Music History: From “Hillbilly Music” to Country-Western

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Photo by Brent Thorgren
Marc Bristol performance repertoire includes "hillbilly" music and every other folk form.

Back during the years leading up to the Great Depression, the recording industry was just getting on its feet. In those days, phonographs — the windup 78-RPM kind were sold in furniture stores, and so were the records to play on them. It wasn’t long, though, before many rural people had acquired the machines, and a vast market for what was then called “hillbilly music” was born.

One of the industry’s pioneers who recognized the potential of the largely untapped market was Ralph Peer. While working as a talent scout with RCA Victor in 1927, he set up a portable recording studio in Bristol, Tennessee (on the Virginia/Tennessee border a stone’s throw from North Carolina) and advertised for singers and players from that mountain region to come and audition.

Among those who showed up was a fellow by the name of Jimmie Rodgers (incredibly, Peer also “discovered” the then unknown Carter Family at the same tryouts). Jimmie persuaded the talent scout to record two of his tunes, and later that year Rodgers traveled to Victor headquarters in New Jersey and cut several other numbers, including one titled “Blue Yodel” (which has come to be called “T for Texas”).

That first recording of Jimmie’s distinctive blue yodel style — an electrifying blend of blues and yodeling — sold over a million copies. Rodgers ultimately recorded 12 different “blue yodels,” as well as a wealth of other tunes that revealed an amazing versatility which spanned (and often combined) a variety of musical forms. Rodgers’ songs ranged from religious to mildly risque, from traditional to “hot,” and incorporated backup music from Hawaiian slide guitar (now a fixture in country performances) to Dixieland (Louis Armstrong once played behind Jimmie!).

In the six years preceding his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1933, Jimmie Rodgers became country music’s first true superstar and inspired hundreds of other performers — including such greats as Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb to emulate him. He expanded the public’s concept of country music far beyond that of hillbilly string bands. And because many of his tunes (such as “The Yodeling Ranger”) romanticized the West, he is credited by most historians with firmly establishing the association between “western” and “country” music, and for setting in motion America’s long love affair with such country-western “singing cowboys” as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Tex Owens, and Roy Rogers.

  • Published on Sep 1, 1983
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