The Long, Hard Road From DeFord Bailey to Beyoncé
A brief history of Black artists and Country Music
The release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album has created an extraordinary, loud and very public dialogue about Black artists and Country Music.
That’s good. Very good. It’s a long, fascinating and deep story. Here is a small piece of it, which may reveal some of the myths surrounding Black artists and country music, while also underling the extraordinary obstacles artists of colors faced for the better part of a century when trying to make their presence and gifts felt in the mainstream country music industry.
Let’s begin on the radio. Or to be more accurate, a radio studio.
It was Saturday, December 10, 1927.
DeFord Bailey looked nervously at the studio clock.
It was a handful of seconds before 9 PM in the Central Time Zone. In 90 seconds – no, 88 – no, 86 – he would go live on the radio as the first act of the night on a popular Nashville-based radio show, the WSM Barn Dance. On a clear, cold late autumn night like this, WSM could be heard as far north as Chicago and as far south as New Orleans, from Raleigh in the East to Little Rock in the West.
The WSM Barn Dance had been on the air for a little over two years, beamed across the mid-South from the fifth-floor studio of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in downtown Nashville, on the northwest corner of 7th and Union. It was the second most popular hillbilly radio show on the airwaves (and moving up quickly on number one). The type of music the program showcased wouldn’t be called country for another twenty years. Most people referred to it as hillbilly, though sometimes they called it mountain music or just old-time music.
Bailey, a fierce and inventive harmonica player, would be opening tonight’s Barn Dance with one of his audience favorites, “Pan-American Blues.” It was a noisy, churning, almost avant-garde sound painting that succeeded in evoking the new era of gleaming silver cross-country trains lancing valley and mountain, desert and city. It is still resonant and impactful when heard today.
The 9 O’clock hour approached, and the clock counted down to zero.
The lead-in to the local Nashville show would be a program fed from the national NBC Red Network, a classical music show called The Music Appreciation Hour. (Between 1927 and 1945, the programming of NBC Radio was split between two networks: the Red and the Blue.) As the national feed ended, the founder and host of the Barn Dance, George Dewey Hay, whose wide politician’s smile and full head of Brylcreemed hair earned him the nickname “Judge,” stepped to the microphone to welcome listeners to the Barn Dance and introduce Bailey. Hay adlibbed, which was not uncommon for him. Before he spoke, Hays lifted an unlit pipe from between his wide, white teeth.
“For the past hour,” he said, “we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand
Opera. From now on, we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”
Hays then smiled, and cued Bailey with a downward stroke of his pipe.
DeFord Bailey, an African American grandson of slaves, was the first artist ever heard on the newly renamed Grand Ole Opry radio show.
Not long afterwards, Bailey was formally inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, a powerful and utile honor which allowed him to use the Opry name to promote his performances, put him in good stead with the Opry’s leviathan booking service, and insured that he would regularly appear on the radio program that would very shortly become the gold standard in hillbilly music.
It would be a full 40 years before another African American was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry — Charley Pride, in 1967. And 45 years after that — 45 years, my god, think of everything that happened to America between 1967 and 2012! – on Tuesday, October 16, 2012, Darius Rucker became only the third African-American (out of a total of 193 members) to be formally inducted into the Grand Ole Opry.
AUDIO: Charley Pride “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone”
Think of that: Between 1927 – two years before the great depression, and 10 years after the first world war – and 2012 – the year Barack Obama was re-elected, and eight years after the start of Facebook – the country music establishment only deemed three Black artists worthy of formal induction into the Grand Ole Opry.
Country music wasn’t always considered an exclusively white medium.
Before 1933, “country” (we’ll call it that, even though the term was not in use at the time) featured many integrated recording sessions, including those by legendary industry leaders like the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers. At the time, both the common and commercial repertoire for country was full of songs learned from African American performers and composers. In the mid and late 1920s, hillbilly music was, in many ways, as thoroughly cross-cultural as rock music would be in the mid-1960s. So how did country become a genre almost universally considered a province of white artists and listeners?
The racial division of country music was actually more the process of record industry
economics coming from up north than the product of Jim Crow coming from the south.
As the modern record industry developed, companies found that it greatly aided and streamlined their marketing if they could divide the marketplace into “race” and “hillbilly,” and sell to record stores and retail outlets serving these color-divided markets, more or less without crossover. This in turn created the myth that “hillbilly” was a genre largely of Celtic origin and the cultural legacy of white southern mountaineers, as opposed to the truth: That extensive racial, cultural, and geographical mixing was essential to the foundations of country. The marketing terms “Race” and “Hillbilly” were industry standard until well after World War II, when they were replaced by “rhythm and blues” and “country and western” by record company offices, industry trade magazines, and record stores. These terms denied the common roots and cross-cultural and interracial collaborations that had contributed to both styles. (A much more detailed dive into these fascinating topics can be found in Hidden in the Mix: The African Presence in Country Music, a collection edited by Diana Pecknold, and Black Country Music by Francesca Royster.)
What had begun as a ploy to simplify marketing soon transformed into a myth that was ingrained into the public and corporate fabric of country music. By the mid-20th century, most of America considered country an aspect of white heritage, and neither the media nor the industry rarely referenced its’ multi-cultural roots, or the reality that country had many African American fans.
VIDEO: Darius Rucker “Wagon Wheel”
It is important to note that the nearly unbelievable gap between Charley Pride’s success in the late 1960s and the emergence of Darius Rucker in 2008 was not a completely empty space for people of color. Cleve Francis scratched the lower ranges of the country charts in the early 1990s before returning to his career as an esteemed cardiologist. Trini Triggs appeared in the middle of the country charts in the late 1990s and early 2000s; and a handful of Hispanic performers, like Freddy Fender, Johnny Rodriguez, and Rick Trevino, made some impression on the country landscape. In addition, Aaron Neville, Tina Turner, and the Pointer Sisters occasionally popped up in the country charts with faith-based, seasonal, and gospel crossovers, and Ray Charles famously scored some country hits in the pre-Charley Pride era, parallel to his pop and R&B career. But this is a fact: Not one African American artist sustained a hit-based career in country music between Pride and Rucker, and the number of artists making country music for major labels and being promoted by mainstream country radio was to remain vastly and overwhelmingly White until Darius Rucker hit the charts in 2008, 81 years after DeFord Bailey helped introduce the Grand Ole Opry to America.
There is fascinating and peculiar architectural quirk that stands as a powerful metaphor of the thorough whiteness associate with country music for most of the 20th century, and a portion of the 21st. Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium is considered the mother church of country music. Between 1943 and 1974 it was the official home of the Grand Ole Opry, and the WSM radio broadcasts that beamed country music’s greatest stars out to America originated from the Ryman. Literally – not figuratively, but literally – every superstar, even influencer, every beloved and revered figure in the history of country music after 1943 played the Ryman stage. It is, without a doubt, one of the most justifiably famous concert venues in America, and today’s country stars continue to perform there as an act of homage, even though the Opry has moved to a new home.
The Ryman was built in 1885, originally intended as a tabernacle for large religious services. In 1897, the United Confederate Veterans hired the Ryman for a large meeting. While planning the gathering, they found that the existing venue was too small for their needs. So the Confederate Veterans paid for a balcony to be built into the Ryman. To commemorate the funding of the addition by the UCV, at the very front and center of that balcony, visible from anywhere on the stage, the United Confederate Veterans placed a sign that said “CONFEDERATE GALLERY.” Although this sign was (sometimes) covered by a placard that read “1892 RYMAN AUDITORIUM,” the Confederate Gallery sign remained in place until 2017. This means that even as we entered the “modern” era of Black engagement with country music, and Darius Rucker first performed at the Ryman in 2008, he was staring right up at a sign that honored the contributions of the veterans of the Confederacy.
(Excerpted and adapted from Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie and the Blowfish, published by University of South Carolina Press. This book is now out in paperback. You may order the book from The Book House.)
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