The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Pecknold, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822340801 ISBN 13: 9780822340805

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Few expressions of popular culture have been shaped as profoundly by the relationship between commercialism and authenticity as country music has. While its apparent realism, sincerity, and frank depictions of everyday life are country’s most obvious stylistic hallmarks, Diane Pecknold demonstrates that commercialism has been just as powerful a cultural narrative in its development. Listeners have long been deeply invested in the “business side” of country. When fans complained in the mid-1950s about elite control of the mass media, or when they expressed their gratitude that the Country Music Hall of Fame served as a physical symbol of the industry’s power, they engaged directly with the commercial apparatus surrounding country music, not with particular songs or stars. In The Selling Sound

, Pecknold explores how country music’s commercialism, widely acknowledged but largely unexamined, has affected the way it is produced, the way it is received by fans and critics, and the way it is valued within the American cultural hierarchy.

Pecknold draws on sources as diverse as radio advertising journals, fan magazines, Hollywood films, and interviews with industry insiders. Her sweeping social history encompasses the genre’s early days as an adjunct of radio advertising in the 1920s, the friction between Billboard and more genre-oriented trade papers over generating the rankings that shaped radio play lists, the establishment of the Country Music Association, and the influence of rock ‘n’ roll on the trend toward single-genre radio stations. Tracing the rise of a large and influential network of country fan clubs, Pecknold highlights the significant promotional responsibilities assumed by club organizers until the early 1970s, when many of their tasks were taken over by professional publicists.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diane Pecknold is a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar in the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society at the University of Louisville. She is a coeditor of A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music.

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"Any intelligent reader will enjoy "The Selling Sound." Tackling an element of country music that few other writers have addressed, Diane Pecknold redefines the relationship between the 'financial economy' and 'cultural economy.'"--David Sanjek, coauthor of "Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century"

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The Selling Sound

THE RISE OF THE COUNTRY MUSIC INDUSTRYBy Diane Pecknold

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4080-5

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Commercialism as a Cultural Text................................................................................11 Commercialism and the Cultural Value of Country Music, 1920-1947............................................................132 Country Music Becomes Mass Culture, 1940-1958...............................................................................533 Country Audiences and the Politics of Mass Culture, 1947-1960...............................................................954 Masses to Classes: The Country Music Association and the Development of Country Format Radio, 1958-1972.....................1335 Commercialism and Tradition, 1958-1970......................................................................................1686 Silent Majorities: The Country Audience as Commodity, Constituency, and Metaphor, 1961-1975.................................200Conclusion: Money Music.......................................................................................................236Notes.........................................................................................................................245Selective Bibliography........................................................................................................273Index.........................................................................................................................287

Chapter One

Commercialism and the Cultural Value of Country Music, 1920-1947

On Saturday nights during the 1920s, thousands of listeners turned on their radio sets to be "hypnotized by the yellow eye of the dial." The technology of broadcasting seemed almost disquieting in its novelty-one fanzine later referred to "the days when hillbilly radio entertaining was just a futuristic dream." As they peered at their sets, listeners could imagine that "the delicate mechanism of the radio ... caught and brought to the ears of us earth dwellers the noises that roar in the space between the worlds." Like the airplanes she sometimes saw fly overhead as she worked the cotton fields, radio was an emissary of the wider world to Florence Ward Ausburn. The daughter of Georgia sharecroppers, Ausburn marveled at her landlord's battery-operated radio and the changes it augured, even though the music she heard every Saturday night when he tuned in the Grand Ole Opry for his tenants was reassuringly familiar. The old-time fiddlers, ancient ballads, and well-worn popular tunes she enjoyed were wrapped in a veneer of unmistakable modernity, delivered from the ether amid the advertising messages of a new consumer order that was reshaping the countryside.

Given country music's association with rusticity and nostalgia, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that its earliest audiences and critics approached the genre through a veil of modernity and commercialism. Early hillbilly traded on the emotional associations, visual imagery, and performance styles of the past, but its structural connections to new technologies and to the early-twentieth-century extension of consumer capitalism into the hinterland positioned it as an exponent of the contemporary world and complicated, maybe even necessitated, its pretensions to simplicity and timelessness. Commercial hillbilly music was embraced as a marketing vehicle by the emerging broadcast advertising industry, rejected as a cynical corruption of tradition by folklorists and preservationists, cited as an example of the deleterious potential of mass media by radio reformers, and rebuffed as a cultural irritant that symbolized the problematic nature of Southern migrants in the minds of established residents of the urban north and west. Paradoxically, in spite of being patently pastoral, hillbilly music often represented unsettling forces of technological, industrial, and class change between 1920 and 1940. Indeed, the specific forms hillbilly's invented authenticity assumed -traditional, rough-hewn, rural-constituted a mirror image of the discourses about modernity that some anxious outsiders imposed on it-a glossy, cheap confection of modern radio; a harbinger of culture's subservience to commerce in a mass media regime; and a product of the disruptions of urban migration.

Richard Peterson and others have shown that hillbilly was enmeshed in conspicuously modern commercial relationships-in new conceptions of intellectual property expressed in copyright law and in the growing cash nexus that made farmers new consumers to the life insurance industry-but fewer chroniclers of the genre's history have recognized that contemporary observers, no less than current scholars, perceived it that way. In contrast to its aesthetic, hillbilly's economic position represented the confluence of technological advances and the maturing power of commercial culture, and critics and fans responded to it as they responded to the possibilities of industrial mass consumerism itself, with a mixture of fascination, unease, and excitement. Those responses, which were often meant to guard or extend specific economic and social privileges, helped to determine hillbilly's cultural and class meaning. Listeners, critics, and entrepreneurs all made sense of the new genre and fixed its cultural significance as much through their understandings of its commercialism as through their readings of its visual and musical substance.

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE HILLBILLY BUSINESS

Hillbilly music was above all a creature of radio. Although the earliest indications of the genre's commercial potential were the recordings of artists like Vernon Dalhart, it was broadcasting rather than publishing or recording that provided the lasting foundation for the country music industry. From the mid-1920s through the end of the Depression, radio remained the cornerstone of the hillbilly economy. Few performers survived on the wages they earned from the stations, and fewer still from the royalties generated by publishing or record sales, but a radio show served as a means of advertising the products that did support artists: the live shows that were the mainstay of every hillbilly musician's livelihood, the photographs and self-published song folios that they sold by direct inquiry, and, less importantly, the recordings marketed by the music industry.

The first barn dance show, an hour-and-a-half program of square dance and fiddle music, was broadcast over WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1923. In those early days of radio, the station's signal could be heard as far away as Haiti, so there is some possibility that the WBAP square dances served as a model for the barn dance format. More likely, though, is the explanation offered by Edgar L. Bill, station manager for the Sears-Roebuck station in Chicago, which in 1924 inaugurated the most important and oft-replicated model for the hillbilly barn dance, the WLS National Barn Dance. According to Bill, the station's programmers, like most of their peers in the fledgling industry, "would try anything once," broadcasting classical music, dance bands, choral music, and whatever else could be arranged. Bill's later account attributed the decision to broadcast a fiddler and a square-dance caller one Saturday night to a spirit...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822340801
• ISBN 13: 9780822340805
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 306
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland