Country music, take me home
By Emma Latendresse ‘20
In the United States, we have a kind of music that, along with blues and jazz, is uniquely American. In country music, America is a wasteland and a sweet home, and Americans themselves are cowboys, honkey tonk guitar players, lady mule skinners, and families with a fast knowledge of “old world” ballads.
From the beginning, country music told the stories of working Americans. With themes like personal redemption, sin, family strife, violence, heartache, loneliness, and being left behind, sometimes personally and sometimes by the rest of America.
This music struck a chord with me when I listened to it in my kitchen in Malaysia, when I was an exchange student. I was lucky enough to have a Malaysian host mom who loved the sound of the banjo and an American cowboy tale.
I’m not from Dolly Parton’s Tennessee Mountains, Loretta Lynn’s hollow in Kentucky, or a “Home On the Range,” but this music pulled me right in with it’s almost inherently nostalgic idea of home. I was a little homesick, and I couldn’t help but connect to these songs.
As a Portlander, I was only able to first feel connected to country music when I was thousands of miles away from where this music comes from. From Malaysia, the distance between Oregon and Nashville felt like no distance at all. I still loved the music, especially Dolly Parton, The Dixie Chicks, and endearingly honest former bull rider Cody Johnson.
Back in America a year later, I had to acclimate myself to Portland and Catlin Gabel School (CGS) culture. Back home, even though I personally listened to country music, I recognized the feeling of distance between “us” and “country.”
I sent out a survey on Nov. 8 to understand the relationship between CGS students and country music.
Out of 68 student-respondents in the Upper School (US), only 41% had somewhat-completely positive feelings associated with country music. 35% of students had somewhat-completely negative feelings associated with country music. 25% were neutral.
While the data for feelings associated with country music is essentially split, almost everyone agrees that they don’t listen to country music often. 75% of students never or rarely listen to country music and only three people out of 68 listen to country music every day.
One student's first association with country music, a sentiment echoed by many other students on the survey, is that country is, “old white men talking about beer and tractors and hunting.”
Are the barriers for country music really age, race, sex, occupation, and the weekend activities one enjoys? Who is country music for anyway?
Surely if CGS students have mostly decided country music doesn’t apply to them, then it must apply to students elsewhere in the U.S.
Perhaps someone like 17-year-old Hannah Schwartz, a rodeo queen from Eagle, Idaho. Before rodeos, Schwartz listens to her local country music station, which is also the most popular radio station in the area.
“101.9 The Bull Horn plays country. Classic country: Tim McGraw and Blake Shelton,” Schwartz said. Schwartz notes that when she thinks of the 101.9 The Bull Horn she can’t think of a single female artist. Unfortunately, this is the norm on country radio today because of a widespread quota system that keeps women artists from being played.
Hannah Schwartz competes in a rodeo on her horse, Hollywood. Courtesy of Hannah Schwartz.
Despite this, the music serves a purpose for Schwartz. It fills her with what she refers to as a “bada** vibe” before she mounts up.
The 2019 Ken Burns documentary series “Country Music” provides a detailed history of country music in response to the question: Where does country music come from and what are people’s connections to it?
As Burns explains, country music grew out of Appalachia in the 1920s and 30s. “Hillbillies,”as the rest of the country called them, sung church hymns and story-songs or “old world” music. Hillbillies sang and played their instruments in church, with their families, and while working on the land.
The music was passed on orally and was said to come straight “from the hills themselves.” The music was true to America: a mix of cultures, ideas, and rhythm that reflected enslaved African music, church music, and music brought with white colonists from western Europe.
A common instrument played in hill music, the banjo, was brought to America on slave ships with enslaved Africans. Much of the music sung in the hills of Tennessee was known as “old world” music. Songs like “Barbara Allen” were sung in English towns hundreds of years before they ever came to America.
The orally passed tradition of old time music is still alive today, although it is aging, in Portland. Old time music and the stories in the songs are kept alive by fiddlers, guitarists, and banjo players in a local group.
“Old time music is four measures repeated over and over... The fiddle plays the melody, the guitar plays the rhythm, and the banjo plays both,” explained Lindsay Babbitt, Assistant Director of Catlin Gabel Outdoor Education. Babbitt learned to play the banjo in North Carolina where she worked as an outdoor educator. A student taught Babbitt her first songs: including “Down the Old Plank Road.”
Babbitt continued to play the banjo when she moved to Portland. She practices with a group of fiddlers, guitarists, and other banjo players that learn music by listening and improvising together. This group is called the Portland Old Time String Band.
Lindsay Babbitt, Assistant Director of Catlin Gabel Outdoor Education, with her banjo. Photo by Emma Latendresse.
Old time music first hit the airwaves in 1921.
Ralph Peer, a businessman who owned a powerful radio station in Bristol, Tennessee had started his epic campaign to record music never before recorded: “hillbilly” and “race” music. (“race” music would later become known as rhythm and blues).
Country music’s soon-to-be stars Jimmy Rogers and the Carter Family heard the fiddling and story songs they knew so well played on the radio for the first time in this period.
The Carter family was a family of farmers in Poor Valley, Tennessee and Jimmy Rogers was a manual laborer on the railroad in Meridian, Mississippi. The Carters sang traditional gospel and Rogers specialized in drawn out yodels.
With the success of “hillbilly” and “race” acts including the harmonica player, Deford Bailey, Rogers and the Carters decided to try their hand at singing on the radio to see if they could make some money off the music they were already singing for their families and at local venues.
The first country music was not written, but collected.
Rogers and the Carters were an almost instant success among middle and working class radio listeners. To capitalize on the popularity of the music, song collectors, like the blues musician, Leslie Riddle, travelled through Appalachia looking for songs that had never been recorded.
Thanks to Peer and song collectors including Riddle and A.P. Carter of the Carter family, country music was finally documented.
By 1929, the Great Depression and, a year later, the Dust Bowl, sent southern country people west, carrying their music along with them. The people of country music hopped trains, walked hundreds of miles, and hitched rides to promised opportunities in the west.
This geographical move brought a new kind of music, still story songs, but with a different beat and musical setting. This music became western swing, bluegrass, and rockabilly. This was the music my host mother really loved.
The long range cattle drivers (or cowboys) of the area became an important force and aesthetic in country music. Suddenly, every country star had to look like a cowboy and every country-star turned cowboy had to yodel. “Cowboys had traditional songs,” Ken Burns contends. But cowboys did not sing or yodel nearly as much as was shown in old Westerns.
This new music was played in dance halls known as “honky-tonks.” The very religious communities of Appalachia would be horrified to see that men and women pressed “stomach to stomach” as they danced and drank beer, following the German tradition of dance halls. New moral struggles and problems arose from this new boisterous culture.
In honky-tonks, the band had to learn: Don’t stop playing when a fight breaks out.
The first country song written by a women to reach No. 1 status on the country charts came out at this time: “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” It was a woman's response to Hank Williams’ “Wild Side of Life,” a song that blamed a girlfriend’s love of dancing for the crumbling of their relationship.
The 1960s happened in country music just like everywhere else.
Johnny Cash and Elvis Presly pushed the music in new genre bending directions, and black musician Charlie Pride took Nashville, now known as “Music City, USA,” by storm.
Country music and country music fans accepted Pride among the ranks of Deford Bailey and Ray Charles, black men who moved country music forward before him.
According to Wynton Marsalis in Burns’ series: “The musicians accepted [black country musicians] at a time when the culture did not accept them. There’s a truth in the music and it’s too bad that we as a culture have not been able to address that truth.”
Another truth that was finally seeping out in spite of Nashville music labels was that women were demanding greater respect. With Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill,” which her music label did not release for two years, a perpetually pregnant mother tells her husband she is tearing down his “brooder house” because “now [she’s] got the pill.”
Pride and Lynn, who were not easily accepted by record labels or the country music business, had written stories that resonated with fans. They had gotten “the story right for themselves, so that story was right for everyone else.”
The country music industry still struggles in its search for its authentic self as seen in the Lil Nas X controversy that centered around “Old Town Road” being taken off the country charts.
Historically, country music has gone through periods of fundamentalism around how the music should sound in periods of dramatic change. In “The Quest for Country Music,” Jocelyn R. Neal, country historian, describes how times of cultural unrest and fear (like in the years after Sept. 11, 2001) can result in “a return to old time music styles and instruments including banjo and mandolin.”
Jon Caramonica of the New York Times Podcast described today's mainstream country music as “The Gentleman Bros Era,” otherwise known as the “Stapleton Era.”
The men in these songs, who blast out of the radio on 101.9 The Bull Horn in Idaho, are gentleman in the way that they sing about marriage and family, both themes prevalent in traditional Carter Family ballads.
The “Bros” in “Gentleman Bros Era” comes from the cheatin’ and drinkin’ songs that started all the way back in honky-tonks in the west.
As seen with Loretta Lynn and Charlie Pride, country music moves forward outside of what is accepted in Nashville and what is played on country radio.
Contrary to what 101.9 The Bull Horn plays, women are singing country music that is moving the whole industry forward and representing women’s stories.
Right now, country music has LGBTQ+ stars including Orville Peck and Brandi Carile who are adding their story songs to the built up foundation of country music. Country is drawing an unprecedented number of LGBTQ+ listeners because, of course, there are now stories in the music that explicitly represent them.
Thankfully, country music artists continues to make music that reflects our more contemporary cultural and social values.
Let people tell their “hurtin’ stories” because if the story is right, it will be right for everyone, as the country music saying goes. Not just right for the old time fiddlers of Portland or the rodeo queens of Idaho, but even CGS students and Portlanders alike.
All of us can connect to the themes of personal redemption, sin, family strife, violence, heartache, loneliness, and being left behind.
Let the bedrock themes of country music, and new ones besides, be heard by all who need and want them.