Southern Music/American Music

Bill C. Malone, David Stricklin

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184340
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The South—an inspiration for songwriters, a source of styles, and the birthplace of many of the nation's greatest musicians—plays a defining role in American musical history. It is impossible to think of American music of the past century without such southern-derived forms as ragtime, jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, gospel, rhythm and blues, Cajun, zydeco, Tejano, rock'n'roll, and even rap. Musicians and listeners around the world have made these vibrant styles their own.

Southern Music/American Music is the first book to investigate the facets of American music from the South and the many popular forms that emerged from it. In this substantially revised and updated edition, Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin bring this classic work into the twenty-first century, including new material on recent phenomena such as the huge success of the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the renewed popularity of Southern music, as well as important new artists Lucinda Williams, Alejandro Escovedo, and the Dixie Chicks, among others. Extensive bibliographic notes and a new suggested listening guide complete this essential study.

Chapter 1

FOLK ORIGINS OF SOUTHERN MUSIC

The folk music reservoir of the South was formed principally by the confluence of two mighty cultural streams, the British-Celtic and the African. But if one looks for purity in the music of the South, one searches in vain. Southerners are often thought of as highly traditional people, and southern music has deep roots in the past. However, to ignore the adaptability of southern music is to miss one of its greatest realities. British and African styles did not leave their home continents in undiluted forms; constant population movements and economic transformations warred against the kind of stability that would have promoted musical isolation or stasis. In this country, they did not simply overlap and interact; they also borrowed from and influenced the musical folkways of other subcultures in the South—the Germans of the Southern Piedmont and Central Texas, the Cajuns of Southwest Louisiana, and the Mexicans of South Texas. Music from Spanish sources, already admixed with African idioms, also came in from the Caribbean via New Orleans and the Gulf South or across the Mexican border into Texas. Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton spoke of the “Spanish tinge” as an essential ingredient of early New Orleans jazz, but the influence was also felt in the rhythms of other styles as well. Furthermore, the songs and styles of English, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Scottish, and Welsh settlers intermingled so rapidly and frequently on the southern frontier that they defy the efforts of folklorists and ethnomusicologists to distinguish conclusively among them or to determine their exact origins. Alan Lomax is probably correct when, recalling the composite quality of this music, he describes it as “more British than anything one can find in Great Britain,”¹ but these styles reached across cultural boundaries and were influenced by the music of people who were not British at all.

Slaves built and occupied a community that white people could observe, and sometimes appreciate, but never wholly understand. In many ways, as Lawrence Levine has argued, their music “remained closer to the musical styles and performances of West Africa and the Afro-American music of the West Indies and South America than to the musical style of Western Europe.”² Intimately linked to work and worship, and marked by improvisation, an “overriding antiphony,” and expressive bodily movement, African-American music spoke to the deepest needs of its creators with idioms that seemed both irresistible and alien to white listeners. Nevertheless, black and white southerners also shared a musical sphere. Acculturation of enslaved Africans to the ways of Europeans began early, from the first moments they encountered one another, particularly on board the slave ships. No one can date precisely the exact moment when black and white southerners began to exchange musical ideas, but the process probably began about the middle of the seventeenth century, when slaves and indentured servants mingled on the farms and plantations of colonial Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas.³ Racial prejudice, then and since, did not deter cultural borrowing: slaves absorbed much of the white people’s music while also retaining as much of their African inheritance as they could, or dared. White musicians, of course, ran up a huge, and continuing, debt to black sources. Levine notes that this “relatively free trade of musical ideas and forms” continued long after the imposition of segregation at the end of the nineteenth century.⁴

Musical interchange existed from such an early date in the South’s history that it is not only difficult to calculate the degree of borrowing on either side, but also nearly impossible to determine the “racial” origin of many southern folk songs and styles. In fact, one can posit the existence of a folk pool shared by many blacks and whites, a common body of songs known in one form or another by poor people, regardless of race, that defied the ugly facts of racial bigotry and exclusion. Poor whites and blacks did not simply share a milieu that was rural, agricultural, and southern; they also had common experiences with poverty, isolation, and exploitation. The oppression of slavery, and the cruel system of racism on which it rested, set African Americans apart from poor whites in many crucial ways, but the two groups nevertheless fashioned an overlapping reservoir of culture and music that largely defined the rural South. Much that came to be termed “soul,” for example, was not so much the product of a peculiar racial experience as it was of a more general rural southern inheritance. A taste for cornbread, black-eyed peas, and collard greens is not the exclusive province of any one race; it once was a class preference, and something of a necessity, that cut across racial lines. Common song preferences similarly reflected such a shared culture, permitting outlets for emotion, distractions from the cares of the day, occasions for communion with friends, and encouragement in the face of adversity.

That inclinations in music were not rigidly segregated, even during slavery, can be seen in the ballad tradition of the South, in the singing of the “songsters”—African-American singers who built diverse repertories aimed at both blacks and whites—and in much of the religious music that prevailed in the two communities. Black singers sometimes sang their own versions of the venerable British ballads, often regarded as the most durable manifestations of British culture in North America. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American songsters fashioned repertories that went far beyond what is now described as the blues, providing music for all sorts of social occasions, white and black, in the years before phonograph recordings appeared. Songster expectations were very high, and they prided themselves, says Paul Oliver, “on their range, versatility, and capacity to pick up a tune,” a skill that came in handy particularly in their work singing and playing for dances. According to Oliver, they used “social songs, comic songs, the blues and ballads, minstrel tunes and popular ditties” to set the tempo for a variety of dancing requirements, “for spirited lindy-hopping or for low-down, slow-dragging across a puncheon floor.”⁵ Even well into the twentieth century, such songsters as Henry Thomas, John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, and Huddie Ledbetter clung to a repertory that was older and more diverse than those of most blues artists, singing ballads, love songs, and pop tunes as well as blues numbers.

Religious music of southern blacks and whites also drew from common sources. The degree to which the Christian message replaced the religious world view of the Africans has been a much debated question,⁶ but slaves received religious instruction from their masters by the mid-seventeenth century and the Church of England had begun its missionary work in the American mainland colonies as early as 1701. Along with the teachings of Christ came the English tradition of hymnody, a body of music that evolved from psalmody, the singing of the Psalms with a faithfulness to the English text, and with a minimum of melodic variation. White people, of course, had the greatest access to such music, but slaves learned songs from the English hymnbooks at least as early as the 1750s. Many blacks long cherished the old, stately long-meter hymns, which they often called “Dr. Watts’s hymns” because of their similarity to the compositions of Isaac Watts, the eighteenth-century English composer who made the first significant departure from psalmody by creating new songs with less literal reliance on Scripture and greater melodic diversity. Black choirs still sing these old songs, revering a song such as “Amazing Grace” as strongly as white singers do and performing it in varying styles that appeal to both white and black audiences.

Although slaves received formal instruction in the Christian religion at an early date and worshipped often in segregated sections of white churches, their first major exposure to the religious music of the poorer whites came in the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening in the early years of the nineteenth century. This revival movement had dramatic manifestations both in the North and in the South. It became especially noted, however, because of the use on the southern frontier of an evangelistic method called the “protracted” meeting, a revival event lasting several days, held in a rural setting in which participants camped, heard preaching, and sang, often having just learned the songs at the meeting. The camp meetings were giant outdoor arenas in which poor black and white southerners learned both songs and styles from each other. In these emotional, ecumenical gatherings, streams of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist evangelists thundered their diverse yet remarkably compatible messages of foreboding tempered with hope. Along with the preaching, songs floated freely through the forest clearings and brush arbors from one group to another. Some old hymns were supplemented by the addition of choruses—possibly a black innovation that broadened a song’s appeal by guaranteeing the sort of regular repetition that oral cultures frequently employ in memorized material, a feature of benefit to poorly educated southern whites as well as to African Americans. Other old hymns were replaced by new, spirited songs specifically designed for quick comprehension and mass performance.⁷ Many of the songs were soon forgotten, but others appeared in printed hymnals or were absorbed into the folk culture where they became the common property of southern blacks and whites.

Many of the camp meeting songs, along with other types of religious song material, circulated in the South, and northward, accompanied by a form of musical notation long cherished by rural southerners. The shape-note method, introduced in New England around 1800 and first made available in 1802 in The Easy Instructor, published in Philadelphia, was a simplified form of musical instruction in which four musical syllables, “fa-sol-la-mi,” were designated by geometric shapes to denote their pitch, with three shapes repeated to make a complete scale. The itinerant singing-school teachers of the early nineteenth century took their shape-note method from New England into Pennsylvania and then into the Shenandoah Valley where the first great concentration of southern shape-note activity occurred, proving of great benefit to earnest would-be singers with limited education and little or no formal musical training. Shape-note composers and songbook compilers adjusted readily to a new seven-note “do-re-mi” system, introduced in 1827 and widely popularized after the Civil War, but the most popular of all the southern-produced books, and one long revered in many southern homes as second only to the Bible, was Benjamin F. White’s Sacred Harp (1844), a book that adhered to the four-note style and still serves as the principal instruction manual for many southern singers. White and other shape-note teachers and writers ministered largely to the needs of white people, but the method, and the hymnals that conveyed it, also moved into the homes of some African Americans. George Pullen Jackson referred to black shape-note singers in 1933, and Joe Dan Boyd noted remnants of the tradition in the 1970s.⁸ The paperback gospel songbooks of the twentieth century, which contained both the oldest hymns of Protestantism and the newest compositions, were color-blind. Songbooks with compositions by both blacks and whites, such as those published by R.E. Winsett in Dayton, Tennessee, could be found in great profusion in homes and rural churches throughout the South. Through such material, and through radio transmission after 1920, the gospel composers circulated their songs, on the whole oblivious to racial considerations. As a result, songs such as “I’ll Fly Away” and “Turn Your Radio On,” both by Albert Brumley, the popular Oklahoma-born white composer, became fixtures in the repertories of black singers. White gospel singers, on the other hand, might have been surprised to learn that such familiar songs as “Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley” were written by the black composer Thomas Dorsey, or that such standards as “Stand by Me” and “Take Your Burdens to the Lord (Leave It There)” came from the pen of a Philadelphia African Methodist Episcopal minister, Charles H. Tindley.

In response to the musical needs of southern religious folk, there arose in the nineteenth century a set of enterprising purveyors of tunebooks for singing schools and songsters for camp meetings whose love of music and the gospel was matched by their business sense and marketing expertise. They combined evangelistic and entrepreneurial instincts for the purpose of making religious music accessible to southerners of modest means but also inadvertently contributed to creating one of the few ways southern-produced music made its way into the North before the Civil War. The Shenandoah Valley became the seedbed of southern religious music, especially due to the efforts of a Mennonite named Joseph Funk, a resident of the little community of Singer’s Glen, near Harrisonburg, Virginia. He printed, in German, his first songbook, Choral-Music, in 1816 and began educating students and siring offspring who contributed greatly to the circulation of the shape-note method throughout the southern backcountry and as far west as East Texas. The songbooks, usually paperback in the twentieth century but normally oblong hardbacks known as “long boys” in the nineteenth, were sold throughout the South and into the North by a network of companies mostly descended from the Ruebush-Kieffer Company, founded by J.H. Ruebush and Aldine Kieffer, two descendants of Joseph Funk. It was the parent organization, directly or indirectly, of virtually all of the southern religious music publishing houses that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of many of the singing schools and teachers that flourished throughout the South. Ruebush-Kieffer and its descendants and the R.E. Winsett Company helped blacks and whites, North and South, shape a body of religious music that came to be one of the most powerful forces in vernacular music in the country.

In addition to the often-intertwined religious music traditions of southern blacks and whites, a string-band tradition also encompassed musicians of both races, although African Americans tended to excel and innovate in the use of stringed instruments earlier than their white counterparts. Many slaves brought with them to the Americas a facility with stringed instruments that was deeply rooted in Africa. Several West African cultures possessed a wide array of stringed instruments, one-stringed or more, which were both plucked and bowed, descendants of which can still be found occasionally in the Deep South. African Americans mastered the guitar in the late nineteenth century, long before southern white musicians. In the most inaccessible regions of the South, the guitar appears to have been a somewhat late acquisition among white folk musicians, coming to the Appalachians after the 1880s and to the Cajun bayou country of Louisiana even later. Black musicians may have inspired one of the most distinctive of all styles of guitar playing, the so-called Hawaiian guitar technique of fretting with a steel bar, usually with the instrument lying flat across the musician’s lap. Folklorist David Evans suggests that African-American sailors may have prompted this style when they introduced their bottleneck style of guitar playing into the Hawaiian Islands at the end of the nineteenth century.⁹ At about that time, guitarists of both racial groups benefited from the arrival of widespread marketing of guitars by Orville Gibson. C.F. Martin had built guitars as early as 1833, but the instruments were not widely available until after 1894 when Gibson made his innovations. Both companies further strengthened the instrument’s importance among southern folk musicians with the introduction of steel strings in 1900, an innovation of great benefit to musicians who often struggled to make themselves heard in noisy dance settings.

Long recognized as an instrument of African origin, the banjo has been associated with black Americans as early as 1749. The addition of the fifth, or drone, string is often attributed to a white southerner, Joel Walker Sweeney, a popular minstrel entertainer from Appomattox, Virginia, although there is little proof for this assumption and some evidence that slaves had added a fifth string long before Sweeney’s time. Scholars also disagree about the means by which the instrument moved into the hands of southern white folk.¹⁰ Did they learn directly from black people, as Sweeney probably did in the 1830s? Did the “frailing” and “clawhammer” styles of banjo picking—later popularly identified with white Appalachian musicians—come to the mountains with black musicians who arrived as slaves or as industrial laborers? Or did southern white rural musicians adopt the banjo and its performance styles from touring white song-and-dance artists, who came to the South as blackface minstrels or as members of circuses or medicine and tent shows? The answer to each question is probably “yes.” Confederate soldiers, in many cases, were already playing banjos when they marched off to war, and they and other white rural musicians had ample opportunities to see and hear the instrument played by slaves and free blacks and by itinerant professional musicians. After the war, in fact, many of those traveling musicians were African Americans who had begun to professionalize their art through performances in blackface troupes. Regardless of its origins and stylistic sources, by the middle of the 1920s the five-string banjo was presumed to be the exclusive property of white musicians, first popular with stage entertainers, then with such southern folk or hillbilly performers as Uncle Dave Macon.

No instrument has been more readily identified with southern whites than the fiddle. Small enough to fit in a saddlebag, the fiddle moved westward with the southern frontier. Fiddlers could be heard practically anywhere a crowd gathered: at county court days, political rallies, militia musters, race days, county fairs, holidays, house-raisings and similar work/social functions, and of course at fiddle contests, which have been held in the South since at least 1736, when fiddlers competed for prizes in a contest in Hanover County, Virginia. The fiddle tunes constituted America’s largest and most important body of folk music preserved and transmitted without benefit of written scores, and many of the tunes are still performed by country musicians, although in styles that their European or African forebears would scarcely recognize. Included among them were old British dance tunes such as “Soldier’s Joy,” indigenous tunes of anonymous origin such as “Hell among the Yearlings,” songs commemorating historical events such as the Battle of New Orleans in “The Eighth of January,” and songs learned from the popular stage or from sheet music such as “Arkansas Traveler” or “Over the Waves.”

Aside from public gatherings, the country dance was the natural setting that showcased the fiddle’s versatility. The country dance was the most important social diversion among rural southerners, and it continued to be so through the 1920s, although the tradition dates from the earliest stages of British colonization of the South. Southern colonists often described dances as “frolics,” borrowing a British expression, by which they meant essentially any social or community event centered around dancing but usually accompanying weddings, holiday celebrations or some other occasion such as the conclusion of a barn raising or other communal work project. Although some dances convened in public settings such as taverns or dance halls, most typically they took place in private farm homes. Such dances were so closely associated with people’s homes that they were commonly called “house parties” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After a family sent out the word that a dance was scheduled for a particular evening, farm folk came by horse and wagon from all over the countryside and gathered in a room that had been stripped bare of furniture, usually moved outside the house. In some cases, two rooms were prepared for the dancers, and a fiddler sat or stood in the doorway between the two rooms. Because of the central importance of fiddlers to the house danc...