Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music

Rating:
Summary: Cross-Cultural Influences on "Old Time" Music
Review: For those interested in the history of the music they play or listen to - specifically country, bluegrass and old time - Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers is a detailed and lively introduction to the beginnings of popular American music.

Subtitled, "Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music," Singing Cowboys analyzes American musical currents across three centuries. Beginning in pre-Colonial America, the book moves rapidly forward to the "industrialization" of country music in the 1920's that reached its apogee in contemporary Nashville.

By demonstrating how rural and urban Americans entertained themselves musically, author Bill C. Malone deftly debunks stubborn linear-inheritance theories of musical transmission. Using countless examples, he shows how American popular music has always had multiple influences.

Favorite tunes like "Coo Coo" or "Shortnin' Bread" did not descend in a straight, "pure" line from slavery. Instead, Malone underscores the significance of close-quarters housing and labor among poor whites and blacks in the 19th century. Despite overt racism, such proximity was particularly common in the south, and forged an active and ongoing interchange of style and repertoire among both groups.

The author also makes a strong case for how music was routinely "traded" between these groups and the professional minstrel troupes performing throughout the big cities and backwaters of 19th century America.

For those who feel that many of our reels and hornpipes remain intact from the British Isles of earlier centuries, this book suggests amalgamating factors not commonly addressed in theories of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon musical influences on American southern music.

Of particular importance to the perpetuation of American folk musical traditions was the Civil War. Men from all over the country circulated songs and playing styles - especially fiddle and 5-string banjo. When soldiers returned home after the war, they brought these musical influences with them.

Underscoring the role of war in cultural transmission, the author points out that American men also went to war in 1775, 1812, 1846, 1898 and 1917.

Where the book really shines, though, is in its analysis of the transition of rural music, performed largely by amateurs and "part-timers," into a multibillion dollar industry. Pivotal to this change was technology. Radio and tape recording were critical factors without which no popular music could have grown to the degree that country music did in the 1930's.

Unfortunately for posterity, there are no eyewitness descriptions of actual playing technique and tunings from earlier centuries. And of course no recordings were made until the first decade of this century. However, banjo players like "Uncle" Dave Macon, born in the 19th century, may have represented somewhat accurate glimpses of these earlier styles in their performances.

Field recordings of rural musicians were made primarily in the American southeast - and most often in the Appalachians. This seeming regional bias was primarily one of convenience: This region was easily accessible from large eastern metropolitan centers -- New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta - that housed the academics who ventured out with tape recorders to "discover" rural music and musicians.

Malone's thoughtful annotations to each chapter of Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers are a Who's Who listing the significant contributions of ethnomusicologists, historians and field recordists to music preservation. Some of those early pioneers mentioned include Bascom Lamar Lunsford, John and Alan Lomax, Cecil Sharp, and Francis Child and, more recently, Ralph Rinzler, Mike Seeger, Norm Cohen and others.

Other musical forms discussed include shape note singing, Child ballads, Tex-Mex conjunto music, German fiddling, Scottish fiddle and bagpipers, the banjo craze of the 1890s, Bill Monroe's inspired creation of bluegrass and the phenomenon of singing cowboys.

Much attention is paid throughout to the powerful role of minstrelsy in transmitting music from rural "amateurs" to professionals and back again. Pop music, after all, has always influenced rural players' musical choices and styles just as much as "mountain music" affected professional performers.

One amusing anecdote from the book highlights the frequent confusion of "genuine" traditional music with commercial recordings:

"At a conference on traditional music held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in April 1989, ballad singer Doug Wallin presented a short program of songs he had learned growing up in that citadel of old time music, Madison County, North Carolina, where Cecil Sharp had found his richest repository of traditional ballads.

"After reverently announcing that he would perform a song he learned from his mother, Berzilla, Wallin...launched into 'After the Ball,' the monster pop hit from 1896 written by Charles K. Harris. The story and lyrics were basically as Harris had written them, but the modal melody and style were Wallin's. Some of the eminent folklorists in attendance sat in embarrassed or stunned silence." [END OF BOOK QUOTE]

Ultimately, the commercialization of country music created its own influences. Song pluggers and the media would help sustain powerful fantasies, created in the 18th and 19th centuries, of rugged individuals, hillbillies, rubes, singing cowboys and lone mountaineers as enduring American cultural stereotypes.