Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls

Women's Country Music, 1930-1960

Stephanie Vander Wel

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780252084959
  9780252043086
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252051944
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Women in History

A PopMatters Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative women artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians, and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl, and honky-tonk angel.

Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film, and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk, and the home. The music also captured the tensions felt by women facing geographic disruption and economic uncertainty. While classic songs and heartfelt performances might ease anxieties, the subject matter underlined women's ambivalent relationships to industrialism, middle-class security, and established notions of femininity.

PART ONE

WLS and the National Barn Dance

1Early Country Music

The Crossing of Musical Hierarchies on Chicago’s WLS

Country music gained its foothold in the commercial establishment of popular music largely through radio programming in the 1930s and 1940s.1 Before the recording industry stumbled onto the appeal of southern vernacular music, Atlanta’s WSB had become the first radio station to introduce white southern folk and popular musicians over the airwaves. Fiddlin’ John Carson, for example, could be heard on WSB in 1922, a year prior to his recording debut with Okeh Records, which launched not only the “old-time” series for the record label but also the phonograph industry’s business pursuits of recording and circulating the various strands of white, rural, and southern vernacular music.2 While the recording industry contributed significantly to building a market for what was referred to as “mountain music,” “old time-tunes,” or “hill country music,” radio stations followed WSB’s model of capitalizing on the commercial interests of musicians connected to the South.3 Fort Worth’s WBAP introduced the first barn-dance program in 1923, replete with an evening of square-dance music. The succeeding year Chicago’s WLS established the National Barn Dance, which emerged as the reigning Saturday-evening barn-dance show throughout the 1930s as it acquired network status and transmitted southern vernacular music into the homes of listeners across the Midwest and the nation.

Of particular interest in this study is radio’s role in shaping and popularizing the theatrical and musical conventions of early country music on one of the most prominent radio stations. This achievement catapulted some of the biggest names in country music into the national spotlight. Among them were Lulu Belle, the “Queen of Radio”; Red Foley, who was not only a successful recording and radio artist but also emceed a portion of the Grand Ole Opry from 1946 to 1953; the singing cowgirl Patsy Montana with her hit song “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart”; and the singing cowboy Gene Autry, who crooned his way from radio to the silver screen. Yet WLS did not broadcast only the syncretic styles of early country music, composed of sentimental ballads, comic numbers, southern string-band playing, western swing, and Tin Pan Alley cowboy songs. The radio station also mixed the diverse strands of vernacular expression with music that pointed to the high and popular aesthetics of the middle-class mainstream. Listeners could tune their radios to the serenades of the WLS Orchestra or to the polished singing of numerous soloists and singing ensembles who swung the melodies of popular tunes in sweet-sounding harmony. The programming of “classical” music or “cultivated” popular music contrasted starkly with the rustic buffoonery that included southern backwoods characters, blackface comedians, and ethnic personalities. In transmitting a multitude of styles and genres, WLS and radio in general largely continued vaudeville’s pursuit of bringing together listeners of different musical tastes and social backgrounds while still striving to attract a middle-class consumer base.4

This chapter examines country music’s dynamic role in WLS’s enterprise of catering to a divergent audience of women, men, midwestern farm families, former rural dwellers, European immigrants, and white southern migrants within the historical setting of the Great Depression. Previous scholars of barndance radio have argued that WLS’s historical significance is predominantly its programming of rural music that provided bucolic reveries of escape from the economic distress and uncertainty of the 1930s.5 Though WLS did strive to create fantasies that enabled its audience to retreat from the harsh material realities that plagued the decade, early country music did not offer only nostalgic portraits of a premodern past. Providing a counterpoint to the dominant narrative of WLS and the National Barn Dance, I argue that the various strands of old-time music or hillbilly music achieved a regional and national consciousness by circulating within a mix of high, middle, and low entertainment associated with the various cultural configurations of taste. In this setting, radio’s eclectic programming enabled a complex and contradictory play of social negotiations tied to regionalism, dislocation, and the shifting parameters of gender conventions during the Great Depression.

WLS’s Programming for a Heterogeneous Audience

WLS, an independent radio station, was established by Sears, Roebuck, and Company in 1924 and then sold to Burridge D. Butler, the publisher of the Prairie Farmer newspaper, in 1928. The station initially catered to the midwestern farm family, an audience overlooked by radio’s predominantly urban-centered programming. Billing WLS as the “Prairie Farmer Station,” Butler believed that radio technology could tap into the midwestern readership he had carefully cultivated through his newspaper, which he had owned since 1908. With the marriage of radio and print, Butler could hope for the creation of an “imagined community” of listeners who resided in the Midwest.6 The essays collected in The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance provide historical accounts of how WLS managed to draw a rural populace into the folds of its audience.7 Its clear-channel signal and fifty-thousand-watt transmitter (acquired in 1931) sent WLS’s programs into the homes of people living in the central part of the country. The daily and weekly broadcasts—agricultural reports and weather updates for the farmer, programs such as the Homemaker’s Hour about fashion, cooking, and child rearing for the farmwife, and bedtime stories for the children—made WLS’s programs a vital element in the daily lives of all members of the farm family. Thus in 1930 the WLS Family Album, a trade magazine published by the Prairie Farmer from 1930 to 1957, could state, “With clean entertainment, new market, and weather reports, WLS has a great audience in rural communities. Thousands of letters daily assure us that our human interest programs reach the hearts of WLS listeners.”8

The “farm” station further strengthened its relationship with its target audience by transmitting music that seemed compatible with the lifestyle of rural denizens. The WLS Family Album, for example, announced that the earlymorning daily program Smile-A-While was ideal for “farm families and other early risers who enjoy[ed] lively popular and old-time music to start the day off right.”9 As this advertising blurb for Smile-A-While suggested, WLS mingled popular tunes with folk or old-time music and other musical genres on the same programs. Yet WLS often cloaked its multitude of genres in regional and pastoral imagery. The instrumental quartet the Hoosier Hot Shots often played swing numbers and comic songs, the Maple City Four sang Tin Pan Alley songs and church hymns, and the many sister and female acts, such as the Three Little Maids, harmonized old standards as well as current popular songs. Verne, Lee, and Mary, another successful trio, were billed as the “Three Wisconsin Honey Bees” or “sweet harmonizers” who, at times, sung to the accompaniment of the WLS Orchestra (see figure 1).10

WLS’s programming, however, drew more than just the farm families of the Midwest into its listening community. Historian Chad Berry has written of how the Chicago radio station also marketed its music to a growing body of white southern migrants.11 Since World War I, black and white southerners had been leaving the depressed conditions of the South for the economic promises of such manufacturing cities as Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati.12 By 1930, close to three million white southerners (mostly from the Upland South region of the southeastern United States) had settled in the Midwest.13 The contemporary sociologist Vivien M. Palmer even noticed a “distinct colony” of Tennesseans in the North Center of Chicago in 1930 that had joined the various ethnic communities of the city.14 Acknowledging the increased presence of southern migrants in the Midwest, WLS encouraged an array of singing and instrumental styles associated with the vernacular traditions and folk theatrics of the rural South. From 1926 to 1930, Bradley Kincaid played the part of the “singing mountaineer” performing folk ballads supposedly plucked from southern Appalachia. Beginning in the 1930s, the Cumberland Ridge Runners offered instrumental renditions of southern vernacular music, and rustic buffoon figures, such as Lulu Belle or Arkie the Woodchopper, highlighted the humor connected with hillbilly music.

Figure 1. Verne, Lee, and Mary. WLS Family Album, 1936.

I want to extend Berry’s historic account of WLS’s audience of southern migrants to argue that the radio station’s fans were not simply a homogenous coterie of prosperous “farm folks” but rather consisted of a diverse body of listeners who crossed class, gender, regional, and ethnic lines.15 The varied nature of WLS’s programming was intended for a heterogeneous white audience. The agricultural Midwest included those of German-Swiss descent, many of whom later moved to the industrial centers of the region.16 During the first third of the twentieth century, when rural dwellers were leaving the countryside for the city, places like Chicago also attracted European immigrants from Poland and Czechoslovakia in addition to migrants from the American South.17 These groups constituted the rank and file of working-class waitresses, sales clerks, laborers, and foremen and lower-middle-class factory managers.

In navigating the musical tastes of a multifarious audience, WLS and radio in general followed the theatrical conventions of vaudeville, a format of entertainment entwined with the contested debates of high and low culture that had emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.18 Much has been written about vaudeville’s attempts to negotiate this crossing of high and low by creating an aura of respectability on stage and in the audience. Featuring music and skits consistent with a middle-class ethos, entrepreneurs hoped to draw bourgeois women into their audiences to connect their halls to “the sacralized feminized culture that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century.”19 Yet even though “vaudeville houses marketed themselves as a sanitized, familyfriendly” venue, as noted by Lori Harrison-Kahan, they continually negotiated the conflicting illustrations of refinement, on the one hand, and the bawdy, on the other.20 Vaudeville thus did not simply adopt the standards of propriety couched in the nineteenth-century ideology of the feminine (i.e., the “angel in the house”).21 Instead, it emerged, according to M. Alison Kibler, as a “site of debate over cultural hierarchy and ‘refinement’” as it appealed to a “mass audience: a heterogeneous crowd of white men and women of different classes and ethnic groups.”22

Continuing the goals of vaudeville, radio encouraged a multitude of musical idioms that brought together popular and folk music and serious and comic expressions. David Goodman’s recent research demonstrates that radio revived “older traditions from before the sacralization and rigid separation of highbrow from lowbrow culture, while at the same time ostentatiously proclaiming and surrounding itself with the sacred aura of classical musical tradition and its great performers.” Radio then was not simply a democratizing vehicle meant to edify the masses by broadcasting “serious” music. Rather, “radio’s commercial but civically responsible public sphere was being filled with an often self-conscious juxtaposition of higher and low, classical and popular.”23 In other words, radio was a medium that upheld the divides between musical hierarchies as it jumbled together classical music with a wide range of vernacular musics.

Following the general trends of radio programming, WLS radio managers worked to create a listening space for a middle-class consumer base of leisure (lower-middle-class farm women or manufacturing managers, for example) while meeting the cultural tastes of a disparate audience of male and female southern migrants, immigrants, and urbanites. Just as vaudeville mediated the intersections of high and low entertainment, radio highlighted programs that projected a bourgeois sensibility onto the staging of slapstick comedy based in the theatrics of minstrelsy (including blackface and rube and ethnic humor). Middlebrow culture, associated with an expanding middle class, had taken root in American society in the 1920s, finding a place between high cultural forms couched in modernist aesthetics (avant-garde music) and plebeian humor and entertainment (burlesque).24 Much of WLS’s programming seemed to be part of this “genial middle ground” even as it highlighted rural and working-class amusements.25

For those of German-Swiss ethnicity, for example, WLS’s daily and weekly programs featured instrumental German music and Swiss vocal performances aimed at transmitting a European lineage of middlebrow respectability. WLS took pride in being the “first station to bring a Little German Band to the air” and included a photo of this ensemble rehearsing in the 1934 issue of the WLS Family Album. The picture’s caption noted that the members of the band had “a collection of numbers brought directly from Germany, which [were] not to be found in any American music library.”26 Apart from programming rarified instrumental music, WLS also promoted Christine, the “Little Swiss Miss,” who could sing yodel songs that soared “almost as high as the Swiss Alps where her ancestors used to live.”27 In her Swis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One • WLS and the National Barn Dance
• Part Two • California Country Music
• Part Three • Nashville’s Honky-Tonk and Country Music Industry
• Conclusion: Country Vocalities and Gendered Theatrics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover