A DISTINCTIVE COUNTRY VOICE: THE NASHVILLE SOUND …

What makes country music country music? And why

does that matter? Both of these questions are posed persistently and tenaciously in the critical and fan literature of country music. Recently, for example, both Tony Scherman ( 1994: pp. 54-57) and Johnny Cash (Cash and Carr, 1997) suggested that contemporary country has lost its distinctive style-and perhaps its identity-in a process of musical and lyrical distancing from its origins in the poor white rural matrix of class experience and musical style.

The catalyst for these anxieties, as Dan Daley pointed out in Nashville's Unwritten Rules, is country`s "absorption of new idiomatic influences,"which "hasalways raised flags about country's musical integrity over the years" (1998: p. 335).For Daley, such appropriation raises n o problems, since "the bulk of country records [are] made in Nashville by the same handful of producers, writers, publishers, and musicians" (1998: p. 336). Daley's institutional, but not geographical, position was seconded by Bill Ivey: "[A] country record is any record a radio station that calls itself 'country' will play and any record that a consumer who considers himself a 'country fan` will

buy . . . no fiddles, steel guitars, high lonesome harmonies, or

rhinestone suits required" (1994, p. 281).

As R. A. Peterson demonstrated (1997: pp. 69-80), the basic lines of contention between Cash, Daley, and Ivey have been present since the first days of commercial country music, when early country radio stars displaced the old-time string bands on "barn dance" shows like the Grand Ole Opry. For Peterson, the repetitive and cyclical nature of stylistic change in country music underwrites the possibility of its ongoing stability; ultimately, the commercial and institutional construction of "the sense of authenticity that allows something new to be plausibly represented as something unchanging" ( 1997: p. 233) offers country the means to recuperate from the tensions opened up by its periodic genre crises.

For all of its suggestive power, however, Peterson's study left off in the early 195Os,just prior to the crisis that emerged later in the same decade, when Nashville responded to the threat posed by the success of rock and roll with a thoroughgoing reorganization of country, as both a n industry and a

C n 1 .-.

4

L genre. The outlines of this crisis have been well-narrated by a variety of au-

0 thors, including Malone (1985:pp. 245-267), Cusic (1994),and Ivey (1994).

With the out-migration of Southern whites during World War 11, the country

c industry expanded greatly. In the decade following the war, the music reached

P

new audiences in urban areas outside its original geographical and socioeco-

nomic base in Southern working-class culture. This expansion was further

Z

facilitated by the consolidation of country music production during the late

>

1940s and early 1950s in Nashville, which, contrary to popular opinion and

industry legend, had not previously been an important country music center

r

(Ivey, 1994: pp. 291-301).

0

Spurred by the popularity of "honky-tonk" hard-country artists like

Webb Pierce, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams, country labels flour-

n ished during country's "boomperiod," until rock and roll began to gain domi-

nance in the newly consumeristic "youthmarket" that had emerged by 1955.

TI

0

The rise of rock and roll threatened ruin for the fledgling country establishment, not so much for aesthetic or ideological reasons as for economic

-0

ones: One of the primary sources of revenue for country artists, publishers,

C

songwriters, and labels then as now was performance royalties derived from

radio. And the number of radio stations playing predominantly country mu-

r sic shrank from several hundred in the early 1950s to just 81 in 1961. As

>

radio stations switched formats from country to rock and roll, royalties dried

up, country artists lost what exposure they had and found booking concert XJ tours increasingly difficult,Meanwhile, labels lost money on those artists who

could not adapt to the new youth market.

3

Further exacerbating the tenuous economic position of country music

C

in the mid- 1950s was its lag-far behind pop and rock and roll-in develop-

cn ing its potentially lucrative "package sales" market of albums and "extended

- play" records (or EPs, which were longer than singles but shorter than "long-

playing" albums). These package sales were made possible by the develop-

n ment of the vinyl record and "microgroove" technology in the late 1940s.

But the bulk of country record sales were singles.

vr

-i

The response of the country industry was twofold: In 1958, the Country

Music Association (CMA) formed from the remnants of the old Country Music

C Disk Jockeys' Association and began working to reclaim country's lost mar-

CI

ket share from rock and roll. But the music the CMA used to win back listen-

-

ers was not the straight-up honky-tonk of Pierce or the "high lonesome harmonies" of the Louvin Brothers. Instead, it was a synthesis of country and

m pop that came to be characterized during the 1960s as "countrypolitan" or

cn "the Nashville Sound."

5

The Nashville Sound represented a break from earlier country in terms of both instrumental and vocal styles, on the one hand, and production techniques and values, on the other. Traditional honky-tonk was foregrounded with fiddles, steel guitars, "twangy" guitar playing, and singers with marked Southern accents.The new Nashville Sound (asexemplified by Patsy Cline's"Sweet Dreams" and Jim Reeves' "Four Walls") tended to flatten out singers' accents, replace improvisational fiddling with orchestrated string sections, mute or do away with the steel guitar, smooth out the lead guitar's sound, and employ background singers (such as the Anita Kerr Singers or the Jordanaires).

Perhaps more importantly (at least in terms of its long-term effect on country and popular music), the Nashville Sound marked a different approach to the means of producing country records. The enhanced orchestration that is its most obvious charactci-isticwas made feasible by the development of multi-track recording technology, which let innovative producers and engineers like Chet Atkins record the basic tracks of a song first and bring in the "sweetening"(background singers and string sections) later.

The Nashville Sound's production techniques also worked to de-emphasize the importance of instrumental backing bands in the recording studio. While Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, and (honky-tonk period) Ray Price generally recorded with their own touring groups, producers associated with the Nashville Sound preferred to accompany singers with musicians drawn from Nashville's session players, including guitarists Hank Garland and Chet Atkins, pianist Floyd Cramer, and saxophonist "Boots" Randolph. These musicians developed and passed on a highly professionalized approach to recording (and career advancement), along with a familiarity with one another's styles and musical idiosyncrasies, that allowed for quick and relatively cheap recording sessions. Their use also increased the importance of record producers in determining the "sound" of a record or artist, and facilitated the centralization of country music production and marketing in Nashville (Daley, 1997).

Clarifying the stylistic parameters of the Nashville Sound is complicated in part because, by the time the term became commonplace in popular literature in the mid-l960s, it encompassed everything from Ray Charles's country and western albums to Flatt and Scruggs`s "Ballad of Jed Clampett" and Ray Price`s "For the Good Times," along with the paradigmatic countrypolitan stylings of Reeves, Arnold, and Cline. The Nashville Sound is most clearly discernible in the style of Reeves, Arnold, and Cline (alongwith post-"GoodTimes"Ray Price). But it functions as a stylistic inflection in much of the music produced in Nashville, from the arrival of Atkins and Owen Bradley as producers and A6.R men until the rise of the "Outlaw" movement of the mid-1970s. Many artists now regarded as "classic" or ''traditional''-such as Loretta Lynn and Tammy

6

Wynette-were stylistic and commercial products of the Sound. In fact, some artists enjoyed a great deal of success both during honky-tonk country's boom period and in the reign of the Nashville Sound-for example, George Jones, a successful recording artist for more than 40 years.

The Nashville Sound reinvigorated and expanded the country industry's economic base by taking advantage of the fluidity of the pop market of the 1950sand early 1960s. Even before the rise of Atkins, Bradley, and other Soundassociated producers, pop singers like Tony Bennett, Pat Boone, Peggy Lee, and Patti Page had scored hits with country songs (e.g., Bennett's recording of Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart").What the Nashville Sound did, particularly at its inception, was allow country-identified singers, labels, and label divisions to reap the profits of pop crossover. This crossover was characterized by Columbia executive Don Law as a new "beat-driven" sound and style ("Columbia Modernizes," 1956: p. 1).The new style was exemplified, however, not by rock-androll crossovers such as Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Wanda Jackson, but by Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight" and Sonny James' "YoungLove,"which topped the country and pop charts in 1957. This fluidity suggested to some observers (such as the author of an unsigned article in the May 1957 Music Reporter) that

musical demand is universal. . . . [Tlhe categories have merged [so]

that one category today is borrowing successfully from the other; and like so many rivers converging, they are all finding a welcoming sea. ("NewSound Vogue Here," p. 3 )

By the mid-l960s, Chet Atkins was able to claim:

Anyway, most popular music is pretty near the same today. The only way to tell the difference is to categorize the artist. If he's Negro, he's rhythm-and-blues; if he's white and up North, he's rock-and-roll; and if he`s here, he's country. (Simon, 1966: n.p.)

For its advocates, the Nashville Sound was potentially capable of transcending the old generic boundaries of American popular music. Yet the response of the country-music world was not univocal regarding the success of country-pop crossovers in general or the Nashville Sound in particular. In the 1965 issue of Who`s Who in Country Music, for example, Tex Ritter defended Ray Price (who had recently gone countrypolitan with "For the Good Times") and Eddy Arnold from "the people that keep crying, there's too much in it, too many voices, the instruments, too many strings. Keep It Country. I don't know what they mean by it" (p. 3 2 ) . This suggests a wellspring of discontent with the idiomatic features of the Nashville Sound that was being articulated in terms of a generic betrayal. That there was such unhappiness on the part of "traditional-

7

ists" was seconded by Bill C. Malone (1982; 1985) and, ironically, by Patsy Cline, who constantly resisted her producer's decisions to record her with string arrangements and lush background vocals. As Joli Jensen ( 1998)point-

ed out, "[iln spite of desperately wanting to be a star, . . . [Cline] was unwill-

ing to shed the 'hillbilly' image" (p. 98), regarding it as a form of "classing off."

Cline's unease and the traditionalists' resistance suggest some of the fault-lines in the country community of the 1950s that led to the destabilization and contestation of the very meaning of "country," a contestation that took place both inside and outside of Nashville. As Fabbri pointed out in his important essay, musical genres work by tying together a complex of social, formal, and semiotic codes or rules (1982: pp. 54-58); the historical problem posed by the Nashville Sound, then, involves understanding the dynamics of both its break with the previous country formation and its re-articulation. So, what is the nature of that break? In her recent work The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music, Joli Jensen posited that the perception of the break and the criticism directed at it are misguided because they rest on a set of dubious assumptions about the relationship between culture and economics:

Authenticity is connected with beliefs about spontaneous, natural cultural production, while commercialization is connected with assumptions about technology and the marketplace. Commercialization is imagined as something "done to" a natural form, in or-

der to make money. . . . [This] presumes that commerce destroys

art. (Jensen, 1998: p. 39)

On Jensen's reading, country (like rock) "did not `sell out' because it was always already `sold"' (p. 49).

While Jensen's argument here is framed in reference to the Nashville Sound, it is one whose terms are obviously applicable to contemporary debates about "hot new country," a point that Jensen herself made (pp. 3-20). In much Contemporary writing on country music, genre contestations and crises have been read as debates over the terms (and the possibility) of country "authenticity."For example, In Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, Richard Peterson ( 1997) seconded Jensen's argument that ascriptions of authenticity are predicated on "authenticity markers" that are commercially constructed and mediated and therefore are no different qua commercial constructs from any other commercial construct.

Similarly, for Aaron Fox (1992), the discourse of authenticity betrayed a "nostalgicpreference" (p.68) for cultural and musical forms that have been

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download