Segment B

Suarez:
There are more than 10,000 commercial radio stations broadcasting in the United States today. On one out of every five of them, you'll hear something like this. [contemporary country] Country music is deeply embedded in American culture, from strip mines in Kentucky to strip malls in Los Angeles. Country music is a quintessentially American style, celebrating the lives of working-class people. Mostly white, working class people.

But the story of how country music got its hold on the nation is an unlikely one. When radio dominated American cultural life, back before the 1950s when television swept the country, America tuned in to a much different sound. When you switched on a radio in the 1930s, you heard "respectable" music. High-quality broadcasts with a sophisticated, big-city sound. National networks were taking over radio. Both the federal government and the advertising companies demanded respectable programs.

Radio networks hoped to win the ears and minds of the nation. But a lot of Americans didn't want to listen to music dictated by New York's cultural elite. In the second part of our program, Nate DiMeo explains how a few powerful broadcasters created country music America.

Nate DiMeo: By 1930, networks linked radio stations from coast to coast. The sounds of high-brow New York culture became the default soundtrack to American life. Its symphonies, its broadway showtunes, even its tap dancing. [tap music]

Some music simply vanished from the air. Gone was the stuff that caused so much turmoil in the 20s, the hot jazz of night clubs and dance floors and saxophones.

Announcer: Perhaps you've already realized that you're listening to an orchestra different from any that's ever been on the air. The Coca Cola Orchestra is an all-string orchestra. It doesn't even have a saxophone.

The network era was almost aggressively civil.

Ben Grauer: All staff people had to wear tuxedos after 6 p.m.

Ben Grauer was a popular voice on NBC for decades.

Grauer: The dominant note was one of cautious formality with the listener. The doctrine was that you were a guest in the home. The earliest hosts or masters of ceremony were very square, they had to be. The idea was you were the spokesman for this dignified responsible, highly ethical corporation.

After all, radio had earned a bit of a reputation in the pre-network years. What with its music made by foreigners and black people and hillbillies. There were rough edges that needed sanding.

NBC Announcer: [NBC chimes] It's 10:15. B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova watch time. W-E-A-F New York.

Most of the audience loved this new national programming from NBC and CBS. They'd been listening to amateurish local stations with fourth-rate dance bands for years and now there were high quality productions coming in with a clear signal. But author Cliff Doerksen says there was a major audience left out.

Doerksen: Rural people in the 20s had their own stations called farmer stations. [Atlanta station ID] They didn't like what came out of the cities, they didn't want to hear the classical music and opera coming from the high-brow stations. And they sure didn't want to listen to jazz from the low-brow stations. They wanted to listen to what was called "old-time" music.

Old-time, sort of a grab bag category of fiddle music and old pop tunes that were so far behind the time that they had become folk songs. But with the New York-based networks running the show, these stations and this music almost disappeared completely from the air. Almost.

The federal government wanted everyone in America to have access to national programming. But it knew it wasn't in the networks best interest to buy a little 200-watt station in every hill or holler to make that possible. So Washington allowed for what were called clear channel stations. These were powerful stations in cities whose broadcasts could reach out into people's homes in the countryside.

And on a few of those stations. Old-time music found champions. Perhaps none was more important than George D. Hay.

George D. Hay: Hello everybody, this is George D. Hay speaking. I thought we might do a few little country music sketches just for old time's sake. The Grand Ole Opry was started.

This is Hay sometime in the early 50s, looking back on his years as the host and creator of the Grand Ole Opry. He started out as a newspaper man. Had a popular column called Howdy Judge in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. A lot of the articles were fictional accounts of African Americans appearing in court before a white judge. The same kind of racist jokes that were in some of the minstrel acts he later brought to radio. [McGee Brothers: "C-H-I-C-K-E-N Spells Chicken"] Hay was an early host of the WLS Barn Dance, an old-time music program on a powerful Chicago station.

John Rumble: He created this persona for himself called the solemn old judge.

John Rumble is senior historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Rumble: He dressed in an old fashioned flowing tie and a swallow tail coat, he had a little, wooden whistle that would recreate the sound of a steamboat whistle. And he would blow that to begin the country programs.

Hay's career took off when he moved down to start up another program on Nashville's WSM. The station mostly played New York stuff from the network.

Rumble: So in 1925 he organized what was then called the WSM Barn Dance. Which was fortuitously and serendipitously renamed the Grand Ole Opry in 1927.

The "night the Opry got its name" is one of the classic origin stories in American pop-culture history. Here's historian Louis Kyriakoudes.

Louis Kyriakoudes: The Opry got its name one Saturday evening in 1927. Over the radio from New York, on the national broadcast feed, was the New York Philharmonic. Walter Damrosch was the conductor and he told the audience that there was no place in the classics for realism, but that he would make an exception and perform a piece by Arthur Honegger called "Pacific 231," which sought to recreate the sounds of a train. [Arthur Honnegger "Pacific 231"] George D. Hay in Nashville, waiting for the orchestral concert to end, said, "For the next three hours, we will present nothing but realism. We will be down to earth for the earthy. We have heard grand opera from New York, but now we will be listening to the Grand Ole Opry." And there upon, DeFord Bailey, the harmonica virtuoso on the program, launched into his Pan American Blues. [DeFord Bailey: "Pan American Blues"]

Hay was trying to create, and create is the key point, a radio program and a style of music that appealed to the predominantly rural and small town audience. So he was really juxtaposing the collection of string band musicians and odd performers from vaudeville who would show up in the early years of the Opry, against this vision of high culture being broad cast over the New York-based radio station.

Hay played what you could call the hillbilly card. He gave his popular performers names that would sound more authentically Southern and rural. The Fruit Jar Drinkers, The Gully Jumpers. Dr. Humphrey Bate (an actual Vanderbilt-trained physician) and his Augmented String Orchestra became Dr. Humphrey Bate and his Possum Hunters.

Kyriakoudes: Hay is picking and choosing to determine who will be on the Opry and trying to present a highly rusticated vision of what Southern musical culture is and it's appealing to the people who are listening in the audience because they have one leg in each world. They have one leg in the older, really 19th century world of the South and for that matter the Midwest, but then they've got one leg in the modern world, you know, thousands and thousands of them are leaving Southern and Midwestern agriculture, moving to cities. They're people making a transition from one way of life to another and George Hay is there presenting a manufactured rusticality that they find reassuring and comforting and fits in with really what many see as their own self identity.

And that identity was white. Kyriakoudes says Hay took a biracial musical tradition and whitewashed it, creating what would come to be called country music.

Richard Peterson: The down home rural card was a good card to play.

Sociologist Richard Peterson. [Fiddlin' Arthur Smith & His Dixieliners, "Chittlin Cookin' Time in Cheatham County"]

Peterson: Because there was such fear of what was happening in the cities. There was so much race mixing, there was so much jazz, there was all kinds of degredation in music. Here was a way of finding a pure, unadulterated, American music that came out of an Anglo-Saxon background. They made up a whole bunch of stuff.

Shows like the Opry and the WLS Barn Dance were usually squirreled away to just a couple of hours on the weekend, but there was one powerhouse station keeping old-time music alive all week long. How it got there is one of the most unlikely stories in the history of radio.

Dr. Brinkley: And ladies and gentlemen, you're again listening to the voice of Dr. J.R. Brinkley of the Brinkley Hospitals. And I trust that I may have your attention for the next few minutes regarding some matters of vital importance to you as a healthy man and healthy woman.

New regulations gave Washington the ability to shut broadcasters down. Bill Crawford is co-author of "Border Radio."

Bill Crawford: One of the first people is a guy named Dr. John R. Brinkley and he had a station called KFKB, Kansas First Kansas Best, which was one of the most popular stations in the Midwest.

Dr. Brinkley: And you know you're sick. You know your prostate's infected and diseased. And you know that unless some relief comes to you, that you're going to be in the undertaker's parlor on the old, cold slab being embalmed for a funeral.

Crawford: Dr. Brinkley had made a fortune doing something he called the goat gland proposition. An early form of Viagra in which he would take a sliver of a goat gonad and insert it, transplant it, into a man's personal equipment. He claimed it would "Make any man the ram what am with every lamb."

Brinkley did thousands of these quack operations. They were shockingly popular. He built the station at first to entertain recovering patients waiting to get back on their feet and give their new virility a test drive. He also found it was a great way to advertise all sorts of novel procedures and patent medicines. Federal regulators were falling all over themselves to shut him down.

Crawford: So Dr. Brinkley looked for a place where he could reestablish not only his radio station but also his medical practice.

XERF Annoucer: [station ID in Spanish] That means you're listening to XERF in Ciudad de Acuna in the Republic of Mexico. Your clear channel station that covers every state in the nation.

Crawford: If he was broadcasting from Mexico, he was beyond the reach of American broadcasting regulation. He could broadcast whatever he wanted at whatever power he wanted to.

And he could sell whatever he wanted to. Bunk medical cures the U.S. government was cracking down on north of the border. Things like expensive crystals that would supposedly dissolve in water to make water more water-like.

Advertisement: A man may live without food, 40, 60, or even 80 days, but deprive him of water for five or six days and he'll die a horrible death, the best way to give a system the water it needs is to keep a glass handy constantly, sip it but sip lots of it, and that's the way to drink Crazy Water.

Crawford: They designed antenna figurations which boosted the power of the stations to more than a million watts of effective radiated power. So these stations were enormously powerful. They were so powerful that folks who lived by the station didn't need to pay for electricity. There was so much energy that light bulbs would go on by themselves. Folks near the station could hear the stations being picked up on barb wire fences, bed springs and even on their dental work.

But more importantly, people as far away as the Arctic Circle could hear it almost every night

Crawford: The core of Dr. Brinkley's programming on the station was music. This was music that wasn't played by the networks in New York which looked down their nose at these rural sounds because they saw it as their moral duty to uplift America from out of this kind of uneducated form of entertainment into a more educated, sophisticated environment.

The networks needed dozens of small stations to make sure their national message was heard from coast to coast, but Brinkley didn't. His XERF and the other border stations that followed his lead were like networks unto themselves. And while NBC and CBS were making stars of people Bing Crosby, XERF was making the biggest stars in country. [Carter Family, "Keep on the Sunny Side"]

The Carter Family, the first family of country music, paragons of middle-American virtue, owed their careers to thousands of goat testicle operations.

Rumble: The Carters represented the domestic tradition, they sang about the family and God and home, all of those things. Ya know, they'd sell 100,000 recordings or more of some of their hits, but to saturate the culture, that took border radio.

John Rumble says the music on border radio and the Opry helped define what it meant to be a rural American in the 1930s.

Rumble: You had a kinship with other people who listened. Those things reinforced what we would think of as traditional values. Faith in God, devotion to family, hard work, devotion to country. Those things were part of the cultural glue.

Network Opry Announcer: From Nashville Tennessee, Prince Albert, the world's most popular smoking tabacco brings you the South's most popular program, the Grand Ole Opry.

In 1937, NBC gave its seal of approval to George D. Hay's vision of rural America. The Opry could make the network money. The show's mix of country crooners, singing cowboys, minstrel acts, and Southern Christian values was sufficiently packaged and homogenized for the network to take it nationwide. This move helped solidify what you can think of as a sort of shadow mainstream. A cultural parallel track that Louis Kyriakoudes says still runs through the country today.

Kyriakoudes: The Opry has been there, one of the longest, continual playing radio programs, broadcasting to a middle-American sensibility and defining, for these people, what life and culture and popular entertainment are and it has been doing that consistently. [archival Grand Ole Opry tape]

In March of 1974, the Opry celebrated its 50th anniversary in 70s rhinestoned, butterfly-collared style. George Hay was dead. Singer Roy Acuff had taken over the host's mic. It was the opening night of the theater at Opryland - a mammoth complex with a hotel, even an amusement park, on the outskirts of Nashville. The Opry had come of age.

Roy Acuff: But you know, I never dreamed that a night like this would ever come to Roy Acuff. So I'd like to say to the world that's listening in, from our new home in Opryland U.S.A., ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States, Richard Nixon. [applause]

Four months after this appearance, Nixon would resign in disgrace. His presidency was under siege. The Vietnam War was in some of its darkest days. He was in the throes of Watergate.

Richard Nixon: Country music radiates the love of this nation. Patriotism. Country music therefore has those combinations which are so essential to America's character at a time that America needs character.

But that night, in the house that George D. Hay built, Richard Nixon got a standing ovation.

Nixon: But it's going to depend on our willingness to not only wear the flag but stand up for the flag and country music does that. [applause]