Throughout its seven years in existence, the association founded by musician Dale Watson flies so far beneath the radar of the Americana and roots music community that you’d barely know it exists. With its primary focus on honky-tonk, Western swing, and rockabilly, the Ameripolitan Music Awards is admittedly pretty small and loose, and one might assume that it lacks the organization, funding, or desire to be something other than what it is.
For the first four years, the annual event was held in Austin, which was Watson’s hometown, but when he moved to Memphis he found an enthusiastic music and arts community that opened its arms to the Ameripolitan folks and offered its support. This year the event was held over several days at the end of February, with a weekend of showcases and concerts throughout the city that concluded with the awards ceremony hosted by Western swing bandleader Big Sandy and Doris Mayday. Here’s a list of the winners, courtesy of The Boot:
Honky-Tonk Male: Charley Crockett Honky-Tonk Female: Sarah Vista Honky-Tonk Group: The Country Side of Harmonica Sam Rockabilly Male: Bloodshot Bill Rockabilly Female: Laura Palmer Rockabilly Group: Mark Gamsjager and the Lustre Kings Western Swing Male: Dave Stuckey Western Swing Female: Georgia Parker Western Swing Group: The Farmer and Adele Venue: Luckenbach, Texas Musician: Sean Mencher Festival: Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion DJ: Eddie White
For those of you who have followed the Ameripolitan awards, you probably noticed that the outlaw category has been eliminated — actually, it has been rolled into honky-tonk. In addition to the winners listed above, special awards were given out this year to Duane Eddy, who received the 2020 Master Award, and J.M. Van Eaton for the 2020 Founder of the Sound Award.
I’d bet that many of the nominees and winners aren’t all that well known to No Depression readers who live outside of Texas, or maybe Sweden. The latter is home to The Country Side of Harmonica Sam, one of my current favorite bands who took home the award for best honky-tonk group.
Here are a few more clips from some of the winners. And check out these links to the Ameripolitan Music Awards site and its Facebook page. You might also enjoy reading my article on Dale Watson that was originally published as a Broadside column back in 2018.
This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.
Every week when I go to my local Trader Joe’s market, I pick up a pack or two of small grape tomatoes, which some clever employee has chosen to brand as Mini Pearls. It never fails to amuse me, and I’m sure others have noticed my grin almost every time I put them into the cart. It’s an unusual connection point for this city boy’s appreciation of country music and culture, yet one that serves as a reminder of a time that’s come and gone.
I am old enough to have seen the late Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon perform countless times on television in character as Minnie Pearl from Grinder’s Switch in the late ’50s on Ozark Jubilee, then for years on Hee Haw and countless appearances on variety and game shows. Always wearing that hat with a price tag dangling from it and a gingham dress, she debuted on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1940 and was an instant hit. Fears that her country-bumpkin comedy would offend the audience quickly evaporated as she used wit and humor that was often directed at herself. “A feller told me I look like a breath of spring,” Pearl would say. “Well, he didn’t use them words. He said I look like the end of a hard winter.”
While watching Ken Burns’ Country Music series, I was pleased that it included not only a feature on Minnie Pearl, but also spoke of the use of humor and comedy within the country music genre. And the connection to Garrison Keillor’s visit to the Opry at its final broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium was something I didn’t know. His Prairie Home Companion monologues about a fictional Lake Wobegon seem to owe a debt to Pearl’s Grinder’s Switch.
The term “hokum” came out of the minstrel and vaudeville shows, and it represented a “low comedy” style that included gags, routines, and songs using bawdy and risqué innuendo along with social and racial insults. Early blues musicians, jug bands, and string bands popularized thinly veiled sexual songs that were recorded and released in the ’20s. Here’s an example from Bo Carter of the Mississippi Sheiks that includes the lyrics:
Some men like lunch meat And some they likes cold tongue Some men don’t care for biscuits They likes a dog gone big fat bun But baby don’t put no more baking powder in your bread you see ‘Cause your two biscuits plenty big enough for me
Early in his career, Bill Monroe had appeared in blackface at minstrel shows, and he incorporated hokum into his bluegrass shows. The tradition was carried over with performers in blackface at the barn dances, radio shows, and early days of the Grand Ole Opry. Lee Roy “Lasses” White and his partner, Lee Davis “Honey” Wilds, were the first of such comedians who joined the Opry in 1932, and eventually “Lasses” was replaced with a new partner named “Jam-Up.”
Wilds was given permission to do tent shows during the week throughout the South before having to return to Nashville for the Saturday night broadcasts and was often accompanied by other Opry celebrities such as Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, Stringbean, and Monroe. In an interview with Wild’s son David by No Depression co-founder Grant Alden that appeared in the original print magazine in 1996, he shared what his dad and partner brought to the Opry:
“Music was a part of their act, but they were comedians. They would sing comedic songs, a la Homer and Jethro. They would add odd lyrics to existing songs, or write songs that were intended to be comedic. They were out there to come onstage, do five minutes of jokes, sing a song, do five minutes of jokes, sing another song and say ‘Thank you, good night’ as their segment of the Opry. Almost every country band during that time had some guy who dressed funny, wore a goofy hat, and typically played slide guitar.”
Through the years there has been a long tradition of hokum-style, comedic, and just plain silly country songs that have been released. Some, from writers such as Ray Stevens, Shel Silverstein, and Tom T. Hall, have placed high on the charts, while others remain simply a footnote in history. You probably have noticed I’m staying away from the most popular and longest-running series that traded on endless hokum, and that’s Hee Haw. I loved the music but hated the humor on many levels, so I’ll leave it at that.
A woman named Barbra Mies Waterman recently pointed me to a list of modern-day country hokum and humor originally compiled by Southern Living magazine. Check out the list here. Some are almost as sentimental as my Trader Joe’s Mini Pearls grape tomatoes.
This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column on the website of No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.
Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.
Hank and Audrey Williams and The Drifting Cowboys/WikiCommons
After watching the Ken Burns’ Country Music film documentary, the one constant that stands out is that long before Elvis or any other rock musician packed their sexuality into a marketing rocket ship, male and female country musicians could barely keep their hands away from each other. Out on the road poppin’ pills and drinkin’ whiskey, and living in tight quarters away from the family, there were plenty of cheatin’ hearts and endless highways of opportunity.
On Aug. 26, 1977, a single was released on Stiff Records in England by Ian Dury and The Blockheads with the title printed on the label “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.” If any song reflected the loose life of a particular style of music, this was it. I was 25 years old and working in the music business when it was released, and although it was in equal measure both accurate and fantasy, all I could think of when listening to it was modifying the lyrics to “Sex & Drugs & Orthodontia.” Allow me to explain.
I was somewhere around 12 or 13 when my parents decided I needed to put braces on my teeth. While I can recall that there was indeed an overbite and a bit of crooked imperfection, it seemed that nearly every newly middle-class Jewish kid living in the suburbs endured the pain and torture of metal wires inside their mouth to symbolize status as much as the need for cosmetic enhancement and future health.
My orthodontist’s office was a 25-minute bus ride from my school, and every six weeks or so I’d make the trip to have another adjustment. Just when the pain of the last visit would have subsided, he would tighten the wires once again, which would send me to the medicine cabinet in search of a Bayer or Bufferin tablet. That was likely my entry ramp to decades of seeking a level of joy and happiness through chemistry.
The office was in the basement of the orthodontist’s home, and he had three exam rooms that he rotated through with incredible speed, spending only a few minutes with each boy or girl for a fleeting infliction of pain and encouragement. “Looking good, little princess,” or “What a handsome cowboy you’ll make” was part of his standard patter. “Keep up the good work, don’t forget to brush and no chewing gum,” were the last words you’d hear as he dashed to the next patient.
Working alongside the man, whose wife and kids lived upstairs above the office, I might mention, was a beautiful dark-haired woman in her 30s, with a wedding band on her finger, and, even more important to a boy my age, a curvaceous figure that would occasionally brush up against me and send me home with lewd and lascivious thoughts late into the night. She was an object of my young desire and I learned I was hardly the only one.
One day as I sat in the chair holding a mirror to view the progress my shifting teeth were making, I heard movement behind me. Shifting the reflection a bit, I witnessed the orthodontist in a passionate embrace with his assistant, his hands sliding over her tight white uniform and moving south. I had feelings of jealousy, envy, and betrayal all at once and learned a life lesson. Regardless of marriage, commitment, and any sense of social or religious morality and values, nothing transcends raw sexual desire.
Ken Burns, Country Music, and Sex
For a genre originally sold to the public on the bedrock of religion and family values, country music stars have not escaped the same lifestyle of hedonism and decadence we’ve come to associate with rock and roll in the 1950s through present day. Some examples of the latter that come to mind are Jerry Lee Lewis’s 13-year-old wife and cousin, Keith Richards’ notorious drug and alcohol use, partying upstairs at Studio 54, and the film archives of R. Kelly. So if we’re gonna tell the story of three chords and the truth, shouldn’t we be at least a little truthful?
What is lacking in Burns’ documentary or most books I’ve read over the years is the darker side of country life, with its hidden secrets and contradictions. Nashville is not unlike Hollywood with its casting couches and “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” culture that, as we’ve discovered in the past few years, are far worse than imagined. Do you think that there weren’t or aren’t Harvey Weinstein/ #metoo equivalents in country music? Please … just start with Spade Cooley and go from there.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Burns will do a fine job elevating and bringing attention to a new generation of the great music of our American musical heritage. That he weaves into the story the presence and influence of African American musicians is a big step forward from past storytellers. His description of Hank Williams’ early death due to drugs and alcohol is rightly unromanticized. He also shares with great detail the adulterous realities and accusations of many of the early musicians and doesn’t shy away from the attraction and union of Johnny Cash and June Carter, who were each married to others. But none of these stories are new, nor do they shine a light on the seedier side of 16th Avenue.
This notion that “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” is simply about one particular career choice is laughable. You can substitute an auto plant assembly line, real estate office, your local police department, any athletic entity from youth sports to the pros, the college campus or whatever else you can think of. For me, it was the goings-on at the orthodontist that come to mind.
Maybe Ken Burns will cover that topic next.
This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.
Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.
Like a lot of other families back in the 1950s, we owned a black-and-white television that sat in our parlor in front of the old red couch. It had a tiny little screen built into a large walnut cabinet and it was where I watched my favorite cowboy and Western shows that were popular back then. Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun – Will Travel, Kit Carson, The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, The Rifleman, Davy Crockett, and all the rest. In the afternoons my sister watched and danced to American Bandstand, and after we went to sleep my folks would tune in adult shows like M Squad, Perry Mason, or The Naked City.
I was probably about 10 or 11 when my dad decided to step up our game by purchasing a 19-inch Zenith “portable” TV that weighed about a thousand pounds and was placed on a wheeled cart in my parents’ bedroom. It had a built-in rabbit-ears antenna and came with a small box that sat on the top with a round wire antenna screwed in. Although we wouldn’t have color until sometime after Apollo 11 and the moonwalk, we were one of the first on the block to get the low-budget UHF stations. Along with the three regular network stations, we now doubled our pleasure. Roller Derby, wrestling, and reruns of old shows were standard fare for these new stations, but it was The Porter Wagoner Show that I fell in love with.
“The Thin Man from West Plains” got his start in Missouri when his band The Blue Ridge Boys got their own radio show, and they broadcasted from the butcher shop where Wagoner worked. In 1951 he signed with RCA Victor, but it wasn’t until four years later that he got his first number one single, “A Satisfied Mind.” A featured performer on ABC-TV’s Ozark Jubilee, he and his musical and business partner Don Warden relocated to Nashville in 1957 and joined the Grand Ole Opry. Over the next 25 years, Wagoner’s singles charted 81 times.
In 1960, with the Chattanooga Medicine Company as his sponsor, The Porter Wagoner Show made its debut. The 30-minute syndicated show broadcasted for an amazing 21 years. There were 686 episodes filmed, with the first 104 filmed in black-and-white. Each show included a couple songs by Wagoner and his band, one by the regular “girl singers” like Norma Jean, above, perhaps a gospel number, comedy from Speck Rhodes or Curly Harris, and the finale, often featuring the entire cast performing.
Tall and thin with a blond pompadour and usually dressed in rhinestone Nudie suits, Wagoner had an easy manner about him, was a congenial host, and throughout his music career pretty much stuck to classic country and spirituals. The first five years of the show featured Norma Jean, followed by Jeannie Seely for one season, and then, in 1966, 21-year-old Dolly Parton joined the cast. Together they released 13 duet albums and had 14 top ten hits, with Wagoner acting as producer and arranger for not only these, but also Parton’s early solo albums.
After seven years of working together, Parton left, prompting Wagoner to file a breach of contract lawsuit against her. They eventually settled out of court and didn’t reconcile again until shortly before his death in 2007. She sat with him on the day he passed away.
Parton explained her reason for leaving in a September 2008 Los Angeles Times article:
“I worked with Porter Wagoner on his show for seven years, and he was very much — I don’t mean this in a bad way, so don’t play it up that way — but he very much was a male chauvinist pig. Certainly a male chauvinist. He was in charge, and it was his show, but he was also very strong-willed. That’s why we fought like crazy, because I wouldn’t put up with a bunch of stuff.
“Out of respect for him, I knew he was the boss, and I would go along to where I felt this was reasonable for me. But once it passed points where it was like, your way or my way, and this is just to control, to prove to you that I can do it, then I would just pitch a damn fit. I wouldn’t care if it killed me. I would just say what I thought. I would do like the Doralee character and say, ‘I would turn you from a rooster to a hen if you don’t stop!’”
Before she left the show, she wrote “I Will Always Love You” for him, and it went on to become one of her most beloved songs.
Wagoner and his band did a promotional appearance at the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jerse, just across the bridge from Philadelphia when I was about fourteen. I got my parents to drop me off there, and I stood at the lip of the stage as they played and just soaked up the Western outfits they all wore, the pedal steel guitar player, and, of course, Dolly.
Over the years, up until it went off the air, I’d check out the show from time to time, but it was the early black-and-white episodes that really left their mark on me. You can check out the list of guests here on Ranker, and if you want to see the full episodes they’re currently broadcasted on RFD-TV in America and the United Kingdom, and you’ll find many on YouTube. Let’s close it out with Willie, without the hair.
This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.
Spade and Ella Mae Cooley (Associated Press photo)
My oldest son and his friend stopped by my apartment the other night for a few minutes and I punched the play button on a playlist I put together of old jazz and western swing tracks. There are a couple thousand songs in there that I enjoy listening to, mixing up Dixieland and be-bop, blues shouters and big bands, both Mexican and cowboy orchestras of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The music was playing softly in the background when the kid called it within the first 30 seconds: Spade Cooley’s “Shame on You.”
Although I had long ago read about Cooley’s rise and fall, my armchair ethnomusicologist briefly went through his career and then in great grisly detail reminded me of how he had killed his wife, Ella Mae Evans. It is one of the most horrid tales of spousal abuse I’ve ever heard.
Back in the mid-’30s, on the corner of Sunset and Gower in Hollywood, stood the Columbia Drug Company. There was a small grill with a counter and a couple of booths, shelves of professional makeup for actors, a newsstand outside on the sidewalk, and a phone booth. It was a daily point of congregation for men looking for jobs as extras in the popular Western short reels and full-length films, and close to RKO, Paramount, Republic, Christie, and dozens of other studios. The actors were called “drugstore cowboys” and Dana Serra Cary wrote about them in her book titled The Hollywood Posse.
“They dressed off screen pretty much as they did on. Levis or whipcord straight-legged riding pants, checkered shirts, leather or wool vests, and, of course, Stetsons and steep-heel boots, comprised their daily costume. A cowboy’s hat and boots were something far more than either a necessity or a luxury – they were the hallmark of his pride in his profession. … When a cowboy walked onto the average Western set from the street, all the wardrobe department had to provide was a cartridge belt and guns.”
Like today’s day laborers who stand outside Home Depot hoping for a job, these men were prepared to act in saloon scenes, do some cattle rustling, or join a posse for five or ten bucks a day. John Wayne, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, William Boyd, and Roy Rogers are just a few of the ones who broke out of that crowd to stardom, and there were many more.
Spade Cooley often repeated the line that he “came to California with a fiddle under one arm and a nickel in my pocket.” Born in 1910 in Grand, Oklahoma, he was one-quarter Cherokee and learned how to play the fiddle from his father. He got married at 17, they had a son, and soon after they joined other Dust Bowl migrants traveling to California, which offered jobs in entertainment, agriculture, and the defense industry. The migrants brought their customs, culture, and music with them.
Jimmy Wakely was also from Oklahoma, a singing cowboy with his own band. Encouraged to make the move to California, he began acting in a number of Westerns and his music career took off when his trio joined Autry’s CBS radio show, Melody Ranch. After accepting a movie contract from Universal Pictures, his fiddle player, Spade Cooley, took over the band, added the baritone voice of Tex Williams, and expanded the number of players to include steel guitar, accordion, and harp. And I don’t mean harmonica.
Cooley and His Western Dance Gang soon began an 18-month engagement at Santa Monica’s Venice Pier Ballroom, got signed to Okeh Records, and became a rival of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, who also played regularly in California, often at the Mission Beach Ballroom in San Diego. Cooley began taking advantage of the acting opportunities offered in Hollywood, and he appeared in 38 Western films in both bit parts and as a stand-in for that singing cowboy actor Roy Rogers. In a few films he appeared as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers.
By 1946 the band began to fall apart, with Tex Williams going solo and taking some members along with him to join his new backing band. He scored a hit with the novelty song “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” which stayed at the top of the charts for 16 weeks. Meanwhile, Cooley rebuilt his group with some of Bob Wills’ guys and in 1948 he began broadcasting on television from the Santa Monica Pier Ballroom. Called The Hoffman Hayride, the show won local Emmy Awards (1952, 1953) and at one point was so popular that it’s been estimated that 75% of the TV audience tuned in to watch it every Saturday night. By the mid-’50s, western swing music became less popular, Lawrence Welk’s star was ascending, and Cooley was off the air.
Ella Mae Evans was a singer in Cooley’s band, and he divorced his first wife and married her somewhere around 1945. Fifteen years younger than him, she soon quit show business and began to raise a family. As his fame in music and film increased, Cooley drank heavily and was a known womanizing cheat. Bobbi Bennett, his longtime manager starting in 1943, claimed in an unpublished manuscript that in one year alone she paid off ten women for abortions. (There is much more detail in a 2015 article by Timothy Lemucci for The Californian.)
Throughout their marriage, Evans was often beaten by Cooley, and on several occasions tried to leave him. When his fame began to slip away, they moved to their Water Wonderland Ranch, way out in the Mojave Desert in eastern Kern County. An intensely jealous man, Cooley had accused his wife of cheating, even with his former boss and good friend Roy Rogers. As the beatings escalated, Evans hired a lawyer and filed for divorce on March 17, 1961. A week later he beat her again, making her sign over property to him and admit infidelities to friends and their 14-year-old daughter.
On April 3, 1961, Cooley murdered his wife in an attack that was so vicious and cruel that I’ve decided not to share the details. Last year Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham published an article about the entire crime, trial, conviction, and incarceration that you can read here, but be advised it ain’t for the faint of heart. It turns my stomach.
Although sentenced to life in prison, Cooley reportedly had close ties within law enforcement circles. He was treated very well in prison and was scheduled to be paroled on Feb. 22, 1970, after serving less than ten years for beating his wife to death.
In November 1969 he was given a special 72-hour furlough to play at a benefit in Oakland California for the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Alameda County. He gave his first performance in nine years to an appreciative audience and at intermission he went backstage, signed some autographs, and dropped his fiddle. Spade Cooley died on the spot from a heart attack at age 58. It was hardly soon enough.
Some days my bones feel weary. It especially hurts when I get down on my knees, slowly bend over, and flip through dusty shelves of old, used books. Years ago it was record stores, but I can barely recall the last time I opened my wallet for a hunk of plastic. It’s so much easier to stream it, and when I leave home I can fit a few thousand songs inside my phone. But when it comes to words on a page, I still prefer paper to pixel.
A few months ago I found a copy of Nicholas Dawidoff’s In The Country of Country: Peoples and Places in American Music that was published almost 20 years ago, and I just got around to reading it. Named “one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature” by Conde Nast Traveler, Dawidoff’s series of short profiles and conversations with some of the pioneers of country music at times feels more like a eulogy to the music than a tribute to a living tradition.
The question of what or who killed country music has been discussed and written about endlessly, and it inspired a song called “Murder on Music Row” which you may recall was popularized in 2000 by George Strait and Alan Jackson.
While most people agree that it was pressure from New York record label executives on Nashville producers in the ’60s to sweeten up traditional country songs with syrupy orchestrations and arrangements that could appeal to a suburban audience, that’s just one of the theories about what went wrong with country music. Another finger points at the 1980 film Urban Cowboy, which re-calibrated the story from Saturday Night Fever and changed up the music.
While Urban Cowboy spawned a fashion trend in big cities of men wearing cowboy boots and women in tight denim jeans doing line dances and two-stepping at strip-mall bars, I’ve always believed it was the pop-country radio playlists — along with the emergence of the Walmart consumer driving a pickup truck and watching Shania Twain doing a virtual lap dance — that killed off hard-core country.
I might have been wrong.
The Stanley Brothers “Rank Stranger” is a beloved country classic, and Dawidoff spent time with Ralph Stanley talking about what it was like growing up in rural Virginia. No running water, no electricity, no bathrooms. They had a horse to plow the field and a washboard to clean their clothes. They were Primitive Baptists, and as such they sang sacred music without instruments on Sunday mornings. When the family moved to Smith Ridge, their father acquired a Philco battery-operated radio, and as they listened to the music of the Manier Brothers and Carter Family, Ralph and his brother Carter would sing along.
The Louvin Brothers grew up in Henagar, Alabama, on a five-acre government allotment where their father grew vegetables and sorghum cane. The town had a post office and cotton gin. Charlie was 12 and Ira 15 when they saw Roy Acuff pass by in an aircooled Franklin, on his way to a show at the Spring Hill schoolhouse. They didn’t have the money to get in, so they stood outside with three or four hundred other folks.
Buck Owens was born in Texas just ahead of the Dust Bowl exodus, in 1929. Seven years later, the family of 10 loaded up their old Ford coupe and a trailer to head West in search of a new life. They settled in Arizona and were “fruit tramps,” picking grapes, carrots, peaches, and cotton. Many nights, Owens went to bed hungry, with only cornbread and milk in his stomach. The whole family would travel to California when the seasons called for field work, and they stayed in migrant camps that were often filled with music. According to Dawidoff, “The Mexicans sang folksongs, the blacks sang the blues and spirituals, and the whites sang country gospel and Jimmie Rodgers’ songs.”
These are only three stories he captured, but Dawidoff also profiles Harlan Howard, Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt, Bill Monroe, Chet Atkins, Sara Carter, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, the Maddox Brothers, Sister Rose, Merle Haggard, and Iris DeMent. Along the way he meets many other musicians, and there is a common thread.
Pretty much all of the early country artists came from rural areas and their families were, if not poor, then of barely modest means. Religion was a large part of their upbringing, and there was also a consistent tug of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” behavior. Liquor, drugs, gambling, womanizing, and other diversions were often mentioned.
Seems as if, more than anything, what killed country music was our own country. The population has shifted from living off the land in sparse areas of small populations to larger towns, cities, and suburbs. As much as there is a financial divide of the haves and have-nots, even the poorest of the poor have iPhones and access to popular music and culture.
If you’re searching for a type of music that shares raw stories of people’s lives and experiences, you’re more likely to find it in hip-hop or rap than in the studios of Nashville or on the airwaves. And while we’re fortunate in these times that there is a new generation of great musicians embracing old-time music, bluegrass traditions, folk singing-songwriting, honky-tonk, classic country, and alt-whatever, it all flies under a flag called Americana, which sometimes feels too encapsulated and formulaic. Beware of an Urban Cowboy backsplash and whiplash.
In 1997, Dawidoff closed out his book with an epilogue appropriately titled “No Depression”:
To call today’s mainstream country music county at all is a misnomer. Hot Country is really pop music for a prospering, mostly conservative white middle class. It’s kempt, comfortable music – hyper-sincere, settled and careful not to offend nor surprise. A lot like Disneyland, in some ways its model, contemporary country thrives because it is sleek and predictable, a safe adventure in a smoke-free environment.
In this final chapter Dawidoff offers up a bit more hope and optimism. He cites Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Junior Brown, Alison Krauss, Suzanne Cox, Dwight Yoakam, and Lucinda Williams as having “fresh things to say about life.” He mentions Son Volt and Golden Smog as the heirs to Hank Williams and Gram Parsons. And to close out the book he quotes Joe Ely: “You know, good stuff, people’ll want to hear it.”
This guy sure gives all of us country music fans hope.
This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.
Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email is easyed@therealeasyed.com
While it’s a little hard to admit that every now and then I can lose my focus and get sidetracked, there are those occasions when I take on a particular subject only to end up somewhere else. For example, about a month ago I sat down to write a short essay about the Carter Family, and by the time I got to the second paragraph I had shifted the focus to the African-American influence in roots music, featuring videos from Uncle John Scruggs to Grandmaster Flash. But after spending several months of researching and reading books about Sara, Maybelle and A.P. Carter, listening to hours of audio recordings and radio transcriptions, and watching an excellent documentary titled The Winding Stream you’d think I would be prepared this time around not to stray from the path. Wrong.
As much as I’d love to retell the story of the Carter Family for those who may not know how they’ve left an everlasting imprint on American music, it is the journey of award-winning independent producer, director and writer Beth Harrington and the way she brought the Carter’s story to the screen that has currently captured my interest. It’s too good of a tale to not be told. And better still, most of it will be in her own words. God bless digital footprints.
On November 15, 2010 a Kickstarter campaign was created to help fund a feature-length documentary. At the top of the page it’s described as an “epic story of the dynasty at the heart of American roots music – The Carter and Cash families.” Here is an excerpt of the introduction:
My name is Beth Harrington, and I’ve been a documentary filmmaker for more than 30 years. I’m also a former musician – a singer in the band Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers. So there you have it, my two loves – music and documentary film.
A few years ago, I successfully combined these loves on a film called Welcome to the Club – The Woman of Rockabilly. It was really well-received, so much so that it got nominated for a Grammy Award. Needless to say, this encouraged me to move ahead on my next music documentary, The Winding Stream which has the subtitle “The Carters, the Cashes and the Course of Country Music.”
I’d been aware of the Original Carter Family – the biggest “old-timey” music act of their day – and their musical legacy for a long time. But working on Welcome to the Club and meeting Rosanne Cash (who narrated that film) made me think it was time to do a film about this music dynasty that stretched from the 1920s to the present. I wanted to explore how the Carters practically “invented” country music and how legions of musicians – from Woody Guthrie to Elvis to Johnny Cash to Joan Baez to Jeff Tweedy, to name a few – all feel a debt of gratitude to them. And, as a result, how the tradition instituted by the Original Carters has carried on in their family and in the culture at large.
And I realized that, even though small parts of this family’s epic story had been told before, no one had presented this big picture. No one had shown the connection to the Carter Sisters, to Johnny Cash, to the folk movement and to the Americana movement. And no one had told the story using both original recordings AND contemporary roots music artists performing (and discussing) the music.
I started shooting The Winding Stream in 2003 and, with Rosanne Cash’s help, one of the first interviews I did was with her dad, Johnny Cash. Sadly, it was to be one of his last interviews; he passed away only three weeks after we’d spoken with him. This forced the realization that I needed to step up production because we were losing some of the key players in this story. I felt a real urgency to get these interviews on tape. I spent a lot of my own money doing so. And I’m very glad I did. But I knew I would need more.
What stuck out for me when I first read those words was the year that Beth noted she first started to shoot this film: 2003. Seven years later she was seeking money to complete editing, sound design, music and footage rights, animation, graphics and titles. That right there is the definition of vision, focus and tenacity.
For those of you who’ve either started or contributed to a Kickstarter or any other crowdsourcing project, it’s a leap of faith that you’ll get to your goal. Sometimes there’s just not enough money donated to keep it going, and there are other times that the original idea turns out to be either flawed, abandoned or simply unable to be completed for any infinite number of reasons.
But there was something I noticed about The Winding Stream campaignthat was different than most, aside from the fact that the picture was actually completed and released: in five years Beth has published forty-two updates to her supporters. What follows is a look into what it took to get this film to the finish line. I’ll share a few of her updates with a little selective editing, and dispense with quotation marks since y’all know it’s Beth’s writing.
Update #4, December 8 2010: Hi everyone. Well, as you may know by now, we’ve reached our Kickstarter goal! I’m moved and grateful to all of you who contributed to this campaign. And you did it in three weeks. Thank you so very much!
Update #15, March 21, 2011: Just a quick note to let you all know that we’ve been putting the funds we raised with your help to very good use. Just back from Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia (yup, it’s a city in two states) and we got five critical interviews done, plus a musical performance with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Wildly successful trip. Probably a Nashville shoot still in our future and one in California and we’ll be close to done shooting.
Update #17, February 28, 2012: I realize it’s been a while since I’ve updated you on things connected to The Winding Stream so here’s a little update. We’re well into post-production now which means there is a glimmer at the end of the tunnel (not exactly a light yet, but soon). Since last I wrote we’ve received two grants – one from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Roy W. Dean Foundation which have helped us considerably and are big honors, needless to say. We’re in the running again for funding from the Independent Television Service and should know in a while if we get that. We’ve started to show excerpts from the film now – once at a fundraiser here in Washington State and more recently at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, MT. Both times the reactions have been very positive which has buoyed our spirits a lot as we move along.
Update #18, April 29, 2012: We’re writing to let you know about some new developments with The Winding Stream. We’re moving into full post-production soon with our pal, editor Greg Snider at the helm. And we’ve found a wonderful animator to do cool photo-animations for us, Mike Olson. I’m at work on the companion book to the film, and we’ve had interest from cable channels, film festivals and theatrical and DVD distributors for when the film is done. Our hope is to wrap it all up by the end of the year.
May 3, 2012: A second round of Kickstarter funding begins.
Update #25, June 21, 2012: In the last 9 years I have amassed a treasure trove of what I consider to be important interviews with people who were witness to some of our most important shared cultural history. The early days of radio, the infancy of the record industry, the growth of interest in what would later be called “country” and “folk” music. People like Johnny Cash, Janette and Joe Carter, Mike Seeger, Charles Wolfe and others knew the Original Carter Family and were among the last living witnesses to the Carters’ role in all this. The people I just named have all passed away in the time we’ve been working on this film. I started to view completion of this film as a sacred trust. These folks had taken the time to share this with me.
This material couldn’t just languish on a shelf. It had to be made into the film I’d promised. So we stuck with it. Through years when everyone turned us down. Through times when we scraped by with tiny amounts of money that would get us one more interview. Through lots and lots of days of colleagues and friends — er, actually, that’s redundant; my colleagues on The Winding Stream are my steadfast friends –donating their time and talent and energy to this. Through many sleepless nights when I did think that I was – indeed – plum crazy to persist.
June 27, 2012: Funding for the second Kickstarter campaign is met.
Update #28: January 7, 2013: Hi everybody! Wanted to let you all know how much progress we’ve made on The Winding Stream! We have a final cut of the film and are now clearing rights for the music and archival images. If all goes well, we should have a completed film very soon. Thanks again for helping us get this far!
Update #29, February 1, 2014: Stopping by to let you know that great things are happening for The Winding Stream. We just recently learned that this labor of love- that’s taken more than a decade and the efforts of numerous talented people to complete – has been chosen for this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin.
Update #33, August 7, 2014: Monday’s NYC premiere of The Winding Stream at Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center was a big hit. We had a full-house and the New York audience embraced the film. We’d also like to announce that The Winding Stream won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Woods Hole Film Festival. This is our fourth festival award and we’re very grateful to be recognized this way. Thanks to all of our Kickstarter backers! You helped make this possible.
Updare #37, December 12, 2014: We have a big, exciting challenge! As you may know, we need to finish paying for music and archival footage and rights before we can open the film theatrically, air it on public television, or make it available on platforms like iTunes and cable on demand. We want to make all this happen as soon as possible to build off our festival momentum. We once needed $85,000. But incredibly we have recently received a grant from the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation for half that!
Update #39, September 2, 2015: Hi Friends – I wanted to let you all know that we’ve entered the next phase of the life of The Winding Stream! Theatrical! Thanks to the efforts of our partners at Argot Pictures, we are now taking the film to art houses across the country. We are also thrilled to say that the good folks at Omnivore Recordings are releasing a soundtrack album from the film! That drops on October 16.
Alright…so as you can tell, I’ve been completely swept away by Beth, her team and this unbelievably enchanting film. On a musical highway that’s ninety years long and still stretches out before us, there are unlimited on and off ramps that this filmmaker could have chosen. With a subtitle that reads ‘The Carters, The Cashes and The Course of Country Music’, she brings to life a family tree with endless branches. By using the voices of those still living and the ones who’ve passed on, and enhancing that experience with film, video, photographs and animation, the music and stories are presented with the delicacy and historical context one could have only hoped for.
There is a tendency to receive and process information in bite-sized pieces in this technologically supercharged world we live in. And I’m sure Beth would agree that it would be a mistake to believe that the tales of this great musical family can be told in a mere ninety-two minutes, despite over a decade in the making. (I’d love to see what didn’t make the final cut.) I think of The Winding Stream as a doorway to discovery, and hope that people will be inspired to seek out not only the music which has endured over the years and is readily available, but also take the time to learn more about the folks who absolutely define any such notion of what you might think the term Americana means. This is a story for the ages.
For those of you in the New York area, I plan to attend a screening at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville (the most appropriately named town ever) on February 11, and there’ll be some fine live music from the Shovel Ready String Band. Buy your tickets before they sell out and if you happen to see me, please say hi.
Some days my bones