Is Country Music Quintessentially American?

Abstract

A phrase that arises repeatedly in relation to country music characterizes it as “quintessentially American.” In 2019 this characterization got a fresh boost from Ken Burns, who positioned it prominently in his Country Music documentary series. The words give voice to an established truism, but is there any truth to them? In what sense, if any, is country music quintessentially American music?With this question in mind, I will explore the meanings of country music and quintessential Americanness in the light of country music's history, its long-standing reputation as a white genre, and recent work that is rewriting the story of country and other American music. Twentieth-century conventional wisdom held that commercial country, known as “hillbilly” music until after World War II, originated in old English ballads and Scots-Irish fiddle tunes. Throughout the century, however, there were people on the ground who knew a different, more complex story, some through scholarship and others by direct experience.Research by Patrick Huber shows that nearly fifty Black musicians played on early hillbilly records in 1924–32.1 Those musicians knew that country was not simply “white music.” Likewise Lesley Riddle and Rufus ‘Tee Tot’ Payne, two southern Black musicians who shaped country music, respectively, through crucial collaborations with country music's “first family,” the Carter Family, and by mentoring Hank Williams, the mid-century superstar now known as the father of modern country music. In the 1960s–1970s Ray Charles, Tina Turner, and Bobby Womack, African American musicians who grew up with country music in the South, were among those who heard the music as their own. Along with a small roster of Black artists in the country industry—including Stoney Edwards, Linda Martell, O. B. McClinton, and Charley Pride—these R&B and soul musicians created and performed country music despite the industry's frequent lack of support in a genre it fashioned as white.Commercial country music is now one hundred years old, and so is its reputed whiteness. In the early 1920s, the dawning U.S. record industry tapped rich veins of multiracial grassroots music in the Jim Crow South, and industry executives invented a pair of racialized categories for marketing it: “race” (later, R&B) and “hillbilly” (or “old-time”) music. These labels imposed sonic and stylistic division on southern working-class music, branding certain sounds as Black and others as white. The audible color line thus drawn has proven both influential and, with help from whiteness-maintenance efforts in the country industry, durable.2 A century later, the categories remain strikingly segregated, and their perceived sonic and stylistic distinctions are naturalized as human “racial differences.”In constructing country as white music the recording industry not only obscured its important (ongoing) relations to Black music.3 It also nearly wiped from memory the Black string band, a rural southern musical tradition that originated with enslaved African people. Fortunately, this banjo-fiddle music survived within some communities and individuals. Richard and Mildred Loving, whose battle for interracial marriage led to their historic 1967 Supreme Court victory in Loving v. Virginia, courted each other in the 1950s at dances played by her brothers’ Black string band; apparently, Caroline County Virginians carried on local string-band traditions at least three decades into the commercial country era. In the 1970s fiddler Joe Thompson and his banjoist cousin Odell Thompson (who both learned the music in the 1920s) led a revival of the North Carolina Piedmont “frolic” tradition, and later, Joe Thompson as octogenarian would nurture a twenty-first century Black string-band renascence through his mentoring of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.4Now, from a certain perspective, one could argue that there's nothing more quintessentially American than the erasure of Black and other marginalized cultural influences and contributions that is exemplified by country music. But from another perspective, country music, in its long-time representation as a product and expression of one relatively narrow, Anglo-Celtic white slice of U.S. society, does not seem an apt exemplar of quintessential Americanness. Quintessentially, American music is distinguished by rich cross-cultural exchange—even if, as the history of country (and other) music shows, dominant representations have not always recognized it.But the stories we tell about American music are changing, and understandings of country music in particular are shifting and expanding rapidly. In recent years scholars and writers have produced groundbreaking work on African American presence in country music;5 a substantial and growing corpus of writing on women, gender, and LGBT+ people in country;6 award-winning research on country music and North American Indigenous communities;7 and a 2020 collection of new work on all these fronts by the most diverse group of writers on country music ever assembled.8 The conversation among scholars and journalists bears important ties to the current revolution in country music itself, an explosion of LGBT+, Latine, Indigenous, of color, and, especially, Black country musical activity. This movement was emergent by the late 2010s but has reached a whole new level of visibility and vigor since the COVID-19 pandemic, when artists, audiences, organizers, and commentators came together online and built new spaces for music and community.9Black sounds and voices in country music have long been “hidden in the mix,” to quote Diane Pecknold. But other voices have been hidden there, too, as the history of the steel guitar illustrates. The cathartic sliding and weeping of the steel guitar is a distinctive signature in country music—so distinctive that when crossover artist Shania Twain released her multiple-version album Up! (2002), steel guitar was excluded from all but the country mix. The instrument's flagrant twang readily inspires the “anything but country” reaction, a declaration of musical taste that functions as a gesture of social exclusion of the low-educated whites stereotypically associated with country music.10The Hawaiian slide steel guitar (kīkā kila) entered country music in the 1920s, via the era's Hawaiian music craze. After 1925, Hawaiian sounds featured on records by many hillbilly artists, including the Carter Family. Maybelle Carter gave her Stella guitar a “Hawaiian setup” and played steel on sessions in 1928–31.11 Jimmie Rodgers, “the father of country music,” enthusiastically embraced Hawaiian music. In his six-year recording career (cut short by tuberculosis), Rodgers used ukulele on a dozen sides and steel guitar on thirty-one. In 1929 he co-wrote “Everybody Does It in Hawaii” and recorded it with the Indigenous Hawaiian steel guitarist Joe Kaipo.12 Also at this moment, in 1926, the Delta blues slide guitar style made its debut on race records. For decades, most blues scholars have traced the origins of that style to West Africa hundreds of years ago.Historian John W. Troutman argues, however, that the first “African American ‘blues slide’ guitarists actually played in the ‘Hawaiian style,’” and that it was called that by southern musicians, including “Son House, the father of the blues slide guitar style.” Troutman's research shows that Indigenous Hawaiian musicians “toured the Deep South [starting in] the 1880s.” He found “Hawaiian steel guitar troupes playing every small town and crossroads in Mississippi and elsewhere in the 1900s and the 1910s,” sharing “colored” spaces, jamming, and performing with Mexican, American Indian, and African American musicians on the vaudeville and chitlin’ circuits. In the light of such extensive Hawaiian and cross-cultural musical engagement in the South, Troutman contends that “we need to completely reimagine what we think we know about the history of southern music, and American music.” On his view, Jim Crow segregation not only “profoundly affected music making in the South” but also, along with racialized music categories, led to dichotomous black-and-white scholarship on southern music, obscuring “a much richer, multi-hued history of the South.” As Troutman emphasizes, “Ours is not a history of black and white music. This history is Technicolor, with indigenous people at the center of the stage.”13Indigenous people have rarely occupied center stage in American music studies, but in some recent country music scholarship they do. Kristina Jacobsen's work on contemporary country music engagements among working-class Navajo, or Diné, people finds them engaging deeply with country music and negotiating identity, status, authenticity, and belonging in relation to it. Jacobsen refutes the notion that country music necessarily calls people to their whiteness, as Geoff Mann argued in “Why Does Country Music Sound White?”14 “If country sometimes calls people to their whiteness,” she writes, it “calls people with equal force to working-class Indigenous identities.” Jacobsen, like Troutman, pushes against the Black/white racial coding of American popular music and its erasure of the cultural engagements of others—here, working-class Diné people.15 Ryan Shuvera highlights 1960s–1980s country, folk, and rock contributions by Indigenous musicians in Canada and concludes, much like Troutman, that “cross-cultural exchange lies at the heart of genres that have largely been seen as music of and for white people.” He continues, “Settler populations have failed to acknowledge this cultural exchange and the contributions Indigenous musicians have made to popular music.”16If Troutman is right, then Indigenous Hawaiians’ music gave rise to iconic instrumental practices in two American genres that have defined what Blackness and whiteness (purportedly) sound like: the blues slide guitar style, first heard on race records in the 1920s, and the country steel guitar idiom, first heard on hillbilly records in the 1920s. Troutman further notes that Hawaiian guitar music itself may have originated through contact with mestizo and Indigenous vaqueros (cowboys) who came in the 1830s from the (then-) Mexican state of California to Hawai'i with guitars, possibly the instrument's first arrival in the islands.17This last scenario suggests the possibility of Mexican influence in the prehistory of American country music. Mexican influences and engagements are the subjects of my current country music research—in which variously gendered vaqueros also figure.18 In my fieldwork, Mexican American country fans spoke of the music's crucial connections to the Mexican figure of the cowboy, working-class rancho culture, the former Mexican territories now known as the American Southwest, and—in country's patriotic songs—their love for both their American and Mexican cultures and identities. Citing these connections and a view that country music gives voice to “Mexican values” (including family, faith, hard work), my interlocutors attested not that country music offers belonging—as, say, a vehicle for immigrants’ U.S. acculturation. Rather, they emphasized, country music belongs to Mexican Americans, and their love for it is inevitable.The sense of country music as one's own culture is shared by members of every group discussed here. To imagine country as white, or straight/cisgender, music in the present is at odds with its widely dispersed cultural ownership and the passionate proliferation of Black, Brown, Indigenous, of color, and LGBT+ country music engagements. To speak of country as white music today is not just a continuation of long-standing erasures. It erases anew.Country music is quintessentially American music, bearing audible traces of ongoing exchange among diverse groups in American society. In our divided moment it is music that speaks to a stereotype-shatteringly broad audience through themes of love of family, friends, community, and country; freedom and fun; and what Steve Goodson called “hillbilly humanism,” an ethos insisting that each person is worthy and none of us can judge another. At this pivotal point in U.S. history, the music industry must recognize the rich diversity of country music's past and embrace its potential for a more equitable and inclusive future.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.