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

Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures

by Bill C. Malone

An examination of the precommercial heritage of country music

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1993

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in the 1950s, when they were collecting old 78s from the 20s and 30s from the ancient relicts of the Appalachians (and the suburbs of Washington DC) they found that most of the blues records were worn to buggery and had more surface noise than a nationwide bacon-frying contest, but most of the old timey records were in pretty good condition. Joe Bussard explains this strange discrepancy thus : black people played their records a million times each and when they got pretty worn out they used to put half a brick on the arm of the phonograph to encourage it to play the record just that one more time. The white folks played their records two or three times and by then they'd learned the song and didn't play it no more.

This is a great little book on that early magical time in America when there was all this stuff and everybody played it. And the record companies were only just getting started and didn't know what was going to sell, so they recorded everything.

It's wonderful when business people get all confused like that. It allows the lunatics to run in behind their backs and whoop it up a little bit before the janitor chases them all out again.

[Garrett Cash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Country music's first great book-writing scholar does a superb job here of briefly exploring the Southern world that gave birth to commercial country and western music. He argues that true rural white Southern music was virtually given no consideration until the 1910's when John Lomax and Cecil Sharp released their folk song books, and so we have very little information on what rural white Southern music was truly like in the nineteenth century. He also argues that the "celtic" or otherwise European influence on Appalachian balladry is overstated in studies and that a great amount of material that mountain folk played for each other was simply the pop tunes of the day (doesn't that sound familiar).

The third and final chapter on the symbolism embodied by country music's early and continuing obsession with the cowboy versus the mountaineer was a little more familiar to me, but still intriguing that we consistently play into these well-defined symbols.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what conditions led to country music's commercial development and its struggle for an identity.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to tracing the roots of American music, there’s just no place like the South: jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, gospel – most music that comes with a “made in America” stamp originated south of the Mason-Dixon line. While the world obviously owes a huge musical debt to African-Americans for their contributions in the aforementioned genres, what we now call “Country” music primarily evolved from the souls and throats of white rural southerners. It is these singers – and their songs – that are the focus of Bill C. Malone’s “Singing Cowboys and Musical Moutaineers.”

Malone’s first concern is to precisely define white rural southern music, especially that which was sung in the 19th century South (just before this music was discovered by the rest of the world). Was it – as early 20th century British musicologist Cecil Sharpe wanted to believe – merely a twangy re-definition of ancient British ballads? Sharpe collected hundreds of Appalachian songs that were clearly traceable to the British Isles, but as Malone points out in “Singing Cowboys,” Sharpe was in the South specifically looking for this connection. He found it in spades but because the other songs he surely heard echoing through the mountains didn’t concern his thesis, he simply ignored them.

There was a lot to ignore. Country music has many primary sources, and although Malone claims that a detailed history of the genre is nigh impossible, he does a masterful job of describing most of its influences in fascinating detail. British ballads, black spirituals, minstrel show songs (most of their composers ironically Northern), German bands and hymns all had a major role in shaping the white folk music of 19th century America. Rural southerners were very catholic in their love for music: a good tune was a good tune, whether it originated in ancient Britain or at the desk of a contemporary New York composer.

By far the most fascinating aspect of Malone’s book is hinted at in its title and answers this question: why did Country singers such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Alan Jackson -- who all hailed from the southeast – dress as though they had been raised on a Texas ranch? Simple: a national hunger for symbols. Before the cowboy singer took over as Country music’s mascot in the 1930's, it was the mountain man of the 1920's, romanticized by novels and the “Great War” hero, Alvin “Tennessee Mountain Boy” York, that exemplified a rural, unfettered, Anglo-Saxon America for an increasingly urban and immigrant-heavy America. It was primarily the Carter family and Bradley Kincaid whose performances first personified this mountain personality; their success paved the way for many other southern musicians of the era to cash in on the hunger for the quintessential American symbol.

However, when reports of aberrant behavior and oppression from coal companies began to trickle out of the Appalachians, along with the proliferation of vaudeville acts that degenerated the mountain man’s vigorous image into a ridiculous caricature (think “The Beverly Hillbillies”), the cowboy – whose manly persona and limitless freedom was being popularized in countless films and dime novels -- became the preeminent and permanent symbol of Country music. The actual canon of authentic cowboy songs is much smaller than the amount of folk songs originally from the eastern south, but an image is an image and the singing cowboy is here to stay.

“Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers” is a very enlightening read regarding the roots of Country music and provides the definitive explanation for the ubiquitous connection between Country music and cowboy hats.


(This review appeared on PopMatters.com).

[Dusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill C. Malone's knowledge of country music is encyclopedic, which I guess is how it should be since he is also the author of the first textbook detailing the history of the genre, Country Music, USA. In this brief follow-up, he delves into the culture of circuses, minstrel shows, and tent revivals that characterized the South after the Civil War and that set the stage for the emergence of "old time" or "country" music as a commercial entity in the 1920s-1940s. The third chapter explores the two personalities referred to in the title, which country performers emulated either to sell records to "outsiders" who had certain stereotypes about the South or to make themselves look more respectable. The field of country music studies is getting crowded, but this is a book worth hanging onto, especially if you are interested in the genre's fascinating and murky origins.