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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060937034 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/27/2001 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.97(d) |
About the Author
A former magazine editor, Patsi Bale Cox collaborated on Nickel Dreams, the autobiography of Tanya Tucker, and The View from Nashvilled with Ralph Emery, among other publications. She serves on the Grammy nominating committee in the liner note category. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Read an Excerpt
Setting the Stage
I've always wondered if maybe I passed Hank Williams on the street without knowing it. I worked down at Loews Theatre at the intersection of Church Street and Capitol Boulevard when Hank was at the Opry and when Hank and Audrey had a clothing store downtown. During the three years I worked there, I met hundreds of people, thousands of people. I rode the bus back then since I didn't have a car. If you came downtown, you'd probably cross that intersection of Church and Capitol Boulevard, and there in the heart of the city, not far from the Ryman Auditorium, you might pass anyone. Tex Ritter, Ernest Tubb, Red Foley—and, just maybe, Hank Williams. I did recognize Bashful Brother Oswald downtown one day down around Fifth and Church.
I might not have known who Hank was because I wasn't a big Opry follower in the late 1940s. I wasn't really a fan of anything except boogie-woogie. My grandparents loved the Opry, so I was grounded in it, but I thought there was a sameness to it. You tuned in and heard the same people singing the same songs. It took me a while to really start to love it. But I did.
I started listening to country music and the Grand Ole Opry because of my friend Jim Ralston, who was a big fan of Lazy Jim Day song went: "Drinkin' beer in a cabaret." The song publishers took Hit Parade to court, and they finally resolved the issue by changing the line to "Singing songs in a cabaret." Of course, millions of copies of the original were already circulating, but at least the song could claim its rightful place as Hit Parade's top tune. And when anyone questioned country music's ability to sell in large numbers, Uncle Artneed only utter three words: "Pistol Packin' Mama.'"
When I went into radio work here in Nashville, we didn't play country music. We played gospel and pop. Many people in Nashville hated country music. Nashville liked to be thought of as the Athens of the South, not the home of what most still called hillbilly music. Back in 1962, when I was announcing at the Grand Ole Opry, my wife at the time, Skeeter Davis, and I built a house in Brentwood; I got to know the contractor well. I didn't think he was a country music fan so I was surprised to see him at the Opry one Saturday night.
"John! What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Oh, we've got out-of-town guests who insisted on coming," he answered.
That's how it was. Many Nashvillians would never have come at all except to accommodate out-of-town visitors.
I remember Minnie Pearl talking about how Nashville's "bluebloods" viewed country music. And of course she was around them a lot, since her husband, Henry Cannon, was a member of the city's elite. "They make fun of people who paint their names on the sides of their cars," she said slyly. Of course, she was talking about the days when entertainers had touring cars instead of buses and put their show names on the sides to advertise the fact that they were in town for a show. Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe—all the entertainers painted their names on the cars.
The King of Country Music was a title bestowed on Roy Acuff by the great Dizzy Dean. Acuff liked that title, even though he liked to tell people that there really wasn't any royalty in country music, just in beehives. Of course I never heard of any king bees in a beehive, and the King of Country Music wasn't even the original term Dizzy coined. It started when Roy played a show with Gene Autry and Dizzy Dean in Dallas. The audience rushed the doors trying to get in, and Roy tried unsuccessfully to calm the excited crowd. "You know how Texans are," Roy later joked. "They'll stampede just like a herd of cattle!" Finally Dizzy Dean came out and refer-red to Roy as the King of the Hillbillies.
There's a fascinating story about Acuff and Tennessee governor Prentice Cooper that is a perfect example of how some felt about country music in the mid-1940s. It was in October 1943, and Roy Acuff had just gone on the air with a coast-to-coast hookup of 129 stations. To celebrate the momentous event, Acuff planned a party to be held at the Ryman Auditorium, where around 3,500 people paid 75 cents every Saturday night to attend the Grand Ole Opry. Acuff thought it would be a fine idea to invite Governor Cooper to be a part of it all. The governor declined and behind Acuff's back criticized the event mightily. "I'll be part of no such circus," he reportedly said. "Acuff is a disgrace to the great state of Tennessee for trying to make Nashville the hillbilly capital of the United States."
The incident might have gone unnoticed, but it happened on a slow news day and a Tennessee reporter named Beazley Thompson decided to stir things up. He told Acuff what Cooper had said and suggested that Acuff run for governor. Acuff supposedly only nodded absently in response, but that was all it took for Beazley to jump in with both feet. He got up a petition and Acuff found himself as a candidate in the 1944 gubernatorial race. Acuff was a Republican, which made the chances of his being elected slim in the first place. Tennessee was a Democratic stronghold. The Tennessean was the pro-Democrat paper and the Banner supported Republicans. In fact they used to say that a possum could run against a Democrat in Tennessee and the Banner would support the possum.
Acuff eventually dropped out of the '44 race and ran again in 1948, but it was the 1944 run that caused the initial political furor. At issue was the fact that a "hillbilly" might govern Tennessee, and people still remembered how W. Lee O'Daniel campaigned for governor of Texas playing country music...
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| Introduction | xvii | |
| Part 1 | Opening Act | |
| Setting the Stage | 3 | |
| Part 2 | Hank Sets the Standard as an Industry Takes Shape in the 1950s | |
| Hank Williams: Elusive Legend | 33 | |
| "Little White Boss" | 48 | |
| Fred Rose: The Beginnings of an Empire | 54 | |
| An All-Star Lineup | 68 | |
| The Wild Side of Life | 79 | |
| Let's Turn Back the Years: Hank's Final Decline | 86 | |
| The Man, the Myth, the Mystery | 97 | |
| Marty Robbins: Country & Western Crossover Giant | 112 | |
| The "Heartbreak Hotel" Factor | 125 | |
| Part 3 | Country's Golden Age--the 1960s | |
| Country Becomes a Fighting Force, Led by the Man in Black | 137 | |
| The Long Good-bye | 152 | |
| Ginny's Heart: Patsy Cline | 158 | |
| Don Gibson: The Acuff-Rose Heir Apparent | 168 | |
| Bakersfield Buck | 180 | |
| Roger Miller: "By Monday I'll Be a Drummer" | 188 | |
| Willie Nelson: Just Waiting for Everyone Else to Catch Up | 199 | |
| Part 4 | Broadening the Scope in the 1970s | |
| Bobby Bare: Ushering In a Time of Contrasts | 209 | |
| Kudos to Kris | 223 | |
| The Storyteller: Tom T. Hall | 232 | |
| Against the Odds: Tillis, Pride, and Milsap | 241 | |
| Mr. and Mrs. Country Music: George Jones and Tammy Wynette | 258 | |
| Part 5 | The Eighties: Contemporary Country Meets Back to Basics | |
| TNN: Country's Coast-to-Coast Party | 265 | |
| Urban Cowboy and Beyond--All Hat, No Cattle? | 275 | |
| Barbara Mandrell: My Little Blond Buddy | 287 | |
| Dolly Parton: A Brain Beneath the Wigs, a Heart Beneath the Boobs | 293 | |
| Reba Nell | 302 | |
| Back to Basics: Skaggs, Strait, and Travis | 310 | |
| Part 6 | The Nineties: Country Explodes | |
| The Garth Factor | 325 | |
| Shania and Nashville: Never the Twain Shall Meet? | 336 | |
| Trisha: She's in Love with the Music ... | 340 | |
| The New Mr. and Mrs. Country Music? | 345 | |
| Dixie Chicks "Fly" High | 350 | |
| Marty Stuart: The Keeper of the Flame | 353 | |
| Postscript: Some Things I've Learned Along the Road | 360 | |
| The Impact Charts: A Measurement of the Best of the Fifty Years 1950-2000 | 388 | |
| Index | 393 |