Twilight Of The Cowboys: A Glance At The Origin Of Country Music
Marcus Spiegel
I’m not one of those people who can say country music flows in my blood. As a city boy from midwestern Canada, during adolescence I rarely ventured outside my musical comfort zone, the boundaries of which were marked by the groovy soundscapes of Aerosmith and the distortion soup of Seattle grunge. Later, in the more rebellious high noon of youth, I still kept well away from mandolins and fiddles, spurning singers whose voices jittered with the pop and spring of Nashville twang. Instead I preferred to teleport all the way back to Vivaldi and the archbishops of baroque, working up to the Classical and Romantic periods, stately operas and sublime concertos, music for kings and duchesses who sat watching from balconies while they stroked their cats. I had zero affection for saloons and dusty leather boots. Hillbilly shrieks disturbed me at a cellular level. I’d always been indifferent to the sight of my native province’s endless wheat fields, and the instant I possessed a modicum of self-determination I felt compelled to leave the heartland for the sort of metropolises where the sky is no more than a conceit and the subway maps are as intricate as the fantastical lands sketched out by Ursula Le Guin.
Nevertheless, even urban sophisticates and would-be intellectuals are not immune to the guitar-and-harmonica offerings of Bob Dylan. Dylan is the only gateway drug one needs to make the plunge into the deep river of the American music tradition. Turned on to Dylan, one can certainly find one’s way to the pan-artistry of surrealists and the mad musings of the Beats. Yet there comes a time when you become disillusioned by the Zen rap of Kerouac and the nearly infinite scroll that contained his ramblings. This is the moment when maybe you graduate from the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited and, after checking out Nashville Skyline, you keep on roving, hungry for more, passing by way of Woodie Guthrie and the traveling minstrels of the plains before pushing on farther south, searching for the enchanted region that gave rise to voodoo, gospel, and the blues.
Amusingly, the very features of country music that used to make me recoil are the ones I now count among the genre’s principal charms. Slide guitar and southern grandeur, plaintive voices, droning banjos, even—yes—yodellers in straw hats. I can’t help but admire Dolly Parton’s frilly dresses and beehive hair as much as I do her lonesome melodies. And I have no reservations about admitting that I now relish the songs of the doomed cowboys and other motley figures from the Southwest who carry about them a permanent shadow born of exile and angst. Haggard men whose knowledge of firearms surpasses their abilities on guitar—or at least so their personae would have us believe.
Okay, sure, maybe my callow romanticism is creeping in, but the thing is, country music itself—like the genre of the Western in literature and cinema—demands nothing short of romanticism pushed to the extreme. Sentimentality is much too threadbare a term to capture the country music artist’s longing for a life that’s already vanished and is now only an apocryphal memory. From the dawn of country music, back in the days when it was being broadcast as the Grand Ole Opry radio show, there were musicians born in the city who were advised by marketers and crafty managers to impersonate bumpkins and hicks. Some were told to don tattered overalls, or to exaggerate their southern drawl. Indeed, the early years of country music were dominated by two artists: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family spoke to America’s worship of the basic family unit and the sweet joy of a rural life. Rodgers, on the other hand, would find acclaim as an embodiment of America’s veneration for the railroad and, later, of the ranch and the rodeo. Rodgers was famous for popularizing the yodel, and he often appeared in costume for concerts—sometimes as a brakeman of the railyard, other times in full cowboy regalia. Christened with the epithet “the father of country music,” Rodgers was a star in the twenties and was already bedding down for a long graveyard sleep in the thirties, courtesy of tuberculosis. It’s significant that his cowboy wardrobe gestured back to the eighteen hundreds. The Homeric period of Ancient Greece now seems to us a high point in the flowering of classical values. But Homer himself was already bemoaning the weakness of the “modern age,” harking back to some more warlike era, when humans were closer to titans, near rivals to the gods.
Country music, then, professes its bardic origins by being backward facing. But even as lyricists and individual artists have anointed the past with greater worth than the present, the music itself is mysterious and difficult to trace. According to lore, however, it was the combination of the banjo (an African instrument brought over by slaves) and the fiddle (a European invention) that’s responsible for the basic architecture of the country music tune. And it seems clear we have African American slaves to thank for this potent alchemy. While it may be rare to see Black people devoting themselves to the banjo now, there was a time when the most exalted banjo pickers, whether in the clawhammer or the three-finger picking technique, later popularized by Earl Scruggs, were Black. So much so that in the early part of the twentieth century, white banjo players tended to invoke their Black counterparts by performing in blackface. Though this choice of makeup surely had other more depraved reasons for being used, one of its aims was to conjure the spirit of the African American banjo artists, the leading masters of the form.
Recordings of country songs gradually became widespread in the twenties, but that’s not to say this music had a modern origin. One of the curious things about country music is that even in contemporary times you don’t know who the original songwriter is unless you undertake a bit of detective work. I have more than once had the experience of listening to a song and assuming it was an original, only to later hear it performed by a musician on an earlier recording. At that point, I am usually deceived into thinking the second artist is the creator, only to be driven backward in time again after discovering an older version, and so forth.
The first recorded musician is in many cases no more the original songwriter than the Brothers Grimm were the first to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Many artists in the country music genre, especially in the deep past, were hardly more than scribes. Once the Carters had recorded all the songs they knew, they didn’t set out to write more music. Instead, A. P. Carter, the gaunt, suit-wearing patriarch, went out searching for it. If he heard a rumor of some old blind spinster who lived alone in a cabin in the remote wilderness of North Carolina who knew songs that could make even a hardened banker rosy-cheeked with dreams and nostalgia, he was willing to drop everything and drive up there and talk the spinster into coughing up her songs. Maybe he would compensate the woman for her music with a couple of nickels. Maybe he would merely offer her a dozen eggs and a bit of company in exchange for the primeval tunes she carried in her head.
Foreshadowing the epoch of celebrity rockers, A. P. Carter was a prodigious drinker. His working memory was frequently too scrambled with bourbon to be of any use. Lucky for him, then, that he came across a talented African American slide guitarist and blues singer, Lesley Riddle, who he met in a ghetto of Kingsport, Tennessee. Riddle was missing a leg because of an accident, but he did have the memory A. P. Carter was lacking. Carter brought Riddle along on these song voyages, and Riddle quickly memorized the lyrics and learned the chord progressions and melodies he heard. Returning to the Carter farm after these trips, A. P. would have Riddle teach the songs to his wife, “Mother” Maybelle, and her sister Sara. The results often made for the next Carter Family album, which of course necessitated A. P. having a few drinks in celebration of the accomplishment.
The past is the subtext of country music, but it searches for the past not through artifact and document, the way a historian would, but through the imagination. Even in its formative years, when the sacrament of the music was still untarnished by a plethora of financial incentives and the snare of celebrity culture—which would emerge with Elvis Presley—country music was by no means “three chords and the truth,” as some folks have defined it, but a strange system of theater no less abstract than kabuki. Journey back to year one of country music and you find it evolving almost as a tributary to vaudeville. You had musicians balancing fiddles on their nose. Banjo players, such as Dave “Stringbean” Macon, who wore his pants down to his ankles and was as much of a comedian as he was a musician. Indeed, Stringbean’s criticism of Earl Scruggs, when the latter erupted onto the scene, was that Scruggs “may be a good banjo player, but he was terrible at comedy.” Then there was Gene Autry, who started out as a Jimmie Rodgers impersonator and developed into a star of the Western genre in cinema. Back then, strangely enough, Westerns tended to be upbeat and comedic, and for a while, until he spawned his own set of copycats, Autry was the golden child of singing cowboy comedies.
But much as the First World War created the Lost Generation, the Second World War spelled the death of sunny Westerns. With the films of Clint Eastwood—not much of a singer judging by his later film, the maudlin Honkytonk Man—the tone of Westerns became a whole lot darker. Maybe we weren’t exactly in Cormac McCarthy territory yet, but we were traveling farther out, into more forbidding landscape, where heroes weren’t so much taming beasts as they were meting out a messy justice to villains in the desert. Country music, too, was taking a sinister left turn with the amphetamine-plagued Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black,” who, despite all his cries to Jesus, could not escape the devil’s sensibility. Ditto, his friend and fellow Highwayman, Waylon Jennings. When Cash roomed with Jennings in Nashville for a time both kept their drug stashes hidden from one another, Jennings inside the frame in a painting, Cash among the tubes and wires of the black-and-white TV.
And yet, however much these artists of the fifties and sixties kneeled to the power of sex, drugs, and fame, you could hear in their songs an echo of the Carters’ simple faith in the sanctity of the family and their little plot of land. The land where they were born, where they harrowed in the fields. The land where their bones would eventually demand to lie still. Still but not altogether silent, in the depths of the earth.
Marcus Spiegel’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Boulevard, Conjunctions, Southwest Review, North American Review, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize XLVI anthology. Originally from the plains of Canada, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His work is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review.