Early Country Music
The Anglo-American ballad tradition was one of the most important influences on the burgeoning market for country music, or “hillbilly” music, in the early 20th century. Indeed, many of the earliest country hits were recordings of ballads or fiddle tunes. Even “original” tunes bore the stamp of the ballad tradition. One of the first hits of the “hillbilly” genre was “The Wreck of Old ’97,” a ballad about a catastrophic train wreck in Danville, VA in 1903 sung to the melody of the 1865 song “The Ship That Never Returned.”
This recording is sung by Vernon Dalhart, who was already well-established as a singer of light opera, and it became a massive hit, alerting record companies and talent scouts that there was an untapped market for hillbilly music.
Among these record company men was Ralph Peer, a talent scout for Victor Records. Peer traveled the South with a portable recording setup and in 1927 he set up shop in a warehouse in Bristol, TN and ultimately recorded two of the foundational groups for modern country music: The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.
“The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in some ways represented two different sides to the nascent country music genre”
Early Country Music
The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in some ways represented two different sides to the nascent country music genre. The Carter Family were a family group from southwest Virginia consisting of A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle Carter. The track “Gospel Ship” (also found on your CDs) is an excellent example of their style. Sara sings the lead while A.P. and Maybelle sing the backing harmonies. The Carter Family’s singing and harmonizing style in particular is influenced by a hymn singing tradition known as “shape-note” or Sacred Harp singing. Without delving too much into the music theory behind it all, you might notice that it has a more open and austere sound than other Protestant hymn traditions. Another distinctive aspect to the Carter Family’s music is the “Carter Scratch” guitar accompaniment played by Maybelle Carter in “Gospel Ship” and other Carter Family recordings. The Carter Scratch is a guitar technique in which the guitarist plays the melody on the bass strings of the guitar with her thumb while filling in the harmonies on the upper strings using a sort of “scratching” motion with the other four fingers. Perhaps the most significant thing about this technique is that it allows the player to provide both the melody and the harmonies at the same time. Here is a video that shows Maybelle Carter performing the song “Wildwood Flower,” with a nice close-up of the technique after the first verse.
Over the Carter Family’s career, they recorded a fairly wide variety of songs drawing from gospel music, Anglo-American ballads, and other folk songs. Indeed, after the Carter Family’s initial successes, A.P. Carter traveled extensively in order to collect “new” folk songs which he would then “fix up” and arrange for the group. Perhaps most importantly from a business standpoint, he registered copyrights for these songs in his name even though many of them were either traditional songs or older songs that had never been copyrighted. In any case, the Carter Family’s catalog provides many of the earliest seeds of 20th century country music.
“Over the Carter Family’s career, they recorded a fairly wide variety of songs, which were then rewritten and performed by hundreds of country musicians.”
These songs were then performed and remixed by hundred of country musicians. “I’m Thinking Tonight of my Blue Eyes” in particular served as the melody for a series of later country hits. Additionally, the Carter Family’s style was a major influence on bluegrass music in the 1940s, which essentially sped it up and added in blazingly fast instrumental solos, as in this example by Bill Monroe.
