Alabama

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Tad Richards

Country music group Alabama's contribution to country music in the 1980s was one of the most significant milestones on the road to country music's extraordinary rise to prominence in the pop music scene of the 1990s. While various threads of artistic influence ran through country in the 1980s, the most important commercial innovations were the ones that brought it closer to rock and roll--following three decades in which country had often positioned itself as the antithesis of rock and roll, either by holding to traditional instrumentation (fiddles and banjoes, de-emphasis on drums) or by moving toward night-club, Las Vegas-style pop music (the Muzak-smooth Nashville sound, the Urban Cowboy fad). Alabama was one of the first major country acts to get its start playing for a college crowd. Most significantly, Alabama was the first pop-styled country "group": the first self-contained unit of singers/musicians/songwriters--along the lines of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Beach Boys--to succeed in country music.

Considering that the self-contained group had dominated pop music since the early 1960s, country was late to the table, and it was no accident. Country labels had quite deliberately avoided signing groups, believing that the image of a bunch of young men touring together, smoking marijuana, and smashing up motel rooms would be anathema to the core country audience and the upscale audience that country was trying to cultivate. As Alabama member Jeff Cook put it to Tom Roland, author of The Billboard Book of Number One Country Hits, the Nashville establishment felt that "if you were a band, you would have a hit record and then have internal problems and break up."

Alabama natives Randy Owen (1949--), Teddy Gentry (1952--), Jeff Cook (1949--), and drummer Bennett Vartanian formed the band's precursor, a group called Wild Country, in the early 1970s. They moved to the resort community of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where an engagement at a local club, the Bowery, extended for eight years. They were a party band, playing marathon sets that sometimes went round the clock. Vartanian left the group in 1976, and the group went through several drummers before settling on transplanted New Englander Mark Herndon (1955--), who had developed a reputation with rock bands around Myrtle Beach.

As the Alabama Band, the group cut some records for small independent labels. A few major labels approached lead singer Owen about signing as a solo act, but he refused to break up the band. Finally, RCA Victor took the chance and signed the group in 1980. The band's first release, "Tennessee River," hit number one on the country charts, and was followed with two dozen number one hits. During one stretch, Alabama saw twenty-one consecutive releases go to number one, a record that no other act has come close to matching. Alabama won two Grammys and was named Entertainers of the Year three times by the Country Music Association and five times by the Academy of Country Music. In the People magazine readers' poll, Alabama three times was named favorite group, any musical style. In 1989, the Academy of Country Music named Alabama Entertainers of the Decade.

Following Alabama's success, pop groups like Exile crossed over to country music, and the self-contained group, from Sawyer Brown to the Kentucky Headhunters to the Mavericks, became a staple of new country.