Country Music

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Tad Richards

One singer who emerged from regional radio in the 1930s to reshape country music was Gene Autry. Autry, who had scored a hit record in 1931 with "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," a sentimental song in the Jimmie Rodgers mode, was summoned to Hollywood in 1934, as the answer to a Republic Studios mogul's brainstorm: The hottest new trend in movies was the musical talkie, like The Jazz Singer, and perennial cinema moneymaker was the Western. With Autry's enormous success as a singing cowboy in films, "country" became "country and western." Gene Autry became the first country star to gain an audience beyond the rural South and West, even drawing a million fans at a 1939 performance in Dublin, Ireland. Rather than authentic western songs, Autry sang music composed by Hollywood songwriters, calculated to appeal to audiences that listened to Cole Porter and Irving Berlin as well as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. The new songs succeeded so well that Berlin would ultimately write his own cowboy song, "Don't Fence Me In."

This was country's first flirtation with the mainstream of American music. Roy Rogers followed Autry's path to success, and soon they were imitated by a multitude of lesser singing cowboys. There was no country music industry as such in the 1930s, but this outsider/mainstream dichotomy would remain an issue throughout country's history. The other significant innovation in the country music of the 1930s also came from the West, and was another unlikely fusion. In Texas, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys blended jazz and country to create a new and infectious dance music.

In the 1940s, country music had its own hit parade, as Billboard magazine created its first country chart in 1944. First called the "folk music" chart, it became the "country and western" chart in 1949, and its first number one hit was Al Dexter's "Pistol Packin' Mama." "Folk music" being loosely defined, the early charts included artists like Louis Jordan, Nat "King" Cole, and Bing Crosby. But country was starting to amass its first generation of major stars--singers like Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Red Foley--and the new sound of bluegrass music, which had been popularized by Bill Monroe in the 1930s, but gained its full maturity when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined Monroe's Bluegrass Boys in the mid-1940s.

In an important sense, country's key figure in the 1940s was Roy Acuff. Acuff joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and not long after became the Opry's host, presiding over its period of greatest popularity. In 1942, Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose started a music publishing company, Acuff-Rose, which signed country songwriters, and created a new standard of professionalism in the field. The Opry and Acuff-Rose were, together, the most significant factors in solidifying the place of Nashville as the country music capital of America. World War II brought a lot of young GIs from the north down to army bases in the South, where they heard Acuff's music and broadened country's listening base even further.