Tag: Country Music

It has become a truism to say that most forms of traditional music in the American South were to some extent ‘commercialized’ by the end of the 1920s; certainly this is true of fiddle and instrumental traditions, country singing, the blues and jazz. By the middle of the Depression most of these musics had gained access to the mass media, either through phonograph records or radio. Throughout the Depression amateur musicians gave way to semi-professional, and then fully professional, musicians who spent most of their time playing music. While these changes meant erosion of regional styles and dilution of tradition,

By Charles Wolfe

There are dozens of unsung heroes in the annals of country music; some are instrumentalists, like the legendary Georgia fiddler Joe Lee, who introduced the “long bow” style to greats like Clayton McMichen; some are songwriters, like the gospel singer Grady Cole, who wrote Tramp on the Street; others were promoters and radio personalities like the late Eddie Hill, who helped introduce the music of the Louvin Broth­ers to a wide audience. But one of the most unsung, and one of the most mysterious, was a remarkable blackface come­dian and singer named Emmett Miller. He flourished

By Charles Wolf

The first great Nashville session fid­dler, Tommy Jackson has probably been heard on more country records than any other musician. Through out the 1950s and 1960s, he dominated .the field, appearing: on records by every major star of the era, from Hank Williams to Bill Monroe, from Ray Price to George Jones. He virtually invented the standard country fiddle back-up style, and in the early 1950s had a string of hit albums of his own that both reflected and stimulated the square dance craze.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 31, 1926, Jackson and his family moved

By Charles Wolf

It was a hot night at the Grand Ole Opry in the summer of 1995. Out frontthe crowd in the Opry house was stocking up on Cokes and trying to explain to northern visitors what Goo ­Goos were. Backstage the talk was about whether or not the Houston Oilers were serious about moving to Nashville. An­nouncer Kyle Cantrell was checking over his schedule and getting ready to intro­duce the host for the 8:30 P.M. segment of the world’s longest running radio show. He smiled when he saw who was up next.­

Accompanied by his back-up band of

In 1923 two forces were working in the South to transform the face of American music: the radio and the phonograph record. As the various forms of traditional and grass roots music encountered these new mass media, a curious and complex chemistry developed that gradually changed the nature of the music, the musi­cians, and the role music played in people’s lives. Music once designed for the parlor, the back porch, the barn dance, or the church was now the creature of the radio studio, the Victrola, the fiddling contest, or the vaudeville theater. Musicians used to playing for a local