Welcome to episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Bob Wills and "Ida Red".



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

I mention a PhD thesis on the history of the backbeat in the episode. Here's a link to it.

Bob Wills' music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This is an expensive but exhaustive one, while this is a cheap one which seems to have most of the important hits on it.

The definitive book on Bob Wills, San Antonio Rose, is available here, though it's a bit pricey.

And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum.

Clarification

In the episode I talk about two tracks as being "by Django Reinhardt", but the clips I play happen to be ones featuring violin solos. Those solos are, of course, by Reinhardt's longtime collaborator Stephane Grapelli. I assume most people will know this, but just in case.

Transcript

"Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928! ... We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."

Bob Wills said that in 1957, and it brings up an interesting question. What's in a name?

Genre names are a strange thing, aren't they? In particular, did you ever notice how many of them had the word "and" in them? Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and western? There's sort of a reason for that.

Rock and roll is a special case, but the other two were names that were coined by Billboard, and they weren't originally meant to be descriptors of a single genre, but of collections of genres -- they were titles for its different charts. Rhythm and blues is a name that was used to replace the earlier name, of "race" records, because that was thought a bit demeaning. It was for the chart of "music made by black people", basically, whatever music those black people were making, so they could be making "rhythm" records, or they could be making "blues" records.

Only once you give a collection of things a name, the way people's minds work, they start thinking that because those things share a name they're the same kind of thing. And people start thinking about "rhythm and blues" records as being a particular kind of thing. And then they start making "rhythm and blues" records, and suddenly it is a thing.

The same thing goes for country and western. That was, again, two different genres. Country music was the music made by white people who lived in the rural areas, of the Eastern US basically -- people like the Carter Family, for example.

[Excerpt of “Keep on the Sunny Side” by the Carter Family]

We'll hear more about the Carter family in the future, but that's what country music was. Not country and western, just country. And that was the music made in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially especially Nashville.

Western music was a bit different. That was the music being made in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, and it tended to use similar instrumentation to country music -- violins and guitars and so on -- but it had different subject matter -- lots of songs about cowboys and outlaws and so on -- and at the time we're talking about, the thirties and forties, it was a little bit slicker than country music.

This is odd in retrospect, because not many years later the Western musicians influenced people like Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard, who made very gritty, raw, unpolished music compared to the country music coming out of Nashville, but the thirties and forties w