Did scientology kill country music?
The former first brother of the United States, even before Obama.
Well, perhaps not exactly. But John Travolta did star in a particularly bad 1980 movie called “Urban Cowboy” (a follow-up to his bigger, and less-maligned, music picture, “Saturday Night Fever”), which effectively marks the closest thing we can isolate as an exact time of death for genuine country music in America. And, as everyone knows by now, he’s a Scientologist. As batshit crazy as fundamentalist Baptists and backwoods Pentacostals might seem, they’re worlds apart from Scientology. And, unfortunately, a similarly galactic distance exists between the living, evolving art form known variously through history as “hillbilly music”, “country and western” or simply “country music”, and anything using that name today.
We single out Mr. Travolta’s role in “Urban Cowboy” because it does mark a moment in time when all things country and western were suddenly hip and in the mainstream. CB radios, “Smoky and the Bandit” movies, stock car racing as something more than a marginal, regional sport, “The Dukes of Hazzard” on TV, the first southern U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, Carter’s idiot, beer-swilling brother Billy, pickup trucks as mainstream transportation and every other manifestation of life below the Mason-Dixon line suddenly permeated American culture.
For years, a neatly-packaged, commercial version of the real South had been available to the rest of America as radio-cum-TV show “The Grand Ole Opry”, comedy fluff like TV’s “Hee Haw”, and plenty of almost-popular music by artists who never seemed to quite cross over into mainstream pop music. Musicians of backgrounds as varied as Johnny Cash, Eddy Arnold and Boots Randolph were all known to the general public, and other country stars would crack the Billboard 100 from time to time. After he drifted away from his rock & roll roots, even the King himself–Elvis Presley–produced plenty of countrified records for his most ardent followers. By the late 1960’s, entertainers with country roots like Glen Campbell and Kenny Rogers did break through to pop success, but the material for which they achieved fame was not country, not western and certainly had nothing to do with the type of thing being produced in Nashville at that time. They were simply Southern boys doing pop music, and that sort of thing had been done even before the days of Johnny Mercer and Kay Kyser.
So no, it wasn’t as though country music was an underground, edgy art form by the 1970’s. Country music was a viable radio format across the country, with only a few pockets of dead air in the Northeast, and had been since at least as far back as 1960. After World War II, “hillbilly” acts had dolled themselves up with sequins, string ties and suits to give themselves a little more panache than their predecessors like The Carter Family (not to be confused with Jimmy and Billy, above) and Jimmie Rodgers. Further, they started to borrow ideas from the “cowboy” acts out of Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest. Authentic acts like Bob Wills, and Hollywood-friendly practitioners like Gene Autry, lent ideas like electric guitars, drums, swing rhythms and cowboy hats. By the time Hank Williams, Sr. became prominent in the very late 1940’s, he typified–at least superficially–the newly christened “country and western” style of performer. Gone were the overalls, “hobo” personas, washboards and banjos of earlier styles, replaced by the above accoutrements. Many of the roots elements, both musical and superficial, that were discarded by the first “country & western” acts would survive in more complete form as what became known as “bluegrass” later on.
Mr. Cash, emoting tenderly.
By the mid-1950’s, this “new” country & western style had become a genuine money-maker for record labels both small and large. Although it still wasn’t mainstream popular, it certainly equaled rhythm & blues as a viable commercial form. Not surprisingly, vapid, commercial fare was rampant, and persisted into the 1960’s with popular but shallow acts like Jim Reeves, Don Gibson and Jimmy Dean. The upside of not being full-fledged pop music was that genuinely-talented artists like George Jones, Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline were allowed to flourish in in the genre’s somewhat less commercially-inclined confines. There was a happy time, sometime in the mid-1960’s, when “country” radio playlists included everything from the edgy and introspective artists like Cash and Merle Haggard, to brilliant traditional musicians–only recently labeled as “bluegrass”–like Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe, on to talented songwriters like Buck Owens and Willie Nelson, and finally including instrumentalists like the always dazzling, and occasionally truly creative, Chet Atkins. In spite of the happy hokum face put on the music by outlets like “The Grand Ole Opry”, the Nashville music scene of the 1950’s and ’60’s was at least as diverse, edgy and volatile as the rock & roll scenes in LA and New York in the same period. The combination of great studio instrumentalists, talented–or at least prolific–songwriters and plenty of hungry singers created a real melting pot of styles and artists, even if the recorded output didn’t always equal the zeal of the after hours scene in Nashville’s honky tonks.
But, just as rock & roll peaked and then burned between the late ’60’s and the mid-’70’s, so did country. By 1970, the two businesses had in fact more or less merged. Several factors conspired to blur the lines between the two genres. A lot of studio musicians were working alternately in Nashville, New York and LA. A lot of country musicians were smoking dope and growing their hair long. A lot of rock & roll musicians, like The Grateful Dead and The Band, had begun to work in styles more authentically “country” than many country artists. And the business end–the A & R people, the marketing types and the producers–became one and the same in each genre. The music business in general had by this time swallowed up all of the smaller, independent record labels, and the machinery that was in place to market pop music was now brought to bear equally on all potentially profitable styles.
It can be said, then, that country music as a living art form was killed by the same factors that brought about the death of rock & roll in the late 1970’s. Just as the big record labels marketed the “counterculture” as a product, and managed to permeate popular commercial media with a homogenized form of what had been a serious artistic endeavor, so did they bring this same tactic to sell the culture that was “The South”. By the end of the 1970’s, country music was dominated by acts like Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt, Anne Murray and Barbara Mandrell. As the years have gone on, the music coming out of Nashville has only gotten more homogenized. And, more popular, one should add. If the above-mentioned acts were profitable for their labels, they still pale in comparison to the money being generated by what passes for “country” music now. It’s perhaps the best living example of the recording-studio-as-assembly-line, more insidious than the worst example you can think of from some other genre of popular music. The musicians, as talented as ever, now follow a format as strict, tested and narrow as anything ever devised.
Oh, “roots” music survives, but not as much of a viable money-maker. The old guys still do what they do, and bluegrass lives on as wonderful, if fairly stagnant, repertory music. Much like jazz. Full of brilliant players and virtuoso performances, but not covering much new ground in the last, oh, 40 years. One hates to hate on these folks, since they’re such dedicated, talented practitioners, but if we can diss jazz, we can diss a banjo player. Having played our insult card, know that we will celebrate the best of this roots music long and hard as we go forward. We’re simply commenting on the state of an entire genre’s evolution.
Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadors
The last gasp of “real” country music was something called “outlaw” country. Lost on both the general public and the establishment in Nashville, it grew out of the increasing discontent of the youngest, and most talented, creative forces in the business around 1970. As these edgiest of Nashville’s musicians started to swap their pompadours and sequins for long hair and drugs, the music suddenly became a reaction to both non-redneck America, and the country establishment. Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker and others became standard bearers for a music that thumbed its noses at every Opry-esque convention, while celebrating the formerly taboo (at least for country music) subjects of drugs, race, politics and class. At the same time, shit-kicking, drinking and fighting were recurring themes, themes that in hindsight are much more in tune with any sort of real America, redneck or otherwise. Just as country music was supposed to be, we think. This then was country’s “punk” music. The last hurrah–or yee-ha, if you prefer–of a genuine American art form. It’s probably not a coincidence that outlaw and punk happened around the same time, and for many of the same reasons. Then again, maybe we just miss Ernest Tubb.
Here’s a suggested playlist, which you can purchase tune-by-tune at Amazon by clicking the song titles:
“Wildwood Flower
“Blue Yodel No. 1 (T For Texas)”
“Roly Poly”
“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
“I Walk the Line”
“I Fall To Pieces”
“She Thinks I Still Care”
“Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
“The Weight”
“Pissin’ In The Wind”
“Walkin’ the Floor Over You”
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One of my fondest memories was a concert in the 70’s or early 80’s…. free tickets that I was reluctant to use…. that featured the entire Carter family, Johnny Cash and a host of other OLD country stars. Great, great concert. Unexpected surprise.
The original Carters were long gone by then, but the incarnation you saw did have most of the second generation. That must have been an unexpected surprise. 🙂 Other than June—and mostly because of her marriage to Johnny—they were, and still are, unknown to most people. Unfortunate, in that a big chunk of country’s vocabulary can be traced to these original late ’20’s recordings. Cool stuff.