Crash Course Time Line, No. 12: Roy Acuff & Bob Wills, a Pair of Kings

Hear the echoes.

Because the subjects of this third and final chapter in this mini-series on early country music provide context all on their own, I don’t need to pad this as much as I did the last two. Both served as bridges to the growth and future of the genre and people called both of them kings….or they just laid claim to the throne. Let’s get to it.

Roy Acuff, the King of Country Music
“Stylistically, his clear, heartfelt vocals modernized the era’s predominantly stringband sound just enough to seem innovative and traditional at the same time.”

That quote from Roy Acuff’s biography on the Country Music Hall of Fame website (hereafter, “CMHoF”) caught my eye for two reasons. First, it speaks to the particular weight of tradition in the genre, i.e., innovation can’t happen without giving tradition its due. Second, I’ve heard Acuff’s voice enough to know that does it justice.

Roy Claxton Acuff was born into a prominent family in Maynardville, Tennessee in 1903. He had a Tennessee state senator hanging from his family tree, just one generation back, and his parents’ home was a popular spot for community entertaining; the young Acuff pitched in by balancing farm tools on his chin. Athletics interested him more than music growing up - just about every source I read noted he was a “three-sport standout” - but Acuff did sing in his school’s chapel choir and performed in “every play they had” during his high school career. His first pass at a career saw him try out for the Knoxville minor-league baseball affiliate to the (then) New York Giants in 1929, but Acuff collapsed during tryouts - “an after-effect of earlier sunstroke” according to the CMHoF - which resulted in what all accounts term “a nervous breakdown” that lasted into 1930. Music would carry him out of it.

Acuff learned to play the fiddle during his convalescence by listening to Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner records and kept working from there. He started playing patent medicine shows (in blackface), and Wikipedia credits his experience working with no microphones for developing a clear and powerful voice; when he and his bandmates landed their radio gigs, that voice cut through the static nicely as well as carrying over the instruments. That backing band, the Tennessee Crackerjacks, featured Jess Easteray on guitar and a Hawaiian guitarist named Clell Summey, but became the Crazy Tennesseans with the addition of bassist Red Jones and upon being introduced as such by a radio announcer named Alan Stout (WROL was one station they worked, WNOX the other).

Crash Course Timeline, No. 8: Ethel Waters' Succession of Hard Times

Barely north of her prime...

“Life isn’t the easiest thing, but if we can learn to do more laughing about it, it won’t weigh so heavily on us.”

Ethel Waters should have never had a chance in the world, but she reigned as one of the leading performers of the 1920s and opened doors for black Americans across the emerging media of the decades that followed. She caught hell for opening a few of them - from black Americans, specifically - but her career embodied the progress and stumbles of an evolving American culture, both pop and otherwise.

Because so much of Waters’ story takes place after the 20s, placing her in that decade feels a little like cheating - i.e., since so many of her achievements came after 1930, why include her while pushing a legend like Duke Ellington to the 1930s? I don’t have a good answer for that beyond, well, I made a choice.

Ethel Waters came into the world in 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania, but not into a stable family. Her birth resulted from the rape of her mother, Louise Anderson, by a family acquaintance, John Waters, who happened to be a pianist. Her mother passed her to her grandmother, a housemaid who provided her less a home than a rapid succession of places where she happened to live. Waters married, and poorly, at the disturbing age of 13, but had the sense and confidence to leave her abusive husband before too long. As the rest of her life proved, she knew how to survive. Still, and not surprisingly, she described growing up in bitter terms:

“I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family.”

Her career started while she lived in Philadelphia, supporting herself as a maid at a hotel. One night, Waters attended a costume party at a nightclub and somehow got an opportunity to sing. She nailed her unplanned debut and parlayed that to performing at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theater earning $10/week, twice as much as she did as a maid (Wikipedia’s entry notes that her managers stole her tips, so who knows what she might have earned). That stumble into show business started a long, fraught career that continued somewhere between A-List and B-List until the 1950s.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 3: Bessie Smith, A "Rough," Brilliant, Damned Tragic Woman

The Empress of the Blues.

Tragedy bookended the life of 1920s blues legend, Bessie Smith. She lost her father, “a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher," before her memory kicked in and lost her mother (and an older brother) by the time she was 9 (or 10; I’ve read both). That threw her family onto the resources and guidance of her oldest sister, Viola, to raise what was left of a too-young family. The Smith family did some of the usual things to find income - e.g., doing other people’s laundry - but Bessie Smith and one of her remaining brothers (Clarence, I’m guessing) raised money by busking; they even had a street corner nailed down, Thirteenth and Elm Street, in front of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s White Elephant Saloon.

Clarence Smith later joined a touring troupe, one owned and operated by Moses Stokes, leaving Bessie behind and breaking up the busking team. He snuck out at night, knowing that Bessie would try to go with him. I haven’t read anything that says how she reacted to that whole thing, but, if hard feelings were present, Clarence made it up to her by finagling an audition to the same troupe for Bessie when she was 18 (old enough, basically, which was why Clarence snuck out the first time); that would have been 1912. She landed the job and joined her brother and the troupe on tour. The name of the company: The Rabbit Foot Minstrels - e.g., the same outfit that employed Ma Rainey. Rainey took Smith under her wing (there are rumors she kidnapped her, but…) and taught her how to sing the blues. Smith learned well. Very well:

“None of the others could sing with her combination of field holler and Jazz Age sophistication. None could throw her voice from the stage — without a microphone — and make a balcony seat feel like the front row. None made such an artistic impression on her contemporaries in jazz, or her disciples in rock 'n' roll.”

“Smith's version of ‘Downhearted Blues’ sold a reported 780,000 copies in 1923, a minor miracle for a song that had already hit nationwide for a variety of different artists.”

“In Smith's case, they amount to a woman whose life makes a liar out of every subsequent performer claiming to have had an original experience in the music business. She was the first bisexual, alcoholic, horsewhipped-by-segregationists, beat-out-of-songwriting-royalties, lemonade-making, dark-skinned singing-sensation whose husband cheated on her with a light-skinned ‘Becky with the good hair.’”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 2: Ma Rainey, Her Black Bottom & More

Wanted a fresh angle. As a tribute to hers.

“Earlier, purely acoustic methods of recording had limited sensitivity and frequency range. Mid-frequency range notes could be recorded, but very low and very high frequencies could not. Instruments such as the violin were difficult to transfer to disc.”

While the limitations of acoustic recording are tangential to the immediate subject, discussions of music from the 1920s should start by admitting the obvious: the sound on the recordings is shit, poor enough to make already dated music sound almost foreign. Richard Crawford’s America’s Musical Life: A History goes into more and better detail on the instruments and vocal ranges that dissolved into aural mush (though not the abridged version; of which, I wouldn't buy it), but acoustic recording turned some sounds tinny while flattening out everything else. As such, as you listen to just about anything recorded during that decade, cut it at least some slack and understand you’re hearing none of these artists at their best, never mind as they were. That applies everyone, even Ma Rainey.

Gertude “Ma” Rainey (nee Pridgett) sits astride at least half a dozen cross-currents of popular music from the 1920s: she came up on the “minstrel” side of vaudeville; she recorded prolifically just as the phonograph outstripped sheet music as the primary vehicle for sharing music; she brought one of the earliest iterations of blues to white audiences and did it while collaborating with pioneers of another famous black genre, jazz; finally, she embodied “jazz age” lewdness, and proudly, singing songs that tore up a handful of taboos:

“In her songs, she and other black women sleep around for revenge, drink and party all night and generally live lives that ‘transgressed these ideas of white middle class female respectability.’”

This was during prohibition, mind, though I just read the other day that Prohibition only outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol, not the consumption of it…so one could drink. Even a black woman. Songs that heavily hinted at (and possibly referenced a 1925 “orgy” with members of her chorus), however, broke taboos that it took the world seven or eight decades to catch up to (the most infamous song was 1928’s “Prove It on Me,” which came very late in her career).