OLDTIME MUSIC:
Oldtime music (1920s to early 1950s) covers 4 main areas of interest that are interconnected:
1. Blues (both black and white forms).
2. Bluegrass, Western Swing and oldtime Stringband.
3. Gospel and Spirituals.
4. Honky tonk and pre-rock country.
Unlike the highly commercialized musics of later on such as rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly and teen pop, oldtime music was sincere, meaningful and above all real. Rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly and all these new forms were basically commercialised versions of older genres like blues, western swing or bluegrass.
1. BLUES: blues music was around long before the ‘20s and owed about 90% to black (African) cultures and 10% to the folksongs of poor whites. When it was first recorded, it was represented by both blacks and whites. Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson were among the first to record a rural form of the blues. Bessie Smith also recorded a more jazzy form of the blues at the same time. Gradually, quite a few variations of the blues developed: firstly, both whites and black began to sing it. The white forms of the blues would eventually evolve into bluegrass and Western swing and was characterised by such artists as Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican and Bill Monroe. The black forms of the blues broke down into Delta blues [characterised by singer/guitarists like Robert Johnson or Charlie Patton], Piedmont blues [more or less initialized by Blind Boy Fuller] & Texas blues [Jefferson and many other disiples]. Other black blues artists [e.g. Blind Willie McTell] were less categorizable but were of course bluesmen. As the years went on, Blues proved very important to the development of all the other forms of oldtime music, especially Western Swing and bluegrass.
2. BLUEGRASS, WESTERN SWING and STRINGBAND MUSIC: The forms of music under this category generally had their routes were fiddle-driven musics. However, as the blues came to be added to stringband music, new genres began to develop. Western Swing - a combination of jazz, blues and oldtime stringband music - developed in the 1930s,. Cliff Bruner’s band - especially the 1937 - 1944 Moon Mullican vocal performances - contain all the elements essential to Western Swing: fiddling, steel guitar, piano & vocals and (songwise) blues, jazz, country/hillbilly & swing. In general, Western Swing was influenced partly by mainstream swing bands like Tommy Dorsey and party by oldtime hillbillly but the presence of blues-based singing and playing is what made this music new and different. Other bands of Western Swing are its most popular stylist, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Adolph Hofner, Pee Wee King and - if you want to call him such - Hank Thompson. Due to the presence of Moon Mullican, a blues singer and pianist who could approach any genre of music and do it exceptionally well, Bruner’s band are by far the best. Wills’ 1930s material is also essential and Adolph Hofner’s is another band well worth listening to. Bluegrass is the other main blues-based derivative of stringband music. Although many will claim that Bob Wills was the sole inventor of Western Swing, he was not overall. It was a group of artists, including Wills, Mullican, Bruner, Milton Browne and many others that developed the genre over the years. Bluegrass, however, was the vision of one man - Bill Monroe. Without him, bluegrass would never have existed. Bluegrass owed a lot to blues, stringband and western swing - as early Monroe recordings show - but also to gospel music. Monroe combined the best elements of blues, gospel, western swing, oldtime stringband music, other hillbilly and mountain musics plus his own personal style to create bluegrass music.
3. GOSPEL AND SPIRITUALS: Religious black music was the power behind many genres, especially blues and bluegrass. Many singers of both races - examples: Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Willie Johnson, Moon Mullican, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams - have sung and sometimes even written a lot of gospel or spiritual songs.
4. HONKY TONK and other PRE-ROCK COUNTRY: 2 thrids of country music was taken up by western swing and bluegrass in the pre-rock ‘n’ roll era; the other third was a diverse set of styles that were offshoots from the other genres. Country [Hillbilly] boogie was one such offshoot. From the Western Swing side came Moon Mullican [who was a member of [as previously stated] Cliff Bruner’s band as well as others and was a veteran singer by the time he went solo in 1946. His recordings for King and other labels from 1946 to his death were very blues-based. Many pure blues were recorded by him, as well as experimental R&B, bluesy country and gospel. From the bluegrass side came the Delmore Brothers, who shared a similar blues style with Mullican. Honky tonk, however, proved to be the biggest offshoot of the earlier genres. In fact, it would remain [in one form or another] until the 1980s as the dominant form of country music. Hank Williams, once again Moon Mullican, Ernest Tubb and a handful of others practically invented the style. Many of the artists - especially Mullican and Williams - were prone to record pure blues very often, too. Later honky tonkers rarely, if ever, recorded true blues.
These 4 styles are the main ones in oldtime music. All these genres were more or less based around the same thing overall - i.e. the blues. The music was - unlike rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly or other poppier forms of the blues - meant to be made for non-commercial or limited commercial reasons. The pop chart was one place the artists neither expect to make or wanted to be on. Many of them dominated the country charts - but no real oldtime artist made the pop charts.
Moon Mullican is an excellent example of a man who personifies the complete oldtime market: his repertoire is full to the brim of all kinds of blues (from jazzy Bessie Smith-type blues like "Old Joe Turner blues" to blues ballads like "1001 sleepless nights" to boogified blues such as "Pipeliner blues" to gutbucket blues like "Falling rain blues" or "Trifling woman blues" to R&B ("I done it") and piano-based vocal blues ("Early morning blues")), as well as mountain music/proto-bluegrass ("Sparkling blue eyes"), hardcore Western swing ("I’ll keep thinking of you", "It’s all over now"), honky tonk ballads ("Mr. Tears", "It’s a sin to love you like I do"), gospel ("Bye and bye") and cajun ("Jole blon"). He developed many oldtime music style and remained inventive until he died.
Bill Monroe is another example of a man who persoanifies oldtime music. From a repertoire that consisted early on of Jimmie Rodgers covers like "Muleskinner blues" & "Blue yodel #7", original blues like "6 white horses", western swing covers like "Dog house blues" & "I wonder if you feel the way I do" and gospel standards like "Were you there when they crucified my lord", Monroe developed his own style, called it bluegrass and wrote many enduring classics like "Rocky road blues", "Blue moon of Kentucky" & "Uncle Pen". In an era when rock ‘n’ roll was poisoning and killing off oldtime music in a way previous pop musics couldn’t, Monroe was the one who kept the oldtime style alive and never compromised. Like Mullican kept real Western swing going, Monroe kept his beloved bluegrass music alive.
Oldtime music had its glory years from the 1920s to the early 1950s. one of its last great stars was Hank Williams. Hank was a bluesman country singer in the traditional style and one of the greatest writers of country music history. By the time Hank came on the scene, oldtime music was so powerful and influential that it could not be ignored anymore by the pop music industry. Tony Bennett even covered Hank’s "Cold cold heart". It was soon that the pop music industry was going to accept oldtime music onboard but slowly kill it off.
1954 was the year that the first signs of the disintegration of oldtime music began. Western Swing bandleader Bill Haley recorded some santized R&B hits of the times and sounded like a watered down version of the R&B style of Moon Mullican. Suddenly, Haley was being called the ‘rockingest rhythm group in America’ and the music he did was being called ‘rock ‘n’ roll’. At the same time, a young wannabe country singer called Elvis Presley recorded his first records, including titles like "That’s alright Mama" & Bill Monroe’s "Blue moon of Kentucky". These were bluesier than Haley’s records but still a lot less bluesy than any blues Monroe or Mullican did.
Elvis’ and Haley’s records soon took off as a new pop phenomenon and for a while it looked as if artists like Moon Mullican, Bill Monroe or Merrill E. Moore would hit the bigtime in the pop charts. That was not to be - gradually, the industry was santizing the blues out of all the popular over-night success’ records.
A look at Jerry Lee Lewis, a would be blues and oldtime country singer who had a few huge hits in the rock ‘n’ roll era and who later emerged as a country hitmaker, reveals the attitude of the producers of the times. Very few true blues single were released on Lewis when he was at Sun or indeed later on.Also,the amount of true blues that were originally released in Lewis' 700 song repertoire can be counted on 10 fingers - while those that had to be held back for decades are very numerous. Sam Phillips wanted his watered down rock ‘n’ roller, not a blues singer. Lewis proved he was not a commercial artist as his rock ‘n’ roll success was shortlived as he was not truly a rock ‘n’ roll artist who could compete with poppy stars like Buddy Holly. If Lewis was around in the Western Swing era, he’d have been far more successful with his type of music and he sure would have recorded much better quality music.
Chess records weren’t putting most of their attention into getting the best out of Muddy Waters. Instead, they were making a success by recording a novelty artist called Chuck Berry - who was making the blues tamer and tamer with every record he made. Furthermore, Sam Phillips kept getting Jerry Lee to cover Berry and released his rival cover versions to challenge Berry instead of concentrating on creating and releasing Lewis blues originals. Chess also were nurturing others besides Berry - Bo Diddley, an even more novelty-type artist who recorded in an even less bluesy style than Berry. Yet, Berry and Diddley were being passed off as ‘bluesmen’. In reality, their teen-orientated songs could never be even considered anything else but outright attempts to become fully fledged popstars.
In parrallel to the sanitization of black R&B with the likes of Berry and Diddley, white hillbilly was becoming rockabilly. Such Mullican, Monroe and Delmore proteges as Carl Perkins were encouraged to write and record songs in the Chuck Berry mould and drop their worldweary blues and country songs from their style. Elvis was nurtured into a pure romantic balladeer while Jerry Lee’s record releases were kept tame rock 'n' roll and Nashville country 70% of the time,none of which truly characterised Lewis' blues based stylings.
Rock ‘n’ roll thus was more a producer thing than an artist thing - as producers made the music their business, cleaned it up and made millions, many of the artists got bored and disillusioned and many never even accepted the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ as a new music form. In most cases, as all rock ‘n’ roll was was a sanitized version of oldtime music. Furthermore, rock ‘n’ roll was insincere and dealt with many trivial, nonsense topics. Just a listen to the Big Bopper’s hits will show you this. And most of Chuck Berry’s (apart from "Maybelline", a glimpse of what might have been if Berry was more serious about his talents) also are rather mindless songs overall. Even on potential meaning songs (for example Buddy Holly’s "Raining in my heart" or "Peggy Sue"), the singer sings in such an emotionless, lighthearted way that the lyrics are rendered useless; in reality, the singer should be crying the blues.
Oldtime music was never to become a success again on the country charts - rock ‘n’ roll meant that ALL music on ALL charts was to be cleaned up and the Nashville establishment willingly cleaned up country music. However, when you compare the rock ‘n’ roll and country pop of the modern country era with the oldtime blues and country music forms, the latter win out bigtime. Rock ‘n’ roll not only destroyed real blues and country music - but also it didn’t allow great artists like Jerry Lee Lewis or Charlie Rich to concentrate on the styles that they truly loved.Such artists as these are ruined forever as a result. In this way, no true music fan can have a true love for rock ‘n’ roll music or if they do like rock ‘n’ roll, it is mislabelled country/blues spillover from the ‘50s.
The scary thing is the fact that now,even when it doesn't matter commercially,many artists still record the watered down rock 'n' roll and make it their premier style..
Nobody of any era is going to improve on the frenetic pace of Bill Monroe’s "Rocky road blues", the angry blues of Moon Mullican’s "New falling rain blues", the lonesome moan of Robert Johnson’s "Hellhound on my trail",the leering gutbucket blues of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Big legged woman" or the scarily truthful statement that is Jimmie Rodgers’ "T.B Blues". This is the music that has to be beaten, and anything commercial just can’t compare.
Patrick Wall,
October 1999.
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