nashville cousin, and would soon be dubbed the ‘Cradle of the Stars’ for helping to launch the careers of Hank Williams, George Jones, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, and Elvis Presley.² Nashville boasted two recording studios – Brown Radio Productions and Castle Recording Studio – but it was still an outpost for old-time and hillbilly recording, which had been dominated first by Atlanta, then by Chicago, and, over the preceding ten years, by Los Angeles and Dallas (Oermann as cited in Kosser, 2006, p. 3).

Just a decade after Cobb first coined his prescient moniker, however, Time magazine could use the term ‘Nashville Sound’ as a metonym for country music, a tautology that summarized the way the city and the genre had come to define one another in the minds of many (Ivey, 1998, p. 371). By the mid-1970s, Nashville and its country music industry were alternately viewed as symbols of a new Southern influence on American life, a ‘redneck revival’ that ‘thrived and spread in the 1970s’, or as a prime example of the homogenization of a distinctively Southern culture (Hemphill, 1975; Schulman, 2002). While Richard Nixon took the stage on the opening night of the new suburban Grand Ole Opry complex to ‘thank country music, those who have created it, those who make it . . . for what it does to make America a better country’, Robert Altman famously deployed Nashville as a symbol of the moral and political decay of American life. Today, Nashville is simultaneously feted as the ‘home’ of country music – as in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s trademarked advertising slogan, ‘Country Music Lives Here’ – and maligned as the slaughtering ground of a rich musical tradition, as in the Waco Brothers’ alt.country lament ‘The Death of Country Music’ or the George Strait and Alan Jackson duet ‘Murder on Music Row’ (which, ironically, became a top 40 country hit and received both a Vocal Event of the Year award and a Song of the Year award from the Country Music Association, arguably the embodiment of the industry itself). Dead or alive, it seems, country music is inseparable from the city of Nashville.

The construction of Nashville as the ‘home’ of country music is easily interpreted as what John Connell and Chris Gibson (2003, p. 112) call a ‘commercially constructed strategic essentialism of place’, which, by fetishizing a local point of origin for a popular music scene, authenticates and confirms genre identity. As Connell and Gibson point out, such essentialisms frequently resort to homological explanations that delineate a link between particular sounds and the specific social configurations that are believed to have given rise to them. On the surface, this model of authenticity would seem to create an insurmountable contradiction. If country music is, in homological terms, the product of a geographically diffuse rural culture, how can its relationship to Nashville become a point of authentication that helps to define the values of the genre? Ironically, though, the connection between Nashville as a city and country music as a genre may be both more plausible and more powerful than the kind of homological claim that has traditionally been the source of musical authenticity. Rather than figuring as an originary creative crucible, Nashville serves as a symbolic geography and social structure within which the core values of country music culture are narratively recapitulated. At the same time, the popular imaginary of Music City, USA, has become a critical rhetorical strategy for defending the economic interests of the country industry as an autonomous business and genre community.

The unbroken circle: Nashville, family, and community

Old-time, hillbilly, and then country music were products of urbanization. Patrick Huber has demonstrated, for instance, that some of the most influential figures in early country music, including Fiddlin’ John Carson, Charlie Poole, and the Dixon Brothers, were thoroughly urbanized textile workers in the cities and towns of the Piedmont South (Huber, 2008). Kristine McCusker has similarly shown how the domestic and maternal imagery of the female artists on barn dance radio was promoted to mediate the anxieties of Southern and Midwestern migrants to cities like Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s (McCusker, 2008). And, as we have seen, the wartime and post-war migration of rural South-westerners in California and Texas generated the era’s most vibrant country music performance circuits and the honky-tonk and Western swing styles that developed there.

Despite its obvious relationship to modernization and urbanization, country music culture equally obviously continues to value an idealized notion of family and community that originated in the rural nostalgia of urbanizing migrants in the first half of the twentieth century. Such commitments were evident during the old-time and barn dance eras, but they persisted long after that period in sometimes unexpected places. Although the cosmic cowboys of the early 1970s Austin scene embraced the rugged individualism of Texas’s frontier heritage in their personae, their music emphasized the easy camaraderie of the collective. The refrain of Michael Murphy’s hit Cosmic Cowboy featured a disorganized chorus of ragged tempos and bent pitches that emphasized the individual within the communal, while MCA records undertook an enormous financial risk to provide mobile recording equipment so that Jerry Jeff Walker could create the ‘live’ feeling of an informal jam session on ¡Viva Terlingua! (Stimeling, 2011). In the 1990s, Garth Brooks was received as an avatar of country’s enormous mainstream success and its suburban, rather than rural, constituency, but Two of a Kind, Working on a Full House was a modern ode to family and home place that echoed the nostalgic rural imagery of the barn dance, while the performatively drunken chorale on I’ve Got Friends in Low Places repeated Michael Murphy’s gesture to communal utopia.³

The construction of Nashville as the ‘home’ of country music and its professionals as a tightly knit community or family is a pervasive aspect of its popular image. In the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter, for example, a savvy Patsy Cline takes an inexperienced and naïve Loretta under her wing and shows her both the ropes of the industry and how to manage her personal life. In the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, June Carter rescues the troubled singer from his own demons by enfolding him in the warm embrace of the Carter Family tradition, metaphorically positioning his membership in the country music family, rather than the rockabilly fraternity, as his salvation. This Nashville family is ritualized as well as narrated. Thousands of people journey to the city each year to participate in the most iconic and distinctive aspect of country music culture, the annual Fan Fair, where they attend artist-hosted picnics, take bus tours of the stars’ homes, hang out at the opening ‘block party’, and attend celebrity baseball games. While clearly a highly produced event, Fan Fair nonetheless valorizes the conviviality of the small town and, as Bill Malone has observed, offers fans and stars ‘an opportunity to renew their familial bonds’ (2002, p. 88).

Country’s imagined community is as fictive as it is real; leaving aside its frequent battles with other centres of country music production, Nashville itself has historically been an intensely competitive business and, as a result, has frequently been riven by conflict. One of the most colourful of such confrontations took place in 1957, near the end of a period of intense struggle over the consolidation of the country industry, when a series of skirmishes surrounding the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival – then the genre’s most important national event – culminated with Ernest Tubb arriving at the WSM studios with a gun to settle a dispute with Jim Denny, who had staged a concert extravaganza at the site of the festival in direct competition with it.⁴ In 1974, a group of artists including George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Dolly Parton, and Barbara Mandrell was inflamed enough by the awards decisions of the Country Music Association that they formed the Association of Country Entertainers (ACE) in protest (Soelberg, 1998, p. 4). The following year, Charlie Rich burned the card announcing John Denver’s award for Entertainer of the Year during the national broadcast of the CMA Awards. While they may have seemed like scandalous, personal outbursts, each of these incidents was tied to wider factional conflicts and contests within the industry. Such clashes might be interpreted as family squabbles, but no less a figure than Roy Acuff, by then serving as the venerable patriarch of the Opry ‘family’, expressed more general reservations about the community image popularly envisaged as the foundation of the country music business:

A lot of people think us boys and girls know one another and visit with each other in their homes. That is far from true. We meet here at the Grand Ole Opry, we play it, and we leave. As far as saying to Minnie Pearl, or Hank Snow, ‘Come on, go over to the house with me,’ I don’t do that. And neither do they . . . . Now, if there’s a party, that’s a different thing. But people are misled that think that there is a family of country music people that go around visiting.

(As cited in Nash, 1988, p. 274)

Nonetheless, the notion that the Nashville country industry is just a congenial small town writ large allows a reaffirmation of country’s communal and family values in circumstances radically removed from the specifically rural nostalgia from which they sprang, and has been a key rhetorical strategy for defending the development of the commercial industry and its economic prerogative. This was particularly true as the city’s recording industry took shape. During the early 1960s, Nashville Sound recording sessions were widely represented as relaxed, informal sites of spontaneous musical collaboration. As McCall’s magazine explained, ‘The musicians generally arrive without knowing the song to be played. The first time they hear the music is when the singer sings it for them; after two or three hearings, they are able to improvise a full accompaniment, still without putting a note on paper’ (Jensen, 1998, p. 82). Such depictions, Joli Jensen argues, provided ideological continuity with the communal performativity of the radio barn dance (itself a carefully constructed image) that symbolically endowed the modern, professional business systems of Music Row with the personal, downhome values upon which country’s genre identity was built (Jensen, 1998).

Jensen is primarily concerned with the ways this negotiation allowed country music to maintain its authenticity claims to its audience and in American culture at large, but the construction of the Nashville recording scene as a close-knit community with a shared culture also served as an important justification for local control of the country industry. Like the popular press, producers such as Chet Atkins, Don Law, and Owen Bradley consistently defined the Nashville Sound not as a particular set of conventions about arranging with lush strings and background vocals, but, rather, as a singular recording environment supporting a unique community of musicians. Owen Bradley suggested that the popularity of Nashville recordings was due to ‘the spontaneity of certain musicians here getting together and making up an arrangement on the spot’ (Portis, 1966). Chet Atkins stressed the idea that country music could only be properly produced close to its source, in Nashville. ‘[T]he studios are the same and the same electronics exist everywhere,’ he told one interviewer, but ‘I think the Nashville Sound is mostly a sound caused by Southern musicians and singers . . . . They still play with their ears’ (Bart, 1970, p. 136). Such arguments clearly hit their mark. One Hollywood recording director for RCA records simply enthused: ‘There’s a feel you get [in Nashville], a pulsation, that you can’t get in New York or Hollywood or anywhere else’ (Asbell, 1962, p. 91). His colleague Steve Sholes explained the success of Music Row’s products in similarly mystical terms. ‘These s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Sounds and the City
• Part I: Cities of Origin?
• Part II: Consumption, Hybridization, and Globalization
• Part III: Music, Heritage, and Urban Policy
• Afterword: Reflections on Popular Music, Place, and Globalization
• Index