|
Recalling Bristol 1927
The state line separating Virginia and Tennessee runs right down the middle of State Street in the center of downtown Bristol - an Appalachian crossroads with a combined population of 42,000. Each fall and spring, the stadium-sized Bristol Motor Speedway on the outskirts of town makes headlines as an important stop on the NASCAR circuit. |
 |
| Logo by Gary Wedemeyer |
Prompted by the BCMA, both state senates and the Virginia House of Delegates have endorsed Bristol’s “birthplace of country music” status. In October 1998, Congress passed a resolution identifying the two Bristols as "the birthplace of country music, a style of music which has enjoyed broad commercial success in the United States and throughout much of the world."
Scholars and fans of country, bluegrass and old-time music have recognized the rich musical heritage of southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee for decades. Yet Bristol's outright claim to being the birthplace of country raises eyebrows and questions.
"It was hardly the start of country music industry as the country and western marketing flacks would lead you to believe," said Indiana-based folk and country music historian Dave Samuelson. "Fiddlin' John Carson, Uncle Dave Macon, Vernon Dalhart, Frank Hutchison, Ernest Stoneman, the Skillet Lickers, Riley Puckett and Charlie Poole were already established recording artists by the summer of 1927."
Supervising the 1927 sessions was Ralph S. Peer, a free-lance talent scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey. Peer was no stranger to field recording or southern music. Four years earlier he had traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, for the Okeh label, recording John Carson, who became the emerging genre's first star.
 |
It was Peer's good fortune that two of the pioneers of what became country music - the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers - stood before his microphones in the vacant warehouse, since razed, at 408-410 State Street in late July and early August 1927. A granite pillar marks the site.
Peer's first order of business in Bristol was to record Ernest V. Stoneman and His Dixie Mountaineers. Stoneman's old-time string band recordings were already best sellers - his song "The Sinking of the Titanic" had sold a million copies in 1924-25 -- and Stoneman descendants such as Patsy Stoneman Murphy say he suggested the location to Peer.
A surprise to Peer was the appearance, on the last days of the sessions, of an obscure Mississippi songwriter and guitar player, Jimmie Rodgers.
 |
| Courtesy of Nolan Porterfield |
A likely explanation is that Rodgers learned of the sessions from the Johnson Brothers, a guitar-playing duo who had just returned from Camden after recording seven numbers for Victor. Rodgers worked with the Johnson Brothers in Tennessee about a month before. "They may very well have alerted him," said Rodgers' biographer Nolan Porterfield in a telephone interview from his home in Kentucky, "but he didn't have a specific date or he would have loaded up the whole band and come to Bristol."
More expected was the arrival of a vocal and instrumental trio from nearby Maces Springs, Virginia. The original Carter Family consisted of Alvin Pleasant (A. P.) Carter, his wife Sara, and her cousin and sister-in-law Maybelle. Peer had corresponded with A. P. Carter earlier that summer. Still, their appearance took him aback.
 |
|
Courtesy of Flo Wolfe |
Sara sang lead and played autoharp. A. P. sang bass on most cuts, while 18-year-old Maybelle played guitar. The Carters recorded four songs on the second Monday of the sessions and two the next day. Victor released the first Carter Family record on November 4, 1927, hardly anticipating the hundreds of records to follow as the group became one of the most popular recording acts in the history of American music.
Jimmie Rodgers struggled to record two songs on the second-to-last day of the sessions, August 4. Recording the two songs took two and a half hours and required more takes than Peer allowed any other musician. One reason for Rodgers' difficulties was that, while rehearsing the previous evening, his band had broken up over whether to record under its original name, the Tenneva Ramblers, or as the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers - the name used when Rodgers booked performances.
According to Dave Samuelson, who produced an LP reissue of the Tenneva Ramblers' music in 1972, the underlying reason was that band member Jack Grant "mistrusted Rodgers because of some fraudulent scheme he concocted regarding railroad bonds. The ever-hustling Rodgers was something of a con artist anyway."
Sounding tentative in contrast to his later recordings, Rodgers accompanied himself on guitar, singing a version of a World War I song, "The Soldier's Sweetheart," and a lullaby "Sleep, Baby, Sleep," on which he displayed the yodel that became his trademark.
In his introduction to a two-CD set containing 34 selections recorded in Bristol, music historian Charles Wolfe of Middle Tennessee State University wrote that the recordings "form an almost perfect cross-section of early country music - from fiddle tunes to blues, from deep-rooted ballads to gospel songs." Twenty-four configurations of musicians - with occasional overlaps in personnel - recorded 76 songs and instrumental tunes. With one possible exception, all the musicians were white.
Victor Talking Machine Company paid the musicians $50 per recorded side. Ralph Peer acted as "publisher" and kept 75 percent of the royalties on the copyrights. "This was my conception starting this hillbilly thing," Peer said later in the Borgeson interviews, "and it cost me thousands and thousands of dollars because I could have just as easily bought (the copyrights) for $25 each, or taken them for nothing, as far as that goes. But fortunately I wasn't quite that greedy, and therefore I built up the business."
In a chapter on the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in the 1988 book "Country: The Music and the Musicians," Nolan Porterfield coined the term that has become ubiquitous in descriptions of the Bristol sessions. "Music historians and others fond of dates and places have a special weakness for 'Bristol, August 1927,'" he wrote. "As a sort of shorthand notation, it has come to signal the Big Bang of country music evolution."
"I was speaking very metaphorically," said Porterfield of the "big bang" reference. "I'm not pronouncing that. It's just kind of in the minds of country music historians. It's simplistic, but it works. It depends on which end of the historical spectrum you are looking from.
"Did Bristol turn out in droves in 1927 and welcome these hillbilly performers? No," said Porterfield. "With the exception of a local newspaper editor, I doubt that anybody much knew what was going on. On the other hand, if you look at it from the perspective of today, the Bristol sessions were very important. I don't know of any other two-week period in the history of then-young country music when so much good stuff was recorded."
Victor released the two songs recorded by Jimmie Rodgers on October 7, 1927, to modest sales. Ralph Peer recorded Rodgers again in Camden on November 30. "The first master he cut at his second session, 'Blue Yodel,' was the side that truly established him," Dave Samuelson said. A dozen songs bearing "blue yodel" in their titles were issued during Rodgers' brief career.
Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1924, Rodgers maintained a strenuous performance and recording schedule until his death in New York City on May 26, 1933 - two days after his final studio session. In 1961, he became the first person inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Described variously as a folklorist and "commercially astute songsmith," A.P. Carter collected songs from the neighboring region, arranged them for the family, and copyrighted them under his name. "During the past 20 years, scholars have unearthed most - if not all - the original sources for the Carter Family's songs," said Dave Samuelson. "Ralph Peer put the squeeze on A.P. to come up with traditional songs suitable for recording. Of course, Peer's real motive was to snag lucrative copyrights for his publishing company.
"To satisfy Peer's demands," said Samuelson, "A. P. scrambled to find as much material as he could - dimly remembered parlor ballads, gospel tunes, traditional pieces. Carter collected songs from wherever he could find them. One informant even fed him the mid-'20s pop tune 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' Sure enough, Carter reworked it, the family recorded it, and the wily Peer copyrighted it. Astounding."
The original Carter Family recorded more than 300 songs, including often-covered classics such as "Wildwood Flower" and "Keep on the Sunny Side." A. P. and Sara divorced, yet the trio performed until 1943 when Sara and her new husband - A. P.'s cousin Coy Bays - moved to California. A. P. died in 1960, Maybelle in 1978, and Sara in 1979. The "first family of country music" was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1970.
Ralph Peer's role in recording traditional American music was pivotal. In 1920, he supervised what may be the first blues recording, "Crazy Blues" sung by Mamie Smith. In 1923, he transported the first mobile recording equipment to Atlanta for sessions that produced what may be the first authentic country record, Fiddlin' John Carson's "A Little Old Cabin Down the Lane." In 1925, he recorded Ernest Stoneman for the Okeh label.
Peer died in Hollywood in 1960. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984. Would he consider Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee, "the birthplace of country music?" Probably not, yet the historical record indicates that he and the musicians who found their way to his temporary studio during those historic two weeks gave the richness of Appalachian music its first significant showcase.
[© 2002 David W. Johnson]
Comments? E-mail the editor at djohnson@folklinks.com.
Return to top page
