Hank Williams was born on this date in 1923. I noticed that there are a number of events in various places across the country and around the world this weekend through the coming week to commemorate what would have been his 100th birthday. I think it’s lost on some what a universal figure Hank is. Go half way around the world and you will find people who listen the man who is still the father of country music. His power was in the directness of the message. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)” “Mind Your Own Business” Three chords and truth applied to no one more than Hank. Whatever his flaws as a human being—and they were many—Williams always regarded himself as a work in progress and capable of redemption. That’s what makes his gospel recordings so powerful.
≈ Comments Off on National Hillbilly Music Day, 1953
The Jimmie Rodgers Memorial was dedicated in Meridian, MS on May 26, 1953.
Jimmie Rodgers died in New York City in 1933 and was laid to rest in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi shortly thereafter. Americans, especially Southerners, mourned Rodgers, but given his controversial nature and the tenuous economic conditions gripping the nation when he died there was much time for elaborate displays of commemoration. That changed twenty years later when on May 26, 1953—seventy years ago today—100,000 turned out on what was dubbed National Hillbilly Music Day to dedicate the monument you see here. Rodgers was know as “The Singing Brakeman,” and indeed for time he worked the rails as a member of Local Lodge 173 of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.
New York Times, May 27, 1953
I must say I came late to Jimmie Rodgers, and didn’t really get it until just a few years ago. I preferred the blue yodels as channeled through such Rodgers acolytes as Merle Haggard, whose covers paradoxically remained true to the originals while sounding more modern. Lynyrd Skynyrd, among of course many others, covered him too. I still appreciate Hag and Skynyrd’s loving homages, but have come to appreciate Rodgers on his own terms more and more in recent years as I’ve grown older. The music is just so . . . adult. It’s no wonder 100,000 people showed up. Meridian, Mississippi still commemorates the life and work of Jimmie Rodgers; the 70th annual music festival was held just a few weeks ago. Here are some stunning photos that the late Scotty Moore posted to his website in 2011 of events featuring Moore, the young Elvis, and others back in the mid-1950s. Please do click. Even better, listen to Jimmie Rodgers.
≈ Comments Off on “Come along, everybody come along”
Shreveport Municipal Auditorium / image by Michael Barera via Wikimedia Commons
Today is a big date in country music history: it was on April 3, 1948—seventy-five years ago—that the Louisiana Hayride debuted on KWKH out of Shreveport, Louisiana. By this time Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry was already firmly entrenched as the radio home of country & western music, which ironically created an opening for enterprising competitors. Detractors viewed the Opry as the staid powerhouse unwilling to put newcomers on the air or otherwise take risks. Opry management simply did not want to stray from the formula that had been paying dividends for so long. Radio, not television, still very much controlled the airwaves in the years immediately after the Second World War and there was no shortage of challengers to the Opry’s artistic orthodoxy. Into this breach stepped the 50,000 watt KWKH. The talent pool in the Hayride’s earliest weeks and months was somewhat weak, though Kitty Wells was a regular throughout the spring and summer of 1948. Things changed when a still relatively unknown Hank Williams made his Louisiana Hayride debut on August 7 before quickly moving on to greater heights elsewhere.
Slim Whitman, 1968
Many of the performers who graced the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium stage were mediocre at best, and Hayride shows were notoriously hit or miss. The program’s weakness however was also its greatest strength. The bean counters at the Ryman might never stray too far from the tried-and-true, but the Hayride management—with nothing to lose—was more than happy to take a chance on an unknown. The young Elvis played the Hayride numerous time. So did Johnny Cash, Slim Whitman, and scores of other innovators. Essentially anyone on the way up—or down—came through Shreveport and played the show. When the Opry let Hank Williams go due to his unreliability, it was back to the Hayride that he came. The Hayride was a weekly radio staple for a dozen years. On August 27, 1960 a pre-Hee Haw Grandpa Jones played an inspired cover of Jimmie Rodgers “Waiting for a Train” on the final night of the radio program. The Hayride did carry on in various incarnations and under different names for another decade or so, and even hosted such figures as Marty Robbins, Tex Ritter, Loretta Lynn, and the Louvin Brothers to name a few. Still, it was the period from 1948-1960 that holds the most cultural relevance.
It was sixty years ago today that Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and others died in a plane crash in Camden, Tennessee. The first time I listened to Patsy in a serious way was one summer in the mid-1990s when, going through a tough stretch, I played one of the many anthology cd’s over and over each morning and evening after work. I have never cared for the countrypolitan style in vogue during her recording lifetime in which the labels added lush strings, backup voices, and other touches to slick the music up and make it more palatable to the respectable crowd now buying records to play on their new living room hi-fi sets. Her voice was so transcendent, however, that it rose above whatever white noise the producers surrounded it with. When one listens to Patsy Cline, the voice is all that matters. I can only imagine what it was like when she was on the road with a small band in front of an intimate audience and everything was working.
≈ Comments Off on Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, 1893-1987
Of all the individuals discovered or rediscovered during the Folk/Blues Revival of the 1950s and 1960s by far my favorite is Elizabeth Cotten, who was born 130 years ago today. Ms. Cotten was left-handed and instead of restringing her guitar simply flipped it over and taught herself how to play it backward. Here is a bit more from Smithsonian Folkways. In that great Folk/Blues tradition, the article lists a different birth year. I have seen other years given in yet other sources as well. By most accounts however, including Cotten’s, she was indeed born on January 5, 1893. For one thing she played a commemorative show at Folk City in Greenwich Village in January 1983 a few days after her 90th birthday.
Seventy years ago at this moment Americans were waking up and hearing on their radios that Hank Williams had died in the backseat of his car on the way to a show in the early hours of 1 January 1953. There is a saying that the Blues is for Saturday night and Gospel for Sunday morning. What is fascinating about Country is that the sacred and profane are equally embedded in the mix. For no one was this truer than the King of Hillbilly himself. I have been listening to Hank Willams for 40+ years now, and can say that listening again in full middle age brings its own rewards. People grew up faster in the early decades of the twentieth than they do today. In his twenties Williams was singing about work, marriage, death, and salvation. There are no songs here about curfews missed or allowances being taken away.
I don’t romanticize the notion of the artist tragically dying young. Hank Williams left us far too early so much still to say. He was also a husband and a father. Still it is difficult to imagine him adjusting to the changes that took place in Country Music in the years immediately after his death. How he would have reconciled to the Nashville Sound is something we will never know. In a piece David Halberstam wrote for the July 13, 1971 edition of Look magazine, later anthologized in The Hank Williams Reader, the journalist asked, “And what would he be like now [at 47]—bald, pudgy in the middle, his sharp, reedy voice gone mellow, his songs backed by violins, pianos and worse? On the late-night talk shows beamed from New York, and dressed in Continental-cut suits?”
These are all good questions. I would add to these how Hank Williams might have adjusted to the rise of the twelve inch, 33 1/3 long playing record, which was invented in 1948 and only coming into its own at the time he died. Here is one he the Drifting Cowboys recorded for his Mother’s Best Flour radio transcriptions when Hank was still in his full powers.
I hope everyone’s Thanksgiving weekend has been restful. I did not leave the house once yesterday. I spend so much time running that it was good to stay in. About two months ago in the waning days of summer I told myself I would watch Ken Burns’s 2019 “Country Music” over Thanksgiving weekend. I started Wednesday night and have now watched five of the eight two-hour segments. I mentioned in a post not long ago that late stage Burns has been his strongest period. His films have taken on a purpose and gravity that was sometimes lacking in his earlier work, especially some the projects from the mid-1990s and early-2000s. I believe it is his most-watched work, but parts of “Baseball” for instance are just so treacly and overly sentimental. There has been none of that in the recent projects that he and his colleagues have done.
“Country Music” does a great job of putting the genre into historical context. The music’s evolution is much more complicated than listeners tend to realize. Part of that, I suppose, is because those in the industry–and make no mistake, country music is, was, and always has been an industry–want you to think of this or that artist in the carefully created manner they have curated. The sooner we get past our conceits about “authenticity” the better.
I always read the media commentary when such films come out and am always taken aback at the lack of generosity from so many observers. Many cannot grasp the amount of work that goes into creating a film like this. They simply watch and take what they’re seeing for granted. Just digging up the thousands of still and moving images, let alone sifting through it all and creating a narrative around it all, is a task for which we should be appreciative. One can argue with this or that editorial decision, and I myself would have emphasized this or that artist a bit less or more, but one should respect anyone who puts themselves out there in any medium. If one is looking for a good place to begin exploring the genre, “Country Music” is a great place to begin.
(image/University of Missouri at Kansas City library)
The Strawfoot 