Cover of COUNTRY, volume 2 of Origin Story

Origin Story  ·  Volume 2

COUNTRY

How Two Weeks in a Hat Warehouse Became an Industry, 1927–1955

Where it sits on the century

19151927–19552030
$14.99Paperback
about 120 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

This is the complete story of country music’s first age in about three hours: the Bristol sessions as they actually happened, with the myth flagged as myth; the radio barn dance that sold insurance and flour by making singers into neighbours, paid its performers almost nothing, and made them rich anyway; the Depression that handed the genre to radio; the million-watt border blaster that carried the Carter Family from Mexico to Canada; and the beer-joint jukebox that taught the music to be electric.

It takes the money seriously, because the people in it did. What fifty dollars a side actually bought. How Ralph Peer worked for a token salary and took the publishing instead, and why that arrangement wrote the genre’s aesthetic. What the Grand Ole Opry paid — and what the billing was worth on the tent-show circuit. How a two-cent statute and a broadcasters’ war made Nashville a publishing town before it was a recording town. Why the songwriter stayed solvent while the singer died broke at twenty-nine in the back of a Cadillac. And who never got paid at all: the Black teachers and partners — Lesley Riddle, Arnold Shultz, Rufus Payne, DeFord Bailey — whose contribution was load-bearing and whose names are not on the papers.

Sixteen records, described, in order — from the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers to Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Kitty Wells — ending in July 1954 with the Memphis B-side that knocked a Bill Monroe waltz out of waltz time and walked off with the young audience.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like — the thumb carrying the melody under the brushed chord, the yodel moving from ornament to architecture, the electric guitar knocking twice at the door of 1941.

Format
Paperback
Trim
5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages
about 120
Chapters
26 in five movements
Period
1927–1955
Audiobook
2h 51m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Country — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 1
BLUESthe same field recorder, the same Ralph Peer, the other of the industry’s two segregated shelves→Volume 5
ROCK 'N' ROLLthe secession this book ends on: the 45, the teenage wallet, and a B-side from Memphis→Volume 9
FOLK REVIVALthe first age’s catalogue reborn as scripture, one anthology and one Greenwich Village apartment at a time→

Free to read  ·  the opening

How volume 2 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 2 · COUNTRYIntroduction

The Discovery Story

Here is the story the way it is usually told.

In the summer of 1927, a talent scout from New York carried a recording machine into the Appalachian mountains, set it up in a small town on the Tennessee–Virginia line, and captured, in two weeks, the pure folk music of the American South, ballads carried over from Britain centuries earlier, preserved in the hollows like insects in amber, sung by mountain people untouched by the modern world. The machine caught the old music just before it vanished, and country music was born.

Nearly every word of that is wrong, and the ways in which it is wrong are the subject of this book.

The man was real. His name was Ralph Peer, and he was not a folklorist; he was a record company’s recording director with a sideline about to become the main line, and by his own later account what he was hunting in Bristol was not old songs but new ones, songs nobody owned yet, because a song nobody owned yet was a song whose copyright he could control. The mountain people were real too, but the ones who made the records were mill hands, railroad men, carpenters, preachers, medicine-show entertainers and at least one professional recording act, and they came not because a stranger with a machine had found them but because he had put a notice in the local paper, and then because that paper reported (in the middle of the sessions, decisively) exactly how much money one of them had made the year before. They read the number and they came to town.

The introduction runs on for another 8 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 26 chapters · about 120 pages · $14.99

Contents

26 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters
  1. 1A Hat Warehouse on State Street
  2. 2The Family from Poor Valley
  3. 3The Brakeman from Meridian
  4. 4Atlanta Got There First
02The Machine6 chapters
  1. 5The Microphone That Learned to Travel
  2. 6The Barn Dance
  3. 7What the Crash Did
  4. 8The Border Blaster and the Transcription Disc
  5. 9The Beer Joint, the Jukebox and the Electric Guitar
  6. 10Why the Records Sound Like That
03The Records6 chapters
  1. 111927–1928. The Two Answers
  2. 121930–1936. What Survived
  3. 131940–1945. The War Moves the Audience
  4. 141946–1949. Two Inventions
  5. 151950–1953. The Money Notices
  6. 16July 1954. The B-Side That Ends This Book
04The Money6 chapters
  1. 17Fifty Dollars a Side
  2. 18The Dollar-a-Year Man
  3. 19What the Barn Dance Paid
  4. 20Acuff-Rose, and the War Between the Letters
  5. 21The Catalogue Outlives the Career
  6. 22Who Did Not Get Paid
05The Ending4 chapters
  1. 23What Exhausted It
  2. 24What It Became
  3. 25What the Story Leaves Out
  4. 26It Was Never Wild

Free to read  ·  reference

COUNTRY: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 30 entries, 1927–1955. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1922
  • June. Eck Robertson records fiddle sides for Victor in New York. Commercially, almost nothing happens.
  • Atlanta’s WSB begins broadcasting; Fiddlin’ John Carson becomes a radio fixture.
1923
  • June. Ralph Peer records Carson in Atlanta for OKeh at Polk Brockman’s urging. The unnumbered first pressing sells out; the hillbilly record business begins.
1924
  • April. WLS Chicago, owned by Sears, first broadcasts the programme that becomes the National Barn Dance.
1925
  • January. Al Hopkins’s band, asked its name, supplies the word the whole catalogue will wear. Electrical recording arrives in the industry. October. WSM Nashville, owned by National Life and Accident Insurance, goes on the air.
  • 28 November. Uncle Jimmy Thompson fiddles on WSM. The mail arrives in sacks; the barn dance becomes a fixture.
1927
  • Early in the year. Peer moves to Victor under the arrangement described in Movement Four. 25 July–5 August, the Bristol sessions: about seventy-six sides by nineteen acts.
  • 1–2 August, the Carter Family record six sides.
  • 4 August. Jimmie Rodgers, his band gone, records two sides alone.
  • November. Rodgers talks his way into Camden and cuts the first Blue Yodel.
  • December, by Hay’s telling, the WSM Barn Dance becomes the Grand Ole Opry.
1928
  • February, Blue Yodel released; Rodgers becomes the genre’s first national star. May, the Carters record Wildwood Flower at Camden. Southern Music is incorporated.
1929–1932
  • Victor is absorbed by RCA. Record sales collapse from the figures usually given above a hundred million discs to about six million. The genre’s economy moves to radio. WSM reaches fifty thousand watts, clear channel.
1933
  • 26 May. Jimmie Rodgers dies in New York, two days after his final session.
  • December. Prohibition is repealed. The honky-tonk and the jukebox begin their work.
1934–1936
  • Decca relaunches at thirty-five cents. Gene Autry goes to Hollywood. Patsy Montana records the cowgirl’s answer. The Carters record the circle song; Sara and A.P. divorce; Acuff records the speckled bird.
1938
  • Roy Acuff joins the Opry; the singing star displaces the string band. The Carter Family goes to border radio at Del Rio.
1939
  • The Opry gains its NBC network segment. Bill Monroe joins the cast. The Coon Creek Girls play the White House.
1940–1941
  • New San Antonio Rose; BMI opens for business; the ASCAP boycott takes the old catalogue off the radio for most of 1941 and hands country songwriters performance income. XERA is silenced. DeFord Bailey is dismissed. Ernest Tubb’s electric guitar reaches the jukeboxes.
1942
  • Acuff-Rose founded in Nashville. Shellac is rationed; the musicians’ union recording ban begins. Brinkley dies broke.
1943–1945
  • The original Carter Family disbands. Pistol Packin’ Mama conquers the war-plant jukeboxes; the trade press starts a folk chart in January 1944 to count what is happening. Wills brings his drums to the Opry stage. Scruggs joins Monroe in December 1945.
1946
  • September. Monroe’s classic band records Blue Moon of Kentucky in Chicago. Hank Williams signs with Acuff-Rose. WSM engineers open Nashville’s first professional studio. The National Barn Dance loses its network berth.
1948–1949
  • Flatt and Scruggs leave Monroe. The Louisiana Hayride launches in Shreveport. Lovesick Blues, cut in Cincinnati against the publisher’s advice, spends its sixteen weeks at the top; the Opry debut and its multiplying encores follow in June 1949. The chart is renamed country and western. Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
1950–1952
  • Patti Page’s Tennessee Waltz teaches the industry what a Nashville copyright is worth; Tony Bennett’s Cold, Cold Heart confirms it. WSM’s announcer coins Music City U.S.A. Kitty Wells answers the honky-tonk men and becomes the first woman atop the country chart. The Harry Smith Anthology quietly hands the first age’s catalogue to the folk revival. Hank Williams is fired from the Opry in August 1952 and cuts his last session in September.
1953
  • 1 January. Hank Williams is pronounced dead at Oak Hill, West Virginia, aged twenty-nine. His posthumous releases dominate the year. Meridian stages the Rodgers memorial festival; Peer speaks. Ralph Peer’s protégés now run an industry.
1954
  • 5–7 July, at Sun in Memphis, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black cut a blues on one side and Monroe’s waltz, in the wrong time signature, on the other.
  • 2 October. Presley’s single, polite Opry appearance.
  • 16 October, the Hayride signs him for a year of Saturdays.
  • December. Fred Rose dies. Monroe recuts his own waltz, new tempo included.
1955
  • Presley tours the country package circuit all year, billed among the hillbilly acts, pulling the young audience out of the tent as he goes. By the autumn the majors are bidding for his contract. The first age of country music has ended; almost nobody on the barn dances says so out loud yet.

Free to read  ·  where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

On the Bristol sessions, and their mythology. The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music, edited by Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson, the standard scholarly collection, valuable precisely because its contributors disagree about how much the big-bang framing deserves. The primary account of the sessions themselves is Ralph Peer’s own, given mainly in interviews late in his life; it is indispensable and self-serving in roughly equal measure, and this book has treated it as testimony rather than as record. The contemporary Bristol newspaper coverage, including the piece that printed Ernest Stoneman’s royalty figure, survives and has been widely reproduced in the scholarship.

On Peer and the business. Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music, Barry Mazor, the fullest account of the publishing machine this book’s fourth movement describes. Russell Sanjek’s American Popular Music and Its Business for the industry mechanics: mechanical royalties, the 1909 statute, the ASCAP–BMI war. The specific percentages, fees and wage comparisons in Movement Four are the figures usually given in this literature and are flagged in the text as illustrative where the underlying contracts are not public.

On the founding artists. Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler, Nolan Porterfield, the standard biography, and the source this book follows on the contested band-split at Bristol and the final sessions. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, the family history on which the Poor Valley chapters chiefly rest, including the family tellings this book flags as tellings. My Husband Jimmie Rodgers, Carrie Rodgers, read as the interested account it is. Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Richard D. Smith. Hank Williams: The Biography, Colin Escott with George Merritt and William MacEwen, the source followed here on the last session, the final drive, and the inquest, including the Marshall forgery.

On the barn dances and the radio economy. A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry, Charles K. Wolfe, for the early Opry, the renamed bands and the costuming. George D. Hay’s own 1945 booklet, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry, as a primary document, self-serving, unreliable on dates, and the source of the passage about DeFord Bailey quoted in Movement Four, which is reproduced in the scholarship and discussed at length in DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music, David C. Morton with Charles K. Wolfe, the account this book follows on Bailey’s career and dismissal. Border Radio, Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, for Brinkley, XERA and the transcription economy.

On the genre’s history entire. Country Music, U.S.A., Bill C. Malone, the foundational survey, and the source of the home-and-away framing of the Carters and Rodgers that this book adopts and extends. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, Richard A. Peterson, the scholarly argument behind this book’s insistence that the genre’s authenticity was manufactured from the start; Movement Five’s audit chapter is in its debt throughout. Tony Russell’s Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942 for dates, personnel and the actual contents of the segregated catalogue series.

On the ending. Last Train to Memphis, Peter Guralnick, for the Sun sessions, the Opry and Hayride episodes, and the surviving session tape quoted with attribution in Movement Three’s final chapter.

Where figures and stories are contested, the Bristol per-side rate and session totals; the Stoneman royalty figure; every sales number attached to Rodgers, Autry, Montana and Page; Hay’s account of the Opry’s christening; the number of Hank Williams’s Opry encores; the advice allegedly given to Elvis Presley at the Opry; Bill Monroe’s remark about the royalty cheques; the authorship of the sunshine song associated with Jimmie Davis; and the several family tellings flagged in Movements One and Two, the text says so at the point of the claim rather than choosing quietly. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. In a genre this devoted to its own legend, they are the record.

What this book does not do

Before anything else, a warning about what this book will not do, which matters more here than in most volumes, because this is a genre people quote at each other.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none.

It should be said at once that country music is the genre where that rule costs the most. These are songs that live in their words, the joke in the last line, the name of the town, the turn where the story goes wrong. What this book does instead is the harder and more interesting thing: it tells you what the voice is doing, how the story is built, where the verse turns, and what the arrangement does while it turns. The words themselves are three taps away, and the ownership of those words (who held it, what it earned, and how it outlived everybody) is half of what this book is actually about.

It reproduces no photographs and no artwork. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Country. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

That is a real cost here, because this is a genre whose defenders would say the words are the entire art form, and they have a case. What the rule buys is everything the words normally crowd out: the recording sessions, the radio barn dances, the publishing, and a founding history far stranger than the one on the plaque, the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where it came from, what made it possible, which records mattered and why, who got paid, who did not, and how its first age ended. Where the record is contested, and the founding events of this genre are contested in ways later chapters will take some pleasure in unpicking, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism  ·  MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Country & Bluegrass  ·  MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN
979-8-90623-877-1
Audiobook ISBN
979-8-90623-878-8
Paperback ISBN
not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 2 about?

How Two Weeks in a Hat Warehouse Became an Industry, 1927–1955. The story everyone tells is a discovery: a talent scout carries a recording machine into the mountains in 1927 and captures folk music in the wild. The record shows something better. Ralph Peer rented a hat warehouse in Bristol, on the Tennessee–Virginia line, put a notice in the paper, and paid fifty dollars a side — and when the local paper printed what one carpenter had earned in royalties the year before, the region did the arithmetic and came to town. In one August week the walk-ins included a carload of family from a Virginia valley and a tubercular railroad brakeman whose band had quit him the night before. Nobody was overheard. Everybody walked in.

What years does COUNTRY cover?

1927–1955. The volume is numbered 2 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made COUNTRY possible?

Radio barn dance, the Bristol sessions. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 28,500 words: 26 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 51m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 30 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy COUNTRY in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.