
          The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country
Music
          By Whisnant, David E.David E. Whisnant
          Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 20-24
          
          The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country
Music, selected and annotated by Bill Malone (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1981). Eight LP or cassette set, boxed,
with 55 pp. illustrated brochure. $54.95.
          Classic Country Music, prepared by Bill C. Malone
for the Smithsonian Institution, takes one back to the clear
headwaters: the first commercial hillbilly recording (Eck Robertson's
"Sally Gooden" for Victor in 1922); the first big sellers (Vernon
Dalhart's "Wreck of the Ole 97" of 1924, Carl T. Sprague's "When the
Work's All Done This Fall" of 1925, Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting For a
Train" of 1928); one of the earliest recorded examples of steel guitar
playing (Derby and Tarlton's "Birmingham Jail" of 1927); the first big
hit by a woman performer (Patsy Montana's "I Want to Be a Cowboy's
Sweetheart" of 1935); Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys performing
the Jimmie Rodgers hit (and later bluegrass standard) "Muleskinner
Blues" in October, 1940 (with Monroe on guitar); the first recorded
example of mandolin cross-picking (Jim and Jesse's "Are You Missing
Me" of 1952), and so on. Altogether a hundred and forty-three tunes,
from Fiddlin' John Carson and the Stonemans to Tammy, Willie, Merle
and Dolly. "Funny," as Willie sings, "How Time Slips Away."
          So friends, don't delay. This offer is good for a limited time
only. Send your check or money order for $54.95 TODAY to "Smithsonian,
Washington, D.C. 20560." That's S-M-I-T-H-S-O-N-I-A-N, Washington, D.C., two oh five, six oh. The first one
hundred orders will receive, in addition to these
eight fine records or cassettes packaged in a beautiful fold-out box
you will be proud to display, an autographed eight by ten glossy
photograph of your favorite country singer,
suitable for framing. You'll hear the inimitable Carter Family's
"Wildwood Flower," so beloved by many a parking lot picker; the
Delmores' "Brown's Ferry Blues," made famous later by Merle Travis,
the Louvin Brothers, and Doc Watson; the original
"Orange Blossom Special" by the Rouse Brothers; and the incomparable
Roy scuff's "Great Speckled Bird." You'll thrill to Cliff Carlisle's
wailing dobro, Lulu Belle and Scotty's "Remember Me (When the Candle
Lights Are Gleaming)," and many, many more. It's an opportunity you
can't afford to miss. So send today. If you are
not completely satisfied, your money will be cheerfully refunded.
          Well, I "sent away," as they used to say in the days of boxtops,
and I am indeed (almost) completely satisfied. Bill Malone has done,
on the whole, an excellent job; it would be folly to expect that his
(or anyone's) 143 choices 

(from a few tens of thousands) could ever
satisfy everyone. Someone could always ask why this tune and not that
one? So the task here is not to quibble about individual tunes, but to
ask how well the eight records reflect the complicated and dynamic
history of country_music.
          One the whole, very well indeed. Malone's strong and sensitive
commentary, arising from his recollections of growing up with country
music as a poor boy in east Texas, is written with the grace and depth
and gentleness that come from knowing--as most country songs tell
us--that life is both very hard and very beautiful. Malone divides the
history of country_music roughly into five periods: the birth of the
industry in the 1920s (Dalhart, Uncle Dave, Gid Tanner and others);
national dissemination and popularization in the 1930s
(southeasterners such as the Delmores, Monroes, Bolicks, and Mainers;
and southwesterners such as Bob Wills, Gene Autry and the Sons of the
Pioneers); the "honky tonk" period, ;94153 (Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow,
Hank Williams); rockabilly and country pop, 1953-63 (Cash, Ray Price,
Chet Atkins, Lefty Frizzell and others); and the current scene since
1960. An additional category--bluegrass and the urban folk
revival--cuts across several of the latter chronological
periods. Malone's historical essay is supplemented by extensive
discographical, historical and interpretative notes on each
selection.
          In his essay and notes, Malone surveys some of the major social,
political and economic factors that have shaped the music:
developments in the radio, recording and television industries; the
Depression and World_War_II; the urban folk revival; the movement of
country people to the city; the proliferation of small record
companies in recent years; the fusion of southeastern and southwestern
styles; the responses of individual performs to social pressure and
dramatic social change. He also explicates some of the major internal
dynamics of the music: the movement from personally modest solo
performers and small permanent ensembles to high-priced,
self-conscious stars "backed" by large aggregations of anonymous
session musicians; the shift from simple to complex, virtuoso
instrumental styles; the replacement of traditional, public domain
tunes by copyrighted material; the gradual evolution from fiddle,
banjo and guitar to drums, dobro, and pedal steel; and the
technological drift from single takes on wax to twenty-four track
taping, mixing, and overdubbing.
          By selecting carefully from Malone's 143 tunes, one can also
assemble some interesting "sub-histories" of country_music. One can
follow to some extent the emergence of women performers, from the Coon
Creek Girls through Patsy Montana and Molly O'Day to Patsy Cline and
Dolly Parton. One can observe the seemingly perennial ambivalence of
the country_music audience with respect to rough vs. smooth or
cultivated vocal styles: Uncle Dave, Martha Carson, Molly O'Day and
Wilma Lee Cooper on the one hand, and a rather surprising array of
smooth singers on the other--Bradley Kincaid, Buell Kazee, Vernon
Dalhart (a Texas-born light opera tenor who tried to sound rough
again, but couldn't), Jimmie Rodgers, Red Foley, Eddie Arnold,
Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and others. Or one can line up the
brother duets (Callahans, Bolicks, Sheltons, Delmores, Monroes,
Kershaws, Louvins, Everlys, Stanleys, MacReynoldses, Osbornes, Lillys)
and wonder whether such duets were, developmentally, a way-station
between the older family-based groups and the newer luxury bus-owning
stars--the last remnant of the close rural family before its final
atomization, the archetypal (Jacob and Esau) binary pair struggling
for unity and harmony against the fragmenting forces of a culture.
          A fine collection, then, and a fine job of selection and
presentation, terms of both and order Malone brings to it, and the
other interpretative orderings it invites. Still, there are some
problems that go beyond quibbling about "significant" (read favorite)
tunes excluded. Malone writes at length, for example, about rockabilly
and country pop, but we get recorded examples of only the
latter. There is no tune by Elvis, Carl Perkins, or Jerry Lee Lewis (a
problem with permissions from Sun Records, perhaps?). And from my
perspective, there are altogether too many bluegrass tunes (two
complete sides; eighteen tunes; nearly thirteen percent of the total,
including three by Bill Monroe; more than twice the number of gospel
tunes--almost half in bluegrass versions). Could that have resulted
from the Smithsonian's exaggerated sensitivity to its local
middle-class audience in Washington--rightly known as the bluegrass
capital of the east coast? As for gospel itself, it seem rather
seriously under-represented in view of its prominence among those
people who gave birth to and sustained country_music. Virtually every
country_music radio or television show ever broadcast, after all,
included at least one gospel song.
          One also wonders why there is not a single example of country
blues, which admittedly was not featured on the major country_music
radio stations or barn dances, but which was every bit as important a
part of the country_music scene after 1920--both as separate idiom
as influence on white performers--as were southern mountain string
bands. Indeed, Malone himself treats these performers in his
Southern Music American Music (1979).
          But finally the larger questions beckon: why, toward what ends, and
with what effect has the Smithsonian at long last ventured to dip its
elite toe into the waters of commercial country_music? The institution
has been 

there since 1846, after all, and could well have documented
at first hand most of the now long lost traditions from which country
music draws its styles and idioms.
          Why didn't it? Partly because its directors have almost always been
natural scientists with at best a limited interest in humanistic or
artistic matters. The Smithsonian's most significant foray into
cultural work (prior to the 1960s, anyway) was the Bureau of
Ethnology, formed by Major John Wesley Powell in 1879, and even that
enterprise proceeded under the flag of scientific anthropology and
archaeology. Nevertheless, for more than a half-century the BAE
carried out extensive studies of American Indian history and life:
language and literature; material culture; myth, ritual, and
ceremonial life; music and dance. But the Bureau was never able to
take what would appear to have been the logical step of moving from
studying Indian life and culture to studying the rich and diverse
culture of the country's many immigrant and enclaved cultural
groups.
          That did not mean that such studies fared poorly within federal
institutions supposedly concerned with culture. The Library of
Congress established its Archive of Folk Song in 1928, but it was (and
remains to this day) small and poorly funded, particularly in
comparison with analogous European efforts. The cultural projects of
the New_Deal for the most part did not survive more than a decade. The
National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, established in 1965,
were initially oriented exclusively toward high culture, and more than
a decade later had to be forced to begin to pay modest (rather
grudging, as it turned out) attention to traditional, non-elite
culture. The first major policy affirmation of federal commitment to
the recognition of traditional culture (the American Folklife
Preservation Act) was signed into law at the opening of the nation's
two hundredth year.
          Meanwhile, since the mid-1960s, the Smithsonian has been inching
toward a rather tentative involvement with non-elite culture. It
staged its first Festival of American Folklife in 1967, and opened a
neighborhood museum in the mostly black District of Columbia suburb of
Anacostia in 1968. Those stirrings, hesitant as they were, came in
response to both the social upheavals of the sixties (Resurrection
City was set up virtually in the front yard of the Smithsonian) and
the urgings of a few individuals who had become infatuated by
traditional music during the "folk revival" of the preceding
decade.
          If one looks closely at the institution's tentative gestures toward
the culturally unwashed, however, they generally prove to have
substantial ties to the old elitism. The Smithsonian's first major
phonograph record issuing project was its six-record Classic
Jazz package of 1973, aimed at--and bought mainly by, I would
guess--middle_class whites, who form the bulk of the jazz listening
audience. (The Smithsonian's jazz recording series now totals about
three dozen discs.) Not until country_music--historically the music of
lower and working class whites, primarily in the South--began to be
accorded status by a growing national (and upscale) audience did the
Smithsonian draw it within the institutional pale. Not, indeed, until
country_music became chic, and designer-jeaned
and powder blue cowboy-hatted Junior Leaguers began to listen to
bluegrass and pump quarters into mechanical broncos at scores of
Gilley's replicas all across the country.
          Even at that, there are signs that the Smithsonian released
Classic Country Music with some sense of
peril. Consider, for example, the preface to the fifty-six page
brochure, supplied by the Smithsonian's Division of Performing Arts,
which issued the set. It is the only official institutional statement
in the entire package, and therefore presumably an index to the
attitudes of at least some Smithsonian policy makers toward the
project and its subject matter. In the main, the preface attempts to
apply to country_music concepts and analytical categories developed to
analyze and interpret elite ("classical") music. Thus we learn that
most country songs are in "AABA form," are "atrophic," and have a
"melodic sequence" that moves from tonic to subdominant and back to
tonic. So far, so good. There certainly is a need to comprehend
country_music in terms more precise and analytically useful than those
employed by disc jockeys and fans, most of whom couldn't care less
whether Freddie Fender's "I'll Be There (Before the Next Teardrop
Falls)" is atrophic or not.
          As in so many cases, however, the technical terminology quickly
proves to be something of a mask for value judgments. The preface in
fact uses musicological terminology partly to dignify music which
someone et the Smithsonian apparently still judges to lack its own
intrinsic dignity. Thus country songs, the preface continues, cannot
be expected to display the "cultivated charm or sophisticated wit of
the standard popular song." The accompanying instruments are not
played in a. "classical style," but are "struck," "twanged,"
"scraped," or "flailed," and voices are "rough-edged," without
"artificial refinement." Subject matter leans toward "cynicism and
wish-fulfillment" (rather like Don Juan or
Madame Butterfly, one supposes).
          The most obvious problem with such evaluations is that they simply
will not wash--unless one can reasonably describe Don Reno as
"twanging," Vassar Clements and Clark Kessinger as "scraping," Jim
Reeves' voice as "rough-edged," and Tom T. Hall's songs as lacking
wit. Any reasonably sympathetic hearing of the full range of country
music would confirm that it is characterized by great breadth of
subject, variety of form, and subtlety of theme. And for an untutored
bunch of strikers, twangers, scrapers, and flailers, Eck Robertson,
Lilly Mae Ledford, Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Earl
Scruggs, Vassar Clements and their like manage to achieve a rather
dazzling level of instrumental virtuosity.
          A more important matter, however, is that in modern society, public
institutions such as the Smithsonian have considerable power to
legitimize or de-legitimize certain cultural forms and expressions--to
prescribe how and in what terms they shall be understood, and to
define the very boundaries within which new legitimacy is to be
conferred. In this set of records, it seems to me, the Smithsonian has
sent the public a mixed message: country_music is a "truly democratic"
art form (as they tell us) which by now even the more timid an'
conventional amongst us can safely listen to in public, but 

it is
withal a little scrape-y and twangy. And so we must distance ourselves
from it, and confine our admiration of it to those aspects which can
be described in language I (AABAs, subdominants, and vocal lines
decorated with "melismatic effects") whose very use reminds
subliminally that we usually listen to and think about "better"
music. At a certain level, the preface reads a bit like a letter one
might write to a wealthy and sophisticated friend back home in Boston
or Marin County after one's elegant cruise ship has docked briefly at
a funky cultural port. Oh, Millicent, the music of those people was
simply so wonderfully primitive and wild!
          In such a situation, those of us who can't afford the cruise would
do well to keep at least a couple of things straight. Historically,
poor and working people in this country have kept hillbilly, country,
Cajun, blues, and gospel music alive in the face of a
consensus of condescension and disapproval by virtually every
established public cultural institution from the local level on up. At
this late date they hardly need any favors or assistance from the
Smithsonian. One wonders, in fact, if Classic Country
Music would ever have been issued primarily out of concern and
respect for the audience which gave the music birth and sustained
it. It took an avalanche of designer jeans to do that. The weather
vane that tops one of the castellated towers at 1000 Jefferson Drive
isn't there for nothing.
          That is one thing to remember. The other is this: country_music has
not only been nurtured and sustained by poor and working people with
precious little assistance or approval from their own tax-supported
public institutions, but it has also until recently been studied,
archived, written about and reissued in much the same way. Like many a
banjo picker or gospel singer, scholars Bill Malone, Bob Pinson,
Judith McCulloh, Charles Wolfe, Archie Green, Norman Cohen and many
others have kept their "day jobs." They have done their writing about
country_music mostly at night and on weekends taken interview trips
out of their own pockets, pasted record labels and stapled little
newsletters and journals together on dining room tables, and run
organizations from post office boxes. The spirit behind the
enterprise--one might almost say the political posture that informs
it--is a spirit (and posture) of love, of self-affirmation, of resistance, of advocacy, of
defiant somebody too-ness. As such, it is invaluable and
irreplaceable.
          At length, then, it is less important that Classic Country
Music was issued (re-issues are plentiful, after all) than
that the Smithsonian commissioned Bill Malone to do it. The energy
that Malone has poured into country_music scholarship for twenty
years--the very perspective he brings to it--comes ultimately from the
physical, social, and cultural landscape of east Texas. That
perspective both informed his choice of tunes and shaped his
language:
          
            When my brother came home on his last furlough before going
overseas, he, my mother, another brother, and I sat around the Spring
Street Bowling Alley watching the bowlers (pleasures were often simple
and cheap for the poor) and waiting for the Trailways bus that would
take him back to camp. I do not know 
            
            what thoughts ran through his
mind, but the possibility of not returning must have been one of
them.
          
          The brother keeps feeding nickels into the jukebox, listening over
and over to the 1941 hit "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,"
which Malone calls "a song of parting and of hoped-for
reconciliation."
          If the issuing of Classic Country Music betokens the
beginning of a cultural reconciliation between the Smithsonian (indeed
the whole federal cultural establishment)and the little people
dropping quarters into jukeboxes in bus stations and bowling alleys
all across the land, it is an event of not only musical but also
profound social significance.
          One of the worst sins a reviewer can commit is to judge a piece of
work by irrelevant criteria, or to condemn it for not being what it
does not pretend to be. Classic Country Music was not
designed as a scholarly treatise. If one wants more extensive
biographical, historical or discographical information on country
music, there are places to get it--including Malone's own other
work. If one wants a fuller reissuing job done on the Carter family,
the Blue Sky Boys, or the Sons of the Pioneers, one may turn to the
fine albums produced by the tiny private John Edwards Memorial
Foundation. If it is more intensive analysis one desires, that also is
available.
          The only fair question one may finally ask is whether
Classic Country Music does what it may reasonably be
expected to do to entertain and educate the rather select group who
will even know it exists, and who can afford to lay down the
fifty-five dollars. And beyond that, whether it is a reliable document
to place in the thousands of community and school libraries that will
probably acquire it.
          My own answer--not in any way intended either to belittle Malone's
work or to underestimate the formidable task he faced--is a qualified
yes. The qualification has less to do with any of the objections I
raised earlier (too much bluegrass, too little gospel, no country
blues) than with Malone's having stopped short of raising some of the
more embarrassing questions--as all of us partisans of country_music
are want to do upon occasion. Out of many possible examples, I mention
two briefly: what about the "dark side" of country_music, and what
about its utility as a creative and correcting force in American
life?
          The dark side is almost impossible not to notice. To put it
bluntly, a good deal of country_music has been (and remains) maudlin,
racist, sexist, and jingoistic. Much of bluegrass in particular
accepts (even celebrates) demeaning images of women and puerile
conceptions of relationships between men and women. (Grand opera does,
too, but it is another matter.) The lyrics have been cleaned up a bit
(or have disappeared altogether), but "rigger" songs (of minstrel and
other origins) linger to this day in fiddle and string band
repertoire. And our every domestic or military misadventure produces
its musical apologia on the country charts.
          If one were to condemn every form of creative expression for its
lapses into bad taste, reactionary politics, or inhumane sentiment,
no form would survive (not even grand opera). The
point is not to condemn or to dismiss, but to understand the dialectic. Merle Haggard wrote both "Okie from Muskogee" and "Mama's Hungry Eyes."
Johnny Cash has sung for Folsom inmates and for Billy Graham. Loretta
Lynn's coal miner's daughter memories may live on "in a cabin in
Butcher Holler," but lately she has been doing commercials for Amax
coal company. And Dolly doesn't wear her coat of many colors
anymore.
          To understand country_music, the agonizing dialectic must not only
be faced as a feature of particular songs or individual careers; it
must become the very foundation for analysis. Much of that task
remains before us, and we who have grown up with the music must do it,
or relinquish the task to those who know less about our values and
perspectives than they need to to understand what happened between Eck
Robertson and Willie Nelson.
          
            David E. Whisnant is professor of American Studies at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of
All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an
American Region (University of North_Carolina Press,
1983).
          
        
