Southern Cultures: 2011 Music Issue, Enhanced Ebook: Winter 2011 Issue, includes Music tracks

By Harry L. Watson

The Music Issue enhanced eBook include all the tracks on our special CD and:

The tell-all letter from a teenage girl who kissed—and kissed—Elvis Presley

How corruption and greed made the Jacksonville music scene

Gretchen Wilson, country music's "Redneck Woman"

The invaluable social spaces of African American record stores

Bobby Rush, "bluesman-plus"

Where Opryland resides in hearts, minds, and souls

Backstage with the Avett Brothers, Doc Watson, Tift Merritt, Southern Culture on the Skids, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Johnny Cash, and more great artists.

This enhanced eBook also contains Loving, Leaving, Liquor, and the Lord, which is packed with tracks from the Avett Brothers, Doc and Merle Watson, Archers of Loaf, and many more amazing Southern musicians--old and new.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807872505

Book preview

front porch

In Backstage Stories: Wonders, Relics, and a Beer Fridge, photographer Daniel Coston has made a project of picturing artists backstage, and some of Coston’s subjects, from Maurice Williams to Tift Merritt, have given him their backstage tales, which he shares along with his pictures. Pop Ferguson, 2008, photographed by Daniel Coston.

The South is widely acknowledged as America’s musical heartland. Other peoples and regions have done their part for the national chorus, from millions of middle-class children hunched over their piano lessons to the writers of Tin Pan Alley to legions of singing cowboys, but more of our popular music seems to come from the South than anywhere else. Renowned musicologist Bill Malone states it as a flat-out fact in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: The folk South has given the nation much of its music, and he goes on to elaborate about minstrel shows, spirituals, blues, ballads, bluegrass, Cajuns, Tex-Mex, revivals, shape notes, and honky-tonks. The list goes on and on, and in the CD for this music issue, we bring you a sparkling sampler of examples, from Doc Watson and the Avett Brothers to the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Where in turn does southern music come from? Other places have been intensely musical without resembling the South at all—think of Mozart’s Austria. And other rural parts of the United States received a similar mix of British immigrants with their ballads and fiddle tunes, without inventing bluegrass. What made the South different?

Most answers to the question rightly start with the South’s African heritage. In his earliest autobiography, published in 1845, Frederick Douglass calls special attention to the songs of slavery, remembering how traveling slaves would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing the highest joy and the deepest sadness. And he emphasizes that black music was rooted in suffering, for the songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

The folk music of England, Ireland, and Scotland is the second great source of southern music. The same musical traditions must surely have come to New England on the Mayflower, frequently replenished by additional generations of British settlers who were both more diverse and less ascetic than the Pilgrims. And from there they spread across the rural North and Midwest from Maine to Iowa, but the hollers and textile towns of New Hampshire were never musical seedbeds like their southern counterparts.

Why not?

For one thing, and for all the divisions between them, black and white southerners swapped tunes, rhythms, and instruments far more than their northern cousins ever could have. For another, southerners were more affected by poverty, isolation, and privation than their Yankee rivals. The musical traditions which attenuated and dissolved when Yankee balladeers moved west or to the city simply grew richer and more diverse in a world of poverty, defeat, and limited mobility.

The starting points for southern music hardly tell the whole story. Beginning with the same body of tradition, a wide variety of impulses now inspires southern music, producing a startling range of forms and messages. If the oldest and most powerful themes express privation and loss, the new ones can sing of religious anguish, sexual desire, business hustle, rebellious rage, and of course, love and heartbreak. And ironically, the music nourished by isolation and self-reliance has become wildly popular and endlessly commercial, purveyed by technology around the globe, and purchased in the mass market by millions of people who define themselves by the musical subculture they buy into.

This issue of Southern Cultures showcases a potpourri of musical inspirations, from existential angst to commercial ambition. One of the most elemental comes from our shortest piece, Poem with a Refrain from Charley Patton, by Travis Smith. Patton was one of the earliest and most powerful bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta, and Smith cites one of his most poignant lines, You gonna need somebody when you come to die. Listen to the track at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68wIYN4nKa8, and it sounds the way Smith describes it: the static crackles like a burning fireplace—or maybe a hotter pit—and King Jesus brings temporal liberation along with spiritual release: I’ve got a lawyer to go my bond.

Bobby Rush is a very different kind of bluesman. If he is torn by a dread of the hereafter, he does not show it in his interview with William R. Ferris. Rush began playing in Arkansas, moved to Chicago, and has now returned to Mississippi, where he travels from town to town and club to club on (and off) the Chitlin’ Circuit. For him, the blues originate in tragedy: There’s a time you feel bad and that’s the blues. But sadness is hardly limited by power or status. It could be the president of the United States, he explains. He has the blues because things are not going just right. Rush wants to make people feel better: I try to sing the song so I can lift them up, entertain them, make them forget about their problems. He goes on to tell how he takes inspiration wherever he finds it—from black blues men to white country singers—how he loves to perform, and how life feels on the road. The joy of Bobby Rush’s art merges with the joy of his service.

No matter how joyful, a performer’s life can be grueling and achingly lonely. Relentless travel from one seedy club and hotel to another can wear on the spirits of the hardiest, yet the show must go on, as they say, and there is a special spot for transition from the shadows of personal life to the glare of the bandstand. That place is backstage, the cramped dingy space, rarely designed for comfort or beauty, where the artist winds down from one performance and prepares for the next one. On the border between private and public, between artless reality and crafted performance, backstage is a place for unguarded emotion, for anxiety, stage fright, elation, disappointment. Photographer Daniel Coston has made a project of picturing artists backstage and has captured its range of emotions. We see musicians struggling keenly with their instruments, trying one last time to get it perfect before facing the world again. We see them unwinding with friends after the show, where music becomes friendly and sociable, no longer demanding or perfectionist. And we see musicians alone, locked in sleep or reverie before the next set. As a special bonus, some of Coston’s subjects, including Tift Merritt, have given him their comments on the backstage experience, which he shares along with his pictures.

In addition to its tragic racial history, the South has a painful experience with class divisions. Just as slavery dug chasms between the owners and the owned, it also put gentry and poor whites on a steep social ladder, teaching almost everyone to resent those above them and scorn those below. At the bottom of the white social staircase, Nadine Hubbs reminds us, stands the redneck woman, double-burdened by poverty and sex. For generations, poor white women mostly carried their burdens alone and silently. Ironically, the world of commercial country music can now open ears to cries of protest and allow them to voice their rage—by buying a record. Hubbs describes the process by analyzing Redneck Woman, the 2004 break-out, best-selling song by Nashville newcomer Gretchen Wilson. Hubbs contrasts the demure, domestic world of respectable middle-class women with the redneck woman who shops at Walmart and despises fancy lingerie, lives in a sloppy mobile home, and loves trucks and hot-rods and the men who drive them. In her view, Wilson cripples stereotypes by upending them, a Virile Woman who claims a proud and tough femininity for women who would never give Southern Living a second look.

Hubbs also mentions the paradox that contemporary Americans of every class seem to fashion ourselves by the products we buy, building selves with a musical choice here, a fashion statement there. Many will acquire an authentic style by purchasing the right accoutrements, a process not restricted to the wealthy. With the price of a record, anyone can proclaim herself a redneck woman, and sales figures tell us there are lots of them out there. Wilson’s music sings their pride.

But speaking of money, we all know that the music business is no longer what it used to be. Even so, southern music has long been big business, from 78s to mp3s. No matter what their more elevated motivations, that means that lots of people are in it for the money, and three of the pieces in this issue deal directly with the business side of southern music. Josh Davis leads off with an exploration of African American record stores in the 1960s and 1970s. These were golden years for soul and rhythm and blues and the inexpensive 45 RPM records they came on, one song to a side. White teenagers were warming up to black performers, but white storekeepers were not quite ready for crowds of new black customers and didn’t know if their white patrons would accept the most exuberant versions of black music. Those circumstances created a golden opportunity for black entrepreneurs to open record stores for black audiences, especially young people eager for the latest hits. These stores were more than just profit centers, Davis tells us. They were community centers, shelters from white disapproval, organizing hubs, and sources of community pride. Today, changing tastes and technology have completely changed the context in which the older stores flourished. Many have now disappeared, and downloads can never take their place. At its best, Davis reminds us, this part of the southern music business played an invaluable role in community culture.

Good art can sometimes grow in bad places, and Michael Ray Fitzgerald gives us an example. In the 1960s, disc jockeys colluded with music promoters in Jacksonville, Florida, by hyping local bands on the radio, overplaying their records, and taking a cut from ensuing concerts. The process was not much different from the payola scandals that rocked the national media that year, but there were few objections on the Jacksonville scene, partly due to a prevailing local climate of corruption and partly because the system made Jacksonville a hotbed for great young bands. More than 100 groups and performers came to national prominence, Fitzgerald tells us, in part, at least, through their purchased popularity in Jacksonville. It is a lively story with a host of colorful but sketchy characters, and Fitzgerald tells it well.

No discussion of the southern music business would be complete without Nashville, and since 1925, the Grand Ole Opry has been its musical center. In 1974, the Opry moved from its longtime home at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville to a spanking new and glitzy palace in a suburban theme park. There were good reasons for the move, for age had made the Ryman facility cramped and uncomfortable for artists and fans alike, but for those who loved tradition, and treasured country music for its appeal to old-time values, it was a bitter pill. And while executives talked up better dressing rooms, Opryland was clearly more inspired by the hope for higher profits than by anything backstage.

So how did radio station WSM and its parent company sell Opryland U.S.A. to skeptical fans? Jeremy Hill explains their dual strategy. First, they painted downtown Nashville as a sinister place that was no longer safe for white families and their children. Second, they stressed that the real Opry was not tied to any specific space; just like America’s mobile families, it carried its identity from one home to another, wrapped in the feelings that family members had for each other. The second tactic was especially intriguing, because it did more than defend a new venue; it helped explain how country music could remain itself, even though the fans and the artists were not really country anymore. None of them came from fields or hollers; their families’ journeys from country to city to suburb had taken place generations earlier. Instead of hayseeds, country people were simply Americans who saw themselves in the verbal and melodic references of country music. Like the fans of Redneck Woman, the lovers of Opryland were constructing their identities.

Is that really enough to inspire a passionate fan? If not, we can cite longings that are closer to flesh and blood. We’ve all seen the pictures of Elvis Presley before a mass of screaming girls. And we’ve all heard Elvis, but have we ever heard from one of the girls?

Wait no longer. Marcie Cohen Ferris has brought us a 1956 letter from a thirteen-year-old Atlanta fan, telling her friends about kissing Elvis Presley while tearing his shirt off. It cannot be summarized; only Genie Dettelbach can recount her own feelings. We share them with you now in Not Forgotten. If Genie was just constructing her identity that night, anything can happen.

In closing, I have to mention that this issue is the fiftieth edition assembled by executive editor Dave Shaw. Dave has been with us since 1998, taking us from wobbly beginnings to what you are reading today, with an annual print and online readership that exceeds 50,000 in over 70 countries. Along the way, Dave has applied his genius in marketing and visuals without missing his ear for language or blowing a deadline. Congratulations, Dave, for all you have done, with our warmest thanks.

HARRY L. WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

Boss Jocks

How Corrupt Radio Practices Helped Make Jacksonville One of the Great Music Cities

Michael Ray Fitzgerald

The Jacksonville-area music boom was sparked by a handful of radio disc jockeys and owners who made extra money promoting local and regional shows. In 1964, WAPE’s owner Bill Brennan presented his coup de grâce: he brought the Beatles to Jacksonville. Hurricane Dora hit the city the day before the concert on September 11, but it did not stop 23,000 Beatlemaniacs from flocking to the Gator Bowl. The Beatles, upon their arrival in the country, 1964, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Tom Register is a good-ol’ boy with a gift for storytelling. Eating our barbecue at Lou Bono’s on Beach Boulevard in Jacksonville, Florida, Register and I reminisced about the days when the area’s music scene was one of the most fertile in the South. More than one hundred nationally signed acts have emerged from the Jacksonville, Florida, area. Pat Armstrong, president of Orlando-based PARC Records, thinks that statistic is extraordinary: Of course, major music-industry towns like Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville can beat that, and probably so can Philadelphia and Detroit. But Jacksonville would certainly be in the top ten.¹

What made an out-of-the-way southern city like Jacksonville such a booming music town in the 1960s and 1970s? Of course, there is never a single cause for these things, but the biggest factor was the demographic tidal wave social scientists dubbed the baby boom. Teenage boomers developed into