The Same Music: The Bristol Sessions, Hank Williams, and the Lie That Split Blues from Country
Download MP3Groundwater — Episode 6: The Same Music: The Bristol Sessions, Hank Williams, and the Lie That Split Blues from Country
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Thomas Stubba: In nineteen twenty, a black vaudeville singer named Mamie Smith walked into a studio in New York and recorded a song called Crazy Blues. Okeh Records. Seventy-five thousand copies in the first month, which proved that black audiences would buy records made by black artists. That should not have been a revelation.
It was. The man [00:01:00] supervising the session was a talent scout named Ralph Peer. Three years later in Atlanta, the same Ralph Peer recorded a white Georgia fiddler named Fiddlin' John Carson
Thomas Stubba: Pierre thought that recording was, in his own words, "of plu-perfect awful quality." It sold out its first pressing of five hundred copies in weeks.
Two discoveries, three years apart, one black, one white, both Southern, both rural, both poor people's music that nobody in New York had thought was worth recording until somebody proved there was [00:02:00] money in it. The recording industry's response was not to say, "Here is one great body of Southern music, varied and rich.
Let's record it all." The response was to build two shelves
Act One: The Hat Company
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Thomas Stubba: This is Groundwater. I'm Thomas Stubbs. Episode six: The Same Music. For five episodes, the show has followed the music out of New Orleans, up the river, across the Atlantic, around the world, all those traditions finding each other. This episode is about the summer somebody decided to split it in two Act one the hat company In the summer of 1927, Ralph Peer set up a temporary recording studio on the third floor of the Taylor Christian Hat & Glove Company in Bristol, Tennessee.
[00:03:00] The building straddled State Street, which was also the state line. Virginia on one side, Tennessee on the other. Peer worked for the Victor Talking Machine Company out of New York, and he was on a two-month, sixty-thousand-dollar trip through the Southern states looking for talent. He'd placed ads in the local papers.
He'd brought two engineers and his wife. He had a microphone, a recording lathe, and twelve days What happened in those 12 days is usually called the Big Bang of country music. Johnny Cash said it was the single most important event in the history of the genre. Bristol built a museum. Congress passed a resolution.
All of this is true, and all of it is incomplete, because what happened in that room above the Hat Company was not the birth of country music. It was the birth of the [00:04:00] idea that country music and blues were different things You can't sell a record if you don't know which store to put it in, and in a segregated country, the stores were segregated too.
So race records on one shelf, hillbilly on the other, separate numerical series in the catalogs, separate advertisements, race records in black newspapers, hillbilly records in rural white publications, separate distribution networks. The music that poor black Southerners and poor white Southerners had been playing together, teaching each other, stealing from each other, and sharing on front porches for generations was now, for the purposes of commerce, two completely different things.
The categories were a business decision, but business decisions have a way of hardening into walls, and walls have a way of becoming invisible to the people who [00:05:00] live behind them. In Bristol, Pierre recorded a family from Mesa Spring, Virginia.
Single Girl, Married Girl, The Carter Family, Victor Records. Recorded at Bristol in the first days of August nineteen twenty-seven. A.P. Sarah and eighteen-year-old Maybelle. That guitar underneath, melody on the bass strings, rhythm on the treble, became the most imitated style in country music
Thomas Stubba: The Carters became the founding mythology of country music [00:06:00] its first family What the mythology leaves out is Leslie Riddle, a black musician from Burnsville, North Carolina, who traveled with A.P.
Carter for years, collecting songs from black communities across the Appalachian region. Riddle taught Maybelle Carter that famous guitar style. He helped A.P. find and arrange the songs that became the Carter Family catalog. His name does not appear on any of the credits. The other founding figure Peter recorded at Bristol was a tubercular railroad brakeman from Meriden, Mississippi, named Jimmie Rodgers.
"Blue Yodel," "The One They Call T for Texas," Jimmie Rodgers, Victor Records, 1927, recorded a few months after Bristol made him. Listen to the structure. That is a 12-bar blues, and then the [00:07:00] yodel.
Thomas Stubba: That's the father of country music By any real accounting, Jimmie Rodgers was a blues singer. More than a third of his recordings were 12-bar blues.
The blue yodel, his signature innovation, fused European yodeling with African American falsetto traditions he'd learned working the railroads along Black brakemen and section hands. Wolf grew up listening to Jimmie Rodgers records. He said so himself, [00:08:00] "I was inspired by the records of Jimmie Rodgers. I took up that idea and adapted it to my own abilities.
I couldn't do no yodeling, so I turned to howling, and it's done me just fine." The father of country music inspiring the howl of one of the greatest blues singers who ever lived. The traffic moved in both directions. The shells were a lie.
Act Two: The Same Five Notes
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Thomas Stubba: Act Two. The same five notes Strip away the marketing, strip away the catalog numbers and the racial coding and the shelf placement. Listen to what's actually happening in the music. What you hear underneath everything is the same five notes. The pentatonic scale, five notes instead of the Western seven.
It's the backbone of the blues. It's the backbone [00:09:00] of Appalachian folk music. It shows up in West African vocal traditions carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people, and it shows up in the Scots-Irish ballad traditions carried across the Atlantic by indentured servants and economic refugees. Two populations arriving from different continents under different conditions of suffering, carrying the same five-note musical vocabulary.
They met in the American South, and the music they made together, before anybody came along to separate it, was the root system of everything that followed. I'm not saying a Scottish fiddler and an enslaved African sat down on a porch together and invented American music in a single afternoon. The conditions were brutal.
The power was asymmetrical. The sharing that happened was often theft, white musicians taking Black musical innovations without credit or compensation, a pattern that would [00:10:00] repeat for the entire century. But the musical fact is stubborn. A fiddle tune from County Donegal and a field holler from the Mississippi Delta share harmonic DNA that neither tradition invented and neither tradition owns.
The banjo is the physical proof. The instrument most Americans associate with white Appalachian music, with bluegrass, with front porches, is African, descended from West African lutes made from gourds, brought to America by enslaved people, then taken up by white musicians through the minstrel show tradition of the nineteenth century.
By the time the recording industry arrived in the 1920s, the banjo was coded white. Its African origins had been laundered out of the cultural memory. The instrument itself had crossed the racial line the record labels were about to draw, and nobody remembered the crossing. The fiddle [00:11:00] tells the same story from the other direction, European in origin, brought by Scots-Irish settlers, but taken up by enslaved and free Black musicians throughout the South to the point where, by some accounts, the best fiddlers in the antebellum South were Black.
And then there's the harmonica player Pan American Blues, DeFord Bailey, recorded in 1927. That is one man and a harmonica doing a locomotive.
Thomas Stubba: [00:12:00] DeFord Bailey, a Black harmonica player from Tennessee, one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry. He performed on the Opry's radio broadcast nearly every Saturday night, his harmonica signal reaching across the Eastern United States.
He helped launch the careers of Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe by touring with them when they were still unknown, drawing audiences the white artists couldn't yet draw on their own. Try putting that on the right shelf
Act Three: The Man at the Crossroads
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Thomas Stubba: Act three the man at the crossroads Robert Johnson recorded 29 songs in two sessions, one in San Antonio in November 1936, one in Dallas in June 1937, and then he was dead, probably poisoned at 27.[00:13:00]
Twenty-nine songs, that's the complete works Come on into my Kitchen, Robert Johnson, recorded November twenty-third, nineteen thirty-six at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.
Released on Vocalion, open tuning a steel-bodied National guitar. Listen to what the slide is doing, a sound that is intimate and ghostly at once, like someone whispering in a room where the walls are too thin to keep anything private
Thomas Stubba: [00:14:00] The song is about a woman and a kitchen and the weather outside and the world that has failed them both, and it holds one line that carries more than most whole albums do.
"When a woman's in trouble, everybody throws her down." In 1930s Delta vernacular, in trouble meant pregnant outside marriage. It also meant in physical danger. Johnson didn't choose between the meanings because the ambiguity is the meaning. A woman who is pregnant and unmarried in the Depression-era Delta is in danger from poverty, from the man, from the community that will judge her, and everybody throws her down.
The community that should protect her participates in her [00:15:00] destruction. Johnson gets all of that in one line, ten words. Johnson himself is the crossroads, and I don't mean the myth. Forget the devil at the intersection of Highway forty-nine and sixty-one. The real crossroads is in the music, the place where every tradition in the American South meets and refuses to separate.
Johnson learned from Son House and Willie Brown. He listened to records by Lonnie Johnson, Kokomo Arnold, and Leroy Carr, urban blues artists whose polish he absorbed and repurposed. He listened to Jimmie Rodgers. He listened to the radio. He took it all in, and what came out was not blues in any pure sense, but the whole tangled root system of Southern music compressed into twenty-nine songs and a dead man at twenty-seven.
Act Four: The Cover That Showed Its Work
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Thomas Stubba: Act four: The cover that showed its work. [00:16:00] Thirty five years after Robert Johnson recorded Come On in My Kitchen in a San Antonio hotel room, the Allman Brothers recorded it too this time the Allman Brothers Band from Shades of Two Worlds, Epic Records, 1991. Listen to the slide guitar and the delta register, the bottleneck, the bending notes, the tradition that runs from Son House to Robert Johnson through Elmore James through Muddy Waters, and then listen to what the phrasing does next
Thomas Stubba: It's a blues guitar.
Nobody hearing those first bars would mistake it for [00:17:00] anything else. And then as the song develops, the phrasing shifts, quick runs, modal inflections, the mountain music DNA that comes from the Scots-Irish side of the Appalachian tradition. The blues and the bluegrass sit in the same song played by the same hand, and the transitions are seamless because they were never really separate.
Duane Allman isn't fusing two genres. He's revealing that they grew from the same root. The Allman Brothers Band, in its original incarnation, was an integrated group from Macon, Georgia. Their sound drew on blues, jazz, country, and rock without privileging any of them. They refused the categories because the categories were irrelevant to what they were doing in the room.
Politics had nothing to do with it The Allmans' version is not better than Johnson's. Nothing could be. Johnson's recording has an authority of a man speaking [00:18:00] directly from inside the conditions the song describes, and that authority is unreproducible. What the Allmans' version does is make visible what Johnson's version takes for granted, that the border between blues and country was drawn by commerce, not by the music.
Johnson didn't need to demonstrate the unity; he never experienced the division. The Allmans, playing in an era where the genre walls were firmly in place, had to actively show the connections that Johnson's generation never thought to hide
Act Five: The Hank Williams Problem
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Thomas Stubba: Act five: The Hank Williams Problem.
Hank Williams is the case that breaks the filing system. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hank Williams, MGM Records, 1949. Listen to the way the melody bends around the beat
Thomas Stubba: [00:19:00] Hiram King Williams was born in nineteen twenty-three in Mount Olive, Alabama, and grew up in Georgiana and Greenville in the southern part of the state.
His primary musical education came from a black street musician named Rufus Teetot Payne, who taught the boy chords, rhythm and blues inflected vocal style that would become the most influential sound in the history of country music. Williams acknowledged Payne as his fundamental teacher. [00:20:00] The foundation of country music's most iconic voice was laid by a black man playing blues on a street corner in Alabama.
"I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" is a blues song in every meaningful sense. The emotional territory, the vocal delivery, the way the melody bends around the beat, the only thing country about it is the label it was filed under and the radio stations that played it. "Love Sick Blues," his breakthrough hit, was written by a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, recorded first by a vaudeville singer, and structured as a twelve bar blues.
Williams took it and made it sound like it came from the same soil as Robert Johnson's recordings because it did. The soil doesn't recognize the property lines. Williams died on New Year's Day, nineteen fifty-three, in the back seat of his Cadillac, somewhere between Knoxville and Canton, Ohio, on his way to a show.
He was twenty-nine years old. The official [00:21:00] cause was heart failure compounded by alcohol and whatever pills he'd been taking. The real cause was the same thing that killed Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday: the conditions, poverty, addiction enabled by an industry that profited from the performer's destruction, a system that extracted the music and discarded the musician.
Johnson died at twenty-seven. Williams died at twenty-nine. They were filed under different genres, played on different radio stations, sold to different audiences. Arnold Shultz, that's the other name nobody knows, a Black fiddler and guitarist from Kentucky who mentored Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass.
Monroe credited Shultz repeatedly, said the man's blues-inflected fiddling was the foundation of his own style. The father of bluegrass learned his signature sound from a Black musician. The father of country music learned his [00:22:00] signature vocal style from a Black musician. The first star of the Grand Ole Opry was a Black harmonica player.
The Carter Family song collector was a Black guitar player. This is not an argument that country music is really Black music. That would be another distortion. Country music is the music of the poor rural South, and the poor rural South was Black and white, and often didn't much care about the distinction when somebody could play
Act Six: The Shells Come Down
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Thomas Stubba: Act six, The Shells Come Down.
There is a recording that settles this. It was made in a room in Hollywood in July of 1930 Blue Yodel number nine, Jimmie Rodgers with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano. Victor Records recorded in Hollywood July, 1930
[00:23:00] A white man from Meridian, Mississippi, singing a 12-bar blues with a yodel he learned from railroad workers and minstrel shows, backed by the greatest jazz musician in the world, a black man from the battlefield in New Orleans who learned to play in the colored waif's home.
Rogers sings, Armstrong plays fills between the vocal lines, commenting, answering, sometimes gently mocking the yodel with a wit that Rogers clearly enjoys. Lil Hardin Armstrong, who had put King Oliver's band together and pushed her husband to leave it, plays piano underneath them both. [00:24:00] The three of them are in a room in Hollywood, and the room doesn't care about the catalog numbers.
The record was filed under hillbilly. Armstrong's name didn't appear on the label of the original 78. The most famous musician alive playing on a record uncredited because the filing system demanded that a hillbilly record feature a hillbilly artist, and Armstrong was on the wrong shelf. The industry erased the collaboration in real time at the moment of its creation because acknowledging it would have complicated the categories that made the whole machine run.
Listen to it again. Forget the shells. Forget race records and hillbilly music and the Hat company in Bristol. Listen to what's happening in the room. A tubercular white yodeler and a black genius from New Orleans are playing the same music. They're playing it together, and they're playing it well, and the music does not know or [00:25:00] care that it is supposed to be two different things Ralph Peer, who set up the microphone in Bristol.
Peer also supervised Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues. He also ran the Memphis Jug Band's first session on Beale Street. He recorded hillbilly and race records on the same trips, in the same southern cities, often in the same weeks.
He knew. He'd heard it. He built the shelves anyway, because shelves are how you sell records, and records are how you make money, and the categories that resulted outlasted him by seventy years and counting The shelves are still standing. You can walk into any record store or open any streaming service and find country music in one place and blues in another.
The marketing decision became cultural assumption. The cultural assumption became a wall. The wall became so familiar that people forget it was built by somebody. [00:26:00] Somebody built it. Somebody profited from it. The music never consented to it.
Thomas Stubba: The shells come down
when you listen This has been Groundwater, episode six, The Same Music.
The book this episode draws from is called Race Records: The Lie That Split American Music and the Blues That Ran Underneath. Next episode, the shells get attacked, and the man who attacked them gets destroyed for it. A Friday night in Cleveland, 1952, a hockey arena built for 10,000 people, a crowd of 20,000 banging on the doors, and a disc jockey at a microphone who spent the next decade playing records from the wrong shelf until the government found a way to remove him.[00:27:00]
The Moondog, episode seven. Thank you for listening.
