Last week, as a Black History Month feature, I wrote about DeFord Bailey, who was the first star of the Grand Ole Opry. He helped usher in the Opry as the grandest stage in country music.
Deford Bailey played other key roles. He popularized the harmonica as a country music instrument, and when Roy Acuff came to Nashville in the 1930s, Bailey helped him by touring with him. Acuff, of course, became known as the King of Country Music.
Bailey did the same with Bill Monroe. He toured with Monroe to attract audiences to his type of music, which became known as Bluegrass, and Monroe was dubbed the father of Bluegrass.
Although no other black performer became a country music superstar until Charley Pride in the 1960s, several black musicians played key roles in its development.
The influence of black music on country music began long before DeFord Bailey. It probably started with the banjo, which often conjures the hazy image of a white pastoral South. But the instrument is a descendant of West African lutes, made from gourds, that slaves brought to America, and which became a central part of slave music and culture in the South. Soon, the instrument was standardized, adopted, and spread to white audiences through minstrel and blackface shows, which influenced the rise of hillbilly music, a term later rebranded as “country music.” Many of the songs that early hillbilly artists played were likewise inherited and adapted from black sources – like slave spirituals, field songs, and religious hymnals.
While the South remained deeply segregated in the ‘20s and ‘30s, black and white musicians frequently engaged in musical collaboration, even appearing on many recordings together. Country Music details the collaboration between Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong on 1929’s “Blue Yodel Number 9.” On that song, the “Father of Country Music” yodels and sings the tale of a Tennessee hustler, while Satchmo, the most influential person in jazz, “seamlessly fills the space with jaunty blues licks.”
A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and her cousin Maybelle constituted the Carter Family, the “First Family of Country Music.” Sara was the lead singer, co-wrote many songs, and performed playing either a guitar or Autoharp. Maybelle (who was married to A. P.’s brother Eck) also sang but is remembered today as a guitar virtuoso. They owed much of their success to Lesley Riddle, a black man who composed several of their songs and helped A.P. Carter collect and rework many of the rest. Riddle taught Maybelle the guitar and influenced her style, and Maybelle revolutionized guitar playing in country music by making it a lead instrument.
Jimmie Rodgers built his fame on being a white musician who sang the blues, a style he learned from blacks while working on southern railroads. The “Father of Bluegrass,” Bill Monroe, credited the black fiddler and guitarist Arnold Schultz for inspiring his blues-inflected style.
Hank Williams’ foundational country sound was deeply influenced by Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, a Black blues street musician in Alabama who mentored him as a youth, teaching him chords and rhythm, and influenced his “hard time” singing style. Williams acknowledged Payne as his primary musical instructor, and the stage play, Hank Williams: Lost Highway, dramatizes Williams’ rise from rural Alabama to stardom, heavily featuring Payne’s influence on his blues-inflected sound.
These notes on country music provide an example of the quote, “America’s love for Black culture, but not Black people has erased African Americans’ role in pioneering American music.”
