Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 19 - September 29, 2024
country as represented by Dolly Parton is more complicated: not reactionary so much as social transformation by a different path.
If putting Dolly Parton at country’s center resists assumptions of conservatism, it also challenges the view that commodification destroyed country’s essence.
As with rhythm and blues (R&B), country was smaller as a market than rock or the middle that Carson represented. And as with R&B, country ultimately found the rock audience less receptive than it appeared, instead expanding into its own mainstream category—too big to ignore and too commercial for some whose identities it built upon. In many ways they are bookends. Yet country has been felt to look backward, while R&B dreamed forward. James Gregory’s history dispels stereotypes of backwoods white southerners foundering in the North, but finds they elected to remain apart, building areas of
...more
In 1960, Vanderbilt economist William Nicholls demanded, “The South must choose between tradition and progress.” Country music sought not to make that choice.
Hominess let country remain “identifiable as a genre, different from and more ‘real’ than pop or rock music.”
the secret of country’s renewed commercial success was that its old audience was newly valuable, having seen its income swell.
From a Music Row perspective, the most heated issues were commercial ones: contesting a genre and format.
Most right-wing country acts were outdated,
Country radio pursued what Look called a “hip face-lift.”
Commercial imperatives, linked to the role of women in expanding country’s reach as a format, guaranteed that. Tammy Wynette, a staunch Republican whose “Stand by Your Man” was heard by some as submissive, pointedly noted her multiple husbands: “I guess I’ve proven that I don’t believe in staying with a man you no longer love.”
While country music and R&B were assumed to take opposite stances on social transformation, their parallels are instructive. Both moved from mainstream appeal to an image of radical intransigence at the turn of the 1970s. Each, as genres fragmenting Top 40 formatting, targeted listeners whose particularity was encouraged rather than suppressed.
This fed statements of identity pride. Soul had James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).” Merle Haggard, proud to be an “Okie from Muskogee,” recorded “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am.” Loretta Lynn was proud to be a coal miner’s daughter.
Wagoner eventually told Parton that “all this Smoky Mountain squalor no longer captivated the housewives or the disc jockeys.”
The music industry saw R&B as a vanguard genre and country as a backward one. R&B was ripe for crossover into Top 40 if it succeeded with blacks. A country hit, like Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” was presumed of no pop interest.
Country-pop crossover, whether by an unaccented Arkansan such as Glen Campbell or Olivia Newton-John, meant crossover out of adult pop (MOR/AC) to country listeners.
Concerned to seem contemporary to advertisers, country radio played adult pop: the easy listening of Newton-John and Denver. Country labels fashioned music with a similar sound.
To reach, or appear to reach, more upscale listeners was a constant priority that contradicted a populist genre.
Parton was executing her own crossover campaign. In 1974, she quit Wagoner’s TV show; in 1976, she stopped having him oversee her albums—seventeen
Parton found it impossible for a woman to embody the outlaw status rock bestowed on Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, or for a rural southerner to be elevated to singer-songwriter artiste. Her crossover required the most rootless option: MOR/AC, which left her making disco records and headlining a Vegas revue. Parton the personality—movie star, “queen of the tabloids,” and motivational speaker—replaced Parton the musician.
Country followed Parton’s course. The “urban cowboy” craze
Where rock failed her, MOR/AC provided a platform.
Celebrity culture loved both sides of Parton’s duet with modernity: impudence toward tradition and incorporation of heritage.
What does this mean?
Discarded, apparently, was the artist who said in 1975, “I don’t think commercial. I write from my heart.”
But then, records were no longer her main platform.
Storm over Nashville.60 Yet as country critic Patrick Carr nails it, “Music Row, as always, accepted success.” “I’m not leaving country, I’m taking country with me,” Parton said repeatedly.
Now she was the artist from outside the country field, in format terms, whose pop breakout had gone from MOR to country.
“To bring country music to the city”: Parton fulfilled what the CMA sought. Updating tradition, she became a crossover superstar who could only be country.
She told Walters during their first interview, in pop “you can make millions compared to thousands.”
The notion of taking country “uptown” had driven format growth. Parton made that quest about expanding, not eradicating, identity, deploying class and gender.
“Modern country music is more and more becoming the MOR music of the U.S.”
Bluegrass transformed comic and old-timey southern music into a revered invented tradition. Parton worked similar magic.
Superstar Dolly used humor, femininity, and lore to traditionalize the New South.
she harmonized with the format ambitions of country, which now commercialized “neotraditionalism.”
Longing for home became her most frequent theme.
Country’s fall had been as quick as its 1979–82 rise,
Though 31 million Americans were said to listen to country each day, the format still struggled, particularly in non-southern big city markets, where Drew Horowitz, GM of Chicago station WUSN, said there remained the perception that “all Country listeners are ignorant, blue-collar shitkickers.”
Nashville soon had an answer: “neotraditionalism.”
Randy Travis, George Strait, the Judds, Dwight Yoakam, Reba McIntire, Steve Earle and the O’Kanes—eschew
Updated studio equipment imparted contemporary qualities to records with retro elements.
Dollywood brought Hollywood—videos, special effects, themes of self-transformation—to Parton’s Tennessee mountain origins:
Parton’s many guises.
When major labels stopped releasing her, she allied with an independent bluegrass label and released three critically acclaimed albums that harkened back to mountain ballads.
Country, the invented vision of an industry and consensus voice of the modernizing South and transplanted white southerners, stayed primarily upbeat and confident during civil rights, the mass entry of women into the workforce, and the transformation of farmland to suburbs. The example of another, angrier radio format—talk radio—provides a useful contrast.
country’s commercialization, need to thrive apart, format bottom line conquering genre ideals, has had a centrist effect. Country remains pop.
the perennial, lucrative tension between genre and format proved decisive. Despite the “Southernization of America” proclaimed in the 1970s, country remains the one geographically separate wing of the format system. The Opry and Hall of Fame codify the past and provide continuity. Commercial radio maintains contemporary talent. Blue-collar men find primary voice in honky-tonk; office-worker women in what Lynn, Wynette, and Parton launched. Country singers can be Australian, like Keith Urban (succeeding Olivia Newton-John), or Canadian, like Shania Twain (succeeding Hank Snow). But within the
...more
A&M Records exemplifies two related and undervalued vantage points for pop music in the rock era: business leaders who produced hits and the middle of the road (MOR) or by 1980 adult contemporary (AC) radio success of many big sellers. MOR/AC, like Top 40, was a crossover format, drawing from multiple genres. Where Top 40 allied with rock and roll and youth culture, MOR/AC profitably catered to older suburban listeners. MOR listeners and record sellers, in the cultural tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, were not the baby boom children of Top 40 and rock—Alpert and Moss were each born in 1935.
...more
revisionists see indie values as a form of cultural elitism.
the transformation of mainstream entertainment that A&M participated in produced a pop sphere characterized less by an oppositional tone, or inherent conformity, so much as a dizzying ability to institutionalize newness.
MOR/AC filtered the new.
For Jews in particular, commercial music’s irreverence toward identity offered a chance to entertain their way into the heart of American life:
