I'm with Carr, and by extension, I guess, Terry, up until this:
> "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."
Which is, to put it kindly, a gross overstatement. The sixties and early
seventies? Here are the top artists in terms of Billboard airplay chart
action in the 1960s:
1. Buck Owens
2. George Jones
3. Jim Reeves
4. Johnny Cash
5. Eddy Arnold
6. Marty Robbins
7. Bill Anderson
8. Webb Pierce
9. Sonny James
10. Ray Price
11. Faron Young
12. Porter Wagoner
13. Kitty Wells
14. Stonewall Jackson
15. Loretta Lynn
16. David Houston
17. Roy Drusky
18. Don Gibson
19. Merle Haggard
20. Roger Miller
21. Billy Walker
22. Bobby Bare
23. George Hamilton IV
24. Connie Smith
25. Dave Dudley
Seems to me that plenty of honky-tonk blues and hillbilly fever were hanging
right out there for all to see, side by side with the Nashville Sound and
related stuff (Reeves, Arnold, Anderson, Gibson, et.al.). In the passage
Terry quotes, at least, Carr seems to have forgotten the dialectic <g>.
Jon Weisberger Kenton County, KY [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.fuse.net/jonweisberger/
P.S. More bluegrass charted in the 1960s than at any time before or since.
That doesn't fit well with a flat statement about "couldn't be allowed to be
shown in public" either.
> 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
>
