Here we go again. As I promised, here's some provocative statements from
Patrick Carr's essay in the Country Music Foundation's "Country: The Music
and the Musicians" (a wonderful book, which uses several writers' essays
on different aspects of country music history, to tell the story. I
haven't read 'em all yet, but Carr's, titled "Country's Changing Image,"
is fairly provocative -- though one would suspect he's got accuracy on his
side since this has been issued under the tacit endorsement of the CMF.)
Anyhow, Carr gets into how the country music industry reacted to Elvis and
Sam Phillips' other musical earthquakes. On the one hand, the industry
reacted predictably, with a swan dive into rockabilly, albeit "tending
toward the coy rather than the provocative." This didn't work, according
to Carr, because the "kids could tell" it was bogus and calculated, and
Phillips had already "cornered the market on real rockabillies -- Lewis,
Perkins, Rich, Cash -- who might otherwise have been there when Nashville
needed them...
"Nashville's other response was, basically, one of surrender. There being
no perceived growth potential in classic straight honky-tonk music and
precious little reward in trying to compete on the youth front, the means
of production were turned toward a new target. Nashville's future, it was
felt, lay in providing music for the flip side of the youth rebellion: the
relatively mature, conservative, conventional urban-suburban middle-class
population whose material advancement through the post-war years had
provided the affluence that made a teenage cunsumer culture possible in
the first place. The existing musical tastes of such people ranin the
direction of softness, mellifluousness, a certain cocktail hour suavete;
some tickling of the ivories, some sweeping strings, perhaps a judicious
touch of brass, a vocal with some moonlight and money in it. And hence
the infamous Nashville Sound.
"Basically, the Nashville Sound ... was a shotgun wedding of inherently
sentimental country melodies and pop-jazzy production technique, the
package dressed up in evening wear and sanitized as much as possible of
rural odor."
He goes on to acknowledge the success of the Nashville Sound, but then
adds that the "dream of full assimilation ... with the Tony Bennetts and
Andy Williamses of this world proved elusive." The idea, Carr writes, ran
in to a brick wall because, "the primary demographic target of the
Nashville Sound, eventually described to a tee by producer Billy Sherrill
as 'the housewife washing dishes at 10 a.m. in Topeka, Kansas', just didn't
buy many records."
Carr sort of meanders into a discussion about how even though the
Nashville country music industry was finding commercial success, it still
wasn't being accepted socially among the top-dogs in Nashville. "God only
knows how much of the music's conscious image manipulation in the sixties
and seventies was motivated not by economics but by the simple craving for
full acceptance in Nashville's better country clubs.
"On the musical front, the mood was even more fragile. In the cause of
pandering to that imaginary housewife's sense of musical and social
propriety, far too many things couldn't be done: sounds not made, songs
not sung, stories not told, fun not had, chances not taken. The honky-tonk
blues, the hillbilly fever, the rockabilly fire -- all core ingredients of
the country musician's most powerful creative reality -- couldn't be
allowed to be shown in public. And so they went underground...
"All if which meant that the country music industry of the sixties and
early seventies qualified quite nicely for description by an adjective
achieving a certain popularity at the time: uptight."
He goes on and on, but you get the idea. Earlier in the essay, he does
point out, as knowledgeable folks on this list have, that the history of
country music is more or less repeated attempts to achieve mass
popularity, and climb out of a self-imposed definition of folk music (in
the folk culture context). The Carter Family, he points out, had a very
deliberate image they were trying to project. "That's how the history
goes. Almost as soon as the technology of recording and radio made it
possible, people began trying to sell the music of the country culture
beyond its natural boundaries. And at that point, the approval of
outsiders began to matter very much indeed.
"If you were a member of the country community who had committed yourself
to making a living by selling your music (and thus, incidentally, buying
into a particularly competitive division of the American Dream crapshoot),
the question of how best to present yourself -- what maintainable image to
adopt in the cause of maximum popularity -- become crucial to your
economic future."
me again -- in a lot of ways these comments apply to the current HNC scene
as much as any that came before, though he does come off a little
hypocritical. He seems to be understanding, and endorsing, the necessity
of country musicians to go outside their "natural boundaries" in order to
make a living, yet he slams one period -- the Nashville Sound -- on the
same basis. The thing is, I agree with him, even with the seeming
contradictions -- and that stems from an arbitrary but no less valid
preference, for me, for simple, stripped-down, rural, gutty musical sounds
and statements.
-- Terry Smith
