Bluegrass Messengers

Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol by Archie Green
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309, Hillbilly Issue (Jul. - Sep., 1965),pp. 204-228

ARCHIE GREEN
HILLBILLY MUSIC: SOURCE AND SYMBOL
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois

HILLBILLY, THE WORD, has been used both pejoratively and humorously in American print since April 23, 1900. On that day the New York Journal reported that "a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him." We do not know how early the term began to circulate in speech. William Nathaniel Harben, 1858-1919, a north Georgia writer, must certainly have heard it during his Whitfield county youth. In his novel, Abner Daniel (1902), he used "passle o' hillbillies" in a vernacular context. When the spate of publications appeared after 1870 based on slow "Arkansaw" trains, one such pamphlet by Charles S. Hibler, Down in Arkansas (1902), featured a full description of The Hill Billy tendered by a guide to a trio of out-of-state land speculators in the Ouachita Mountains. The stereotype moved quickly from novel and pamphlet to academic attention, for J. W. Carr, University of Arkansas professor, in his first word list from the state's Ozark section reported the expression in 1903 speech, "You one-gallused hill billies, behave yourselves."[1]

There is no point in documenting the obvious by noting all the contemporary nuances-negative or comic-that describe the Southern mountaineer or backwoodsman today. Two snatches of folksong, however, add biting twists to the term as well as relate it to specific areas of agrarian conflict. In the Kentucky tobacco wars of 1907 organized farmers sang derisively of their dissident neighbors. "Oh poor old hillbilly, oh, where do you stand,/While the Dark Tobacco Planters Association is forming its clan?" In Texas, some years later, sharecroppers and muleskinners chanted, "I'd rather be a nigger an' plow ol' Beck,/Dan a white hill-billy wid a long red neck." [2]

What brought this figure to the surface of print and speech from Georgia to the Ozarks at the turn of the century? We do not know; nor do we have any acceptable etymology for the word. One possible clue on origin might be found in a pair of Scottish colloquialisms, hill-folk and billie. The former was deprecatory, for it designated a refractory Presbyterian-a Cameronian-a rebel against Charles II. Scots hill-folk and hill-men in 1693 were noted for zeal, devotion, and prudence in seeking isolation away from their rejected monarch's rule. Billie was used in Scots dialect as early as 1505 as a synonym for fellow, companion, comrade, or mate. The words hill and billie might well have been combined in the Highlands before the first austere Cameronian took refuge in the piney uplands of the New World. Historical speculation aside, we know the word in print only from 1900 and only as an Americanism.

Hillbilly, a combined word, has lent itself to further combination, for in many of its recent appearances it is found linked with the nouns-music, song, ballad, singer, folio, act, show, record. The OED places such a new combination for song in 1932, and the DA for ballad in I949. One student of American speech commented that radio itself brought the mountain nickname to acute and general public consciousness in the I930's.[3]

By 1951 the association of the hackneyed image and music was so fixed by mass media that a scholar felt impelled to undercut the linkage. He wrote: "We may safely discount the picturesque hallucination of screen and radio, that ballads are a monopoly of 'hillbillies,' a race of gaunt, bearded primitives, drinking whiskey out of tin dippers and singing ballads when they ain't feudin'." [4] Seemingly his discounting efforts were ineffective, for in a I962 dispatch from Germany a London official stated, "It is no longer considered in good taste among American diplomats to display an awareness of hillbilly music or to discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman." [5]

Perhaps the Foreign Service will shuck off folksy informality and its poetic accouterments, but it is not likely that American speech, letters, or scholarship in the near future is going to break the bond stated in the combination, hillbilly music. My task, then, is to ask why a pejorative-humorous term was first extended to a viable form of traditional folk music and to seek answers to the queries of when, where, and how the act of extension took place.

Two scholars who have listened to the music under consideration offer these preliminary guides. "Hill-billy music seems to be a super-hybrid form of some genuine folk elements which have intruded into the mechanism of popular culture." A dual formulation states: "Of or pertaining to commercialized folk or folkish songs (or the performers thereof) largely derived from or aimed at white folk culture of the southern United States, beginning in 1923. Of or pertaining to that style-a blend of Anglo-Irish-Negro folksong and American popular song-on which the commercial tradition was based and developed." [6] Whether an ultimate definition stresses time, locale, ethnic group, vocal and instrumental style, or the dialectic antithesis and synthesis between Folk and Mass Culture, it is necessary at this juncture to note that the term hillbilly music, however defined, has been employed for three decades as a rubric covering a kaleidoscopic variety of sub forms: old time, familiar tunes, Dixie, mountain, sacred, gospel, country, cowboy, western, country-western, hill and range, western swing, Nashville, rockabilly, bluegrass. Hillbilly can cover all available (recorded and published) white commercial country music or it can be equated simply with one limited type or recent period; for example, Time's folksong expert reports that bluegrass is a polite synonym for hillbilly.[7]

It is obvious that mountain folk sang and played music long before the word hillbilly was printed and before it was coupled with music. Language extension is not a chaotic process isolated from other culture forms. It is my thesis that the term hillbilly music was born out of the marriage of a commercial industry-phonograph records and some units of show business-with traditional Appalachian folksong. My paper is restricted largely to early matrimonial days: pre-1927, pre-Jimmie Rodgers, pre-Carter Family, and frequently pre-electrical recording processes.

The search for an adequate etymology, if one turns to talking machine history, can lead into a discographic jungle where the danger is that a meaningful area in American studies will be lost under a growth of esoteric labels and master numbers. It is basic to our purpose to know who recorded the first hillbilly disc, and when, but it is also more important that we ask who sang such music at home, Snopeses or McCaslins. On first hearing a hillbilly ballad or breakdown, do we visualize the mountain over which the Trail of the Lonesome Pine coiled, or the coves of Frenchman's Bend in Yoknapatawpha County? When we listen to these tunes do we hear the voices of shiftless, landless outcasts or of free and upright herdsmen and yeomen? Are we listening to the music itself or rather to pre-cast aural images? Do we deprecate the music because it is sentimental, banal, saccharine, or do we judge it as the product of an eroded or decadent culture? James Agee linked his talents with photographer Walker Evans to evoke the life of Alabama cotton tenant families in the depressed I930's. If the authors of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) could have supplied to each reader a kit of Okeh 45000's, Brunswick 100's, or Columbia I5000's, how much more powerful would their book's impact have
been!

Why have hillbilly records been on hand for four decades with the minimum attention from the Academy? [8] Why is it so difficult to break the aural blockade even today? David Reisman suggests a clue. "Things that strike the sophisticated person as trash may open up new vistas for the unsophisticated; moreover, the very judgment of what is trash may be biased by one's own unsuspecting limitations, for instance, by one's class position or academic vested interest." [9]

Not only does High Culture frequently downgrade the artifacts that document hillbilly music-record, folio, radio transcription, barn dance show, rural drama-as trash, but for two centuries it has labeled the very people who produced the music as poor white trash. Fanny Kemble, after a visit to antebellum Georgia, wrote of the pinelanders as "the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth-filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages.. .."[10] Frederick L. Olmstead, George M. Weston, Hinton Rowen Helper, and J. E. Cairnes-travelers, historians, sociologists-elaborated and
pyramided the dismal scene. Nor was it confined to the writings of outsiders.

Shields McIlwaine surveyed fictional treatment of the poor white and found that pejorative nomenclature ran from Byrd's History of the Dividing Line (1728) through Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1934).[11] At one time or another Southern local colorists used these analogs for poor white: lubber, peckerwood, cracker, conch, sandhiller, redneck, cajun, woolhat, squatter, clayeater, sharecropper, linthead, swamprat, tarheel, hillbilly. My personal vocabulary of such catch-names was enriched by an Oklahoma sailor buddy (and Bob Wills enthusiast) to include ridgerunner, appleknocker, cherrypicker, and turdkicker. [12]

Yet no country boy who carefully transported his guitar across the Pacific favored us with music labeled under any other tag than hillbilly. The very fact that only one of the names for a poor white was attached to the music and persisted, leads back to the time and circumstances of the christening.

There exists a semi-official baptismal narrative, reported in Collier's (1938) and subsequently picked up and used by others. [13] Like many a folk tale it bears some resemblance to historical fact, but it is so telescoped that it is both unfair to the actors it names and to those it leaves unmentioned. In a nutshell, reporter Kyle Crichton tells us that Ralph S. Peer of Okeh records [14] found Mamie Smith in 1921 to start the boom in race records (blues, jazz, and sacred material recorded by Negro artists intended for sale to Negro audiences), and later recorded Fiddlin' John Carson to start a similar hillbilly boom.

Peer himself richly deserved Crichton's praise and even more. He was at one time a successful businessman, a recording company pioneer, a music publisher, a completely unsung folksong collector, and a camellia grower. In I954 he won a London Royal Horticultural Society gold medal for his gardening skills. There is no mention in his obituaries of any award from the American Folklore Society; nor did any folklorist or historian publish an interview with Peer while he lived. [15] We can only speculate now as to whether he perceived his role to any degree as a cultural documentarian of the first rank.

Peer was regarded by his colleagues as modest and not given to exaggerating his position. He stated his role so briefly as to underplay it. In a letter to Variety he identified himself "as the person responsible for the discovery and development of the hillbilly business. . ." In a letter to me he wrote, "It is quite true . . . that I originated the terms 'Hillbilly' and 'Race' as applied to the record business." [16]

The story begins, then, in Okeh's New York office, but this is like tagging a link in a continuous chain. More properly it has at least five separate places of beginning:

an Atlanta fiddlers' convention;
a Fries, Virginia, textile mill;
a Gap Creek, North Carolina, mountain farm;
a Galax, Virginia, barber shop; and curiously,
a Times Square motion picture theater.

In the period June, I923-January, 1925, Ralph Peer was the director who brought a company of actors together from their various locales and who integrated their skills in a new drama. He welded isolates into a movement in the sense that the hillbilly record industry achieved an esthetic unity like other movements in art and letters. Alternative captions for Peer's achievements -genre, idiom, tradition-have been used to separate hillbilly music from other forms. He and his colleagues thought of themselves only as businessmen selling a new product-native white folksong freshly recorded and packaged-to a buying audience from whom the music had originally come. It took eighteen months to season Peer's creation and another two years, January, 1925-December, 1926, to give it a broadly accepted public name. There was no single day in this forty-two month continuum when a given person broke a champagne bottle and launched the vessel Hillbilly Music.

Actually, students of Americana know that comic derivatives and "concert improvements" of folksong, as well as some traditional folk music, were available on cylinder or disc in the 1890's. An exhaustive survey of the pre-race and hillbilly recorded corpus is badly needed. [17] In essence, much of the material was presented by rustic monologists or black-faced comedians to brighten up the gloom in late Victorian parlors. The potpourri of rural dances, minstrel routines, laughing songs, country fiddling, and concert offerings was neither integrated nor specially categorized by the industry or public. However, it was well received. Alma Gluck's "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" was the first Victor Red Seal disc to sell over a million copies and, needless to say, many of the purchasers felt they were getting a real view of plantation mores. Victor also did well with Charles Ross Taggart, a pre-World War I raconteur in the same vein as Uncle Josh from Pumpkin Center (Cal Stewart).

Taggart added snatches of folk music to his routines on discs with such titles as "The Old Country Fiddler in a New York Restaurant." Then, as now, the media offered restyled vulgarized, folk-like songs as well as authentic pristine selections under a bewildering set of labels. The 190o Columbia cylinder catalog identified the already traditional "Arkansas Traveler" as the "description of a native sitting in front of his hut scraping his fiddle, and answering the interruptions of the stranger with witty sallies." But two decades later this same piece performed by Joseph Samuels was cataloged by Okeh as an Irish instrumental. Between 1901-1923 there existed no established category for recorded native folk music.

This is not the place to ask whether the camouflaged comedians and country fiddlers who first introduced folksong to record buyers were traditional or not (although it is a vital question). In this period no recording executive, or folklorist either, had any reason to ask. Such questions were formulated only after Ralph Peer and his associates opened a field, bounded it, and provided a name. What was Peer's milieu when he recorded his first white folksinger? In 1920-2I the record industry had scored heavily with the rapid climb to popularity of race record star Mamie Smith and her followers. The general post-War economy was already sluggish, when a new competitive menace arose to challenge the medium. Radio was still a utilitarian message service during the War, but on November 2, 1920, Pittsburgh station KDKA broadcast the Harding-Cox election returns, and soon Westinghouse researcher Frank Conrad was reading newspapers and playing records over and over again from this primitive studio. New York station WEAF began selling time, and radio was on its way to big business. The record industry was directly challenged. "Almost overnight, radio sneaked into the picture and the novelty of tuning in music and static from a distance, combined with the convenience of no cranks to wind and no records to buy and change, began sending the sale of platters downward." [18] Edison's progeny was in trouble in 1923

There were many responses to depression. One was receivership; another was intense plugging of tested items; a third was involvement in the process of changing the phonograph's role from a utilitarian talking machine to a piece of home furniture; a fourth was the quest for new material and a new market. At this juncture Polk C. Brockman, [19] a young and imaginative Atlanta record dealer, conceived an idea of great consequence. He had grown up in a mercantile family and had entered his grandfather's furniture store, James K. Polk, Inc., quickly taking over the phonograph department. By 1921 the firm was Okeh's largest regional outlet with particularly heavy sales of the new race records. The young Atlantan convinced Okeh executives Otto Heineman and W. S. Fuhri to give him a wholesale distributorship, and Brockman soon met Peer in New York City. Brockman's business trips to headquarters were frequent; on one such trip early in June, 1923, he found himself in the old Palace Theater on Times Square viewing a newsreel of a Virginia fiddlers' competition.

Struck by a novel idea, he took out his memorandum pad and jotted down "Fiddlin' John Carson-local talent-let's record." His next step was to arrange for an Atlanta recording expedition. Brockman recalls that Peer had no particular type of talent in mind but wanted anything that might stimulate lagging sales. Both men went South via an extended Chicago detour for an Okeh dealers meeting held in conjunction with the National Music Industries annual convention. Meanwhile, Okeh engineers Charles Hibbard and Peter Decker proceeded to Atlanta with the accoustical recording equipment. Brockman rented an empty loft on Nassau Street, off Spring Street, from a suspicious landlord. With an associate, Charles Rey, he rounded up his artists-Warner's Seven Aces, a local collegiate dance band; Eddy Heywood, a Negro theater pianist; Fannie Goosby, a young blues singer; and Fiddlin' John Carson. A number of other performers-the Morehouse College Quartet; Kemper Harreld, violinist; Lucille Bogan, blues singer from Birmingham; Charles Fulcher's novelty jazz band; and Bob White's syncopating band-also recorded but, apparently, not all their material was subsequently released.

Atlanta marked Okeh's initial out-of-town expedition and the first of any major company to record traditional artists of either race in the South. There was no way for the local press, at that time, to assess the session's eventual significance. On June 12 the Atlanta Constitution radio columnist noted that the General Phonograph Company of New York was in town to record the Seven Aces-stars on the newspaper's own station WGM. [20] Three days later the Atlanta Journal carried a more detailed story on the event:

"Canned music" recorded by local musicians will be made for the first time in Atlanta by the Okeh company, of New York, it was announced Friday by R. S. Peer, production manager of the company, who is completing arrangements here for the recording of selections by a number of local musical organizations. About thirty recordings will be made at the laboratory of the company on Nassau street, including selections by the Morehouse college quartet of negro singers, "Fiddlin' John" Carson, the Seven Aces, and other organizations. Manufacture of the records here is made possible by a recording machine recently invented by an engineer of the Okeh company, which lowers the high cost of producing the records away from the home laboratories. [21]

Fiddlin' John Carson recorded on Thursday, June 14, 1923. [22] Initially Peer did not respond to Carson's vocals and felt his singing to be "plu perfect awful." [23] But Brockman knew the fiddler's potential audience-the great numbers of rednecks and woolhats who had flocked into Atlanta's mills and factories since the days of the city's reconstruction. Carson was very well known to these people. He was born in 1868 on a Fannin County Blue Ridge Mountain farm and, at the age of ten, began to play his grandfather's instrument-a Stradivarius copy dated 1714, reputedly brought to the north Georgia hills from Ireland in 1780. Carson fiddled during his years as a young race horse jockey in Cobb County, and, when too large to ride, he competed at the annual Atlanta Interstate Fiddlers' Conventions. Here in the city he was able to scrape out a living with his bow between intermittent jobs as a textile hand and building trades painter. He fiddled constantly at political rallies for friends Tom Watson and Eugene Talmadge, on trolley cars and at street corners presenting topical ballads to casual audiences, at the many Civic Auditorium fiddlers' conventions, and, finally, on the then-infant radio. [24]

On March 16, 1922, the Atlanta Journal had established station WSB with 100-watt transmitter as the first commercial broadcasting unit in the South, and on June 13 it increased its power to 500 watts. Three months later, on September 9, Fiddlin' John Carson made his radio debut as part of a novelty program. It was several years before another old fiddler, Jimmie Thompson, inaugurated Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. Carson had been preceded on WSB by a few folk performers: a Negro quartet from the federal prison in Atlanta; a north Georgia mountain quartet from Miss Berry's settlement school; the Atlanta Primitive Baptist Sacred Harp Singers; the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, a blind evangelist-newsboy and gospel singer. Other folk artists followed Fiddlin' John: Clayton McMichen, Charles and Miles Whitten, Ted and Boss Hawkins, Riley Puckett, and Lowe Stokes, who formed an old time stringband (The Hometown Boys); Dave and Andrew Hendrix, Jesse Jones, and Horace Thomas, a Negro jubilee four; Bob White, a blues-ragtime cornetist and jazz group leader.

WSB's manager, Lambdin Kay, put Carson on the air in I922 for the same reason that Brockman put him on wax in I923, his appeal to a hitherto untapped market; yet there was no direct tie-in between WSB's pioneer country music broadcasts and Okeh's recordings of the same music. Carson's first recorded selections were "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane/The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow." When Peer expressed misgivings at the initial session in the improvised studio, Brockman offered to buy 500 "right now"-in reality, as soon as they could be pressed in New York. Peer acceded and issued the item as an uncataloged special without a label number for local Atlanta consumption. He could not imagine a regional or national market for the disc. In fact, the first Okeh press releases on the southern session to a national trade journal featured the Morehouse College Quartet and Warner's Seven Aces. Meanwhile, in Atlanta Brockman prepared for Carson's new debut. A scant four weeks after the Nassau Street session the 500 records arrived via Railway Express. The Elks were in town for their 59th reunion and were invited to a small but festive old time fiddlers' competition in Cable Hall, 82 Broad Street.

On Friday night, July 13, Carson played both recorded numbers on the Cable stage in front of a large German phonograph with a morning glory horn and did a brisk sale of his own unnumbered discs across the footlights. He was pleased. Brockman recalls the mountaineer's quip, "I'll have to quit making moonshine and start making records."

Peer's early reservations vanished when Brockman reordered Carson's record. On July 19 the Atlanta Journal commented that the fiddler's two most famous tunes were on sale at local distributors and soon they were played for WSB's appreciative audience. The uncataloged special was now, late in July, given label number 4890, and, hence, was automatically placed in Okeh's popular series: dance bands, sacred, Hawaiian, Broadway tunes, novelties, instrumentals, standards. There was no thought of special nomenclature, nor was there any problem in classification, for Carson's disc at this time. On August 3-a day of national mourning for President Harding-Okeh placed special release ads in both Atlanta papers for the current records of such popular best sellers as Vincent Lopez, Billy Jones, and W. C. Handy, as well as the new local favorites, Warner's Seven Aces, The Morehouse Quartet, and Fiddlin' John Carson.

Carson's entry in Okeh's catalog meant that his pieces were available in August and September beyond the Atlanta market. Early in November Brockman sent the fiddler to New York to record a dozen more selections and to place him under an exclusive Okeh contract. Peer released a second Carson disc, coupling a bathetic and a vulgar piece, "You Will Never Miss Your Mother Until She Is Gone/Papa's Billy Goat" (4994), and began to sense the outline of the coming boom. Now Peer recalled that his New York office held a test pressing of some material similar to that of the Atlanta fiddler. In the spring of 1923, Henry Whitter, a Fries, Virginia, millhand-a self-educated guitar and harmonica player-had journeyed to the city to seek fame and fortune. Somehow, he had persuaded the Okeh concert and studio band director, Fred Hager, that he could do better as an entertainer than as a cotton spooler. The tests, instrumental combinations and ballads, were made, perhaps to get rid of the brash youngster, and put away on a shelf. But late in 1923 Peer sent them down to Brockman, the new country music expert, for advice. His reaction was positive and the songs, "Lonesome Road Blues/The Wreck on the Southern Old 97" (40015), were issued very early in 1924. The latter went on to make ballad as well as juridical history. We now know that Carson sparked Okeh's hillbilly movement although Whitter preceded him by some four months as a recording artist. [25]
 
Peer had two country hit sellers on hand; Brockman began scouting for similar talent. A cornucopia opened.
Okeh engineers in Atlanta found themselves listening to an array of local talent: The Jenkins Family-Blind Andy, Irene Spain, Mary Eskew-offered standard gospel numbers; Land Norris accompanied himself on the five-string banjo; J. Douglas Swagerty, the Druid Hills Presbyterian Church Choirmaster, sang hymns. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, an attorney and also an early Blue Ridge folksong collector-performer, responded to a recording session's announcement and journeyed, at his own expense, from Marion, North Carolina, to Atlanta to contribute two traditional songs. While a Georgia Sacred Harp unit sang "Wondrous Love," Fiddlin' John Carson's string-band, The Virginia Reelers, became the first group to record the social music of the area. Not to be outdone, in July, guitarist Henry Whitter took a fiddler and a five-string banjoist to Okeh's New York studio to record as The Virginia Breakdowners. Finally, during Okeh's first expedition to Dallas, Texas, in November, Chenoweth's Cornfield Symphony Orchestra appeared and the long parade of wildly exaggerated or grotesque band names-poking fun at the idiom from within -was on.

These were I924 recordings. Peer was presenting neither gimmicks nor innovations but was seeking material to sell to conservative rural or rural-derived audiences. In these halcyon days Peer's performers could not have broken away from traditional folk style even if they had desired to do so. Within the first year following Carson's debut, Okeh presented a full sampling of folk material in straightforward style: sacred, secular, ballads, lyrics, vocal solos, instrumental combinations. These items were released initially in Okeh's 4000 pop series which gave way early in 1924 to a 40000 series. By the end of I924, there were some forty folksongs scattered in this series and an Okeh executive felt the need for a distinctive sales category-an inclusive name that would identify this music to its audience. The June, 1924, monthly supplement distributed by dealers to announce new releases had identified A. A. Gray, Tallapoosa, Georgia, fiddler, as a Southern hill-country musician. [26]

The comparable December supplement identified two current discs by Carson and by Whitter as "old time tunes" played "in the real 'old-time' way," and parallel to other headings -Dance, Vocal, Irish-it listed "Old Time Tune" Records. (Brochures for July through November are not presently available to me; hence the precise selection date for the new title is unknown.) Okeh had previously pioneered by selecting the name race records for its Negro 8000 series; now it had an old time group within its 40000 series. By January, 1925, a little six-page, accordion-fold brochure was printed with the title "Old Time Tune" Records (equivalent to Foreign Language and Race Records special catalogs). By May, I925, the ninety-two-page Okeh Complete Catalog carried an Old Time Tunes section and this name was used in subsequent publicity material for many years. The qualifying combination, old time, probably had been connected to music in the contex of a southern fiddlers' convention or religious revival meeting, since both functions made extensive use of traditional folksong. [27]

It is interesting to speculate on what chance the new modifier had as the overall name for the genre. In retrospect, it had very little chance, for the February, 1925, Okeh supplement announced a new release, "Silly Bill/Old Time Cinda" (40294), by The Hill Billies. The second "Old Time" Tunes special catalog followed in April and added another disc by the group, "Cripple Creek/Sally Ann" (40336). The provocative copy read:

Hear, folks, the music of the Hill Billies! These rollicking melodies will quicken the memory of the tunes of yesterday. The heart beats time to them while the feet move with the desire to cut a lively shine. These here mountaineers sure have a way of fetching music out of the banjo, fiddle, and guitar that surprises listeners, old and young, into feeling skittish. Theirs is a spirited entertainment and one you will warm to.

The Talking Machine World (April 15, 1925) printed a life-like pen and ink drawing of The Hill Billies. The sketch was soon reproduced in Okeh's May supplement alongside photos of dance band leader Vincent Lopez and Negro monologist Shelton Brooks. How then did the noun hillbilly find its way onto the labels of two Okeh discs released early in I925 and into consequent printed media? The answer involves a southern string-band whose members came from Watauga County, North Carolina, and Grayson-Carroll Counties, Virginia. These two areas are well known to folklorists for the richness of their tradition. They come close to being the scholar's ideal and idealized "singing community." [28]

These three counties, significantly, nurtured the skills of the band members who were destined to name their region's music. John Benjamin Hopkins, farmer, house-builder, and North Carolina state legislator, like many of his Watauga County neighbors knew the songs and fiddle tunes prevalent in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His wife, Celia Isabel Green Hopkins, knew the old ballads and church music as well as her husband's repertoire. After their marriage in 1878, they reared a large family of boys and girls, all with musical talent. In I904 the elder Hopkins moved the brood to Washington, D. C., where he found employment in the Census Bureau. His hobby was organ building, and he taught several of his boys piano and organ tuning. Seemingly, they taught themselves to play any available instruments. In 1910 Al, Joe, Elmer, and John-ages twenty-one through eleven-formed an Old Mohawk Quartet and began entertaining in Washington's Majestic Theater. Music was to remain Al's main concern for the rest of his life.

About 1912 Mr. Hopkins built a large family house at 63 Kennedy Street in Washington's then open-field Northwest section. In the hot summers Mrs. Hopkins took the younger children back to their Gap Creek home farm. Daughter Lucy, until her recent retirement a Washington public school music teacher, recalls a variety of fiddle tunes, hymns, old ballads, and pop songs from both homes. In the early I920's the eldest son, Jacob, had established a country hospital-clinic in Galax, Virginia.

Many anecdotes cluster about his early use of musical therapy-bringing local banjo players into the hospital to cheer his patients. Doctor Hopkins was renowned and active as a surgeon and musician. As his practice grew, he brought his brother Al down from Washington to act as hospital office manager and secretary. Meanwhile, brother Joe, a Railway Express agent at White Top Gap, Virginia, had become an itinerant guitarist between regular jobs. He, too, gravitated towards his brother's office on his "bustin" trips.

On a Monday morning in the late spring of I924, Joe found himself in a Galax barber shop where one of the young journeymen, Alonzo Elvis "Tony" Alderman, kept a fiddle on the wall. The guitarist and fiddler became friends at once, formed a duet on the spot, and began to make music. Tony cut no hair that week. On Saturday Al came for a shave-and for his brother-and joined in the harmony. Word of the new trio reached John Rector, a Fries general store keeper and five-string banjo player of local renown. In fact John had just recently returned from New York City where he, Henry Whitter, and James Sutphin had made three string-band records for Okeh as The Virginia Breakdowners. There seemed to be a great deal of competition among the Grayson-Carroll musicians. Rector felt that the Alderman-Hopkins' talent and his banjo could outshine the Breakdowners. Since he was looking for an opportunity to make the exciting New York trip to stock up on fall merchandise, he asked Al, Tony, and Joe if they wanted to record.

The boys were agreeable, for they preferred music to their respective trades. Tony's musical skill was considerable. As a lad he had played the trumpet in his father's Dixie Concert (brass) Band. From his many uncles and a particular family friend, Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman, he had learned to fiddle at mountain dances. Tony's memory of the summer New York trip is both clear and amusing. It took three days in Al's 192I model T Ford to reach the city where Rector had arranged a session with Clifford Cairns, Victor A & R (Artist and Repertoire) man. [29]

In the studio Joe, John, and Tony used guitar, banjo, and fiddle while Al took vocal leads as well as acting as the group's leader. Also he turned the piano into a country music instrument- a precedent infrequently followed by subsequent string-bands. Good techniques for recording mountain string-bands were not yet perfected in 1924. The music was still relatively unknown in the industry; there were problems in balance
and placement. Tony recalls the scene:

We playedin front of a big horn, banjo ten feet back in the corner. I was fiddling like mad on a fiddle with a horn on it which I couldn't hear. John Rector couldn't hear me either, and no one could hear the guitar. Nobody could hear anybody else, to tell the truth. Victor played the record back to us and my father could have done better on his Edison! (No reflection on Victor;i t was us.) So we went home a little sad and ashamed that we had not done better.[30]

Fortunately, the quartet was not daunted by its failure. In January, 1925, they planned a trip to the Okeh studio-this time in Rector's new Dodge. The weather was cold; hence they improvised a hot brick heater for the journey. To break the long trip from Galax north, they descended on the Hopkins family residence in Washington for shelter. Mr. Hopkins asked his two sons and their mountain companions, "What d'you hillbillies think you'll do up there?" His paternal jibe was to prove effective. In the city, having learned from their previous failure with Victor, the band members were in good form. Ralph Peer supervised the session and recorded six pieces. At the end of the last number Peer asked for the group's name. Al was unprepared. They had no name and he searchedf or words. "We're nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia. Call us anything." Peer, responding at once to the humorous image, turned to his secretary and told her to list The Hill Billies on her ledgers lips for the six selections. [31]

The recording-christening date was January 15, I925; labels, as well as dealer release sheets, were soon printed and by February the first disc with the new band name was on the market. [32] Meanwhile, en route home the boys had qualms about their choice. Tony seemed particularly sensitive:" Hillbilly was not only a funny word; it was a fighting word."

Although he had grown up in an isolated log cabin at River Hill, ten miles southwest of Galax, he was in no sense backwoodsy or backwards. His father, Walter, was a self-educated surveyor and civil engineer, a justice of the peace, and a man of literary and musical skill. Tony felt that his family might be critical of the undignified name selected up North and half wished that he could reach Peer to alter the band's name.
But back in Galax the boys encountered an old friend who was to tip the scale in favor of the new name. "Pop" Stoneman had already journeyed north on September 1, 1924, to record for Okeh "The Ship That Never Returned/The Titanic" (40288).

He, too, like Rector, had felt that he could improve on Whitter. Stoneman's first record was not yet released
at the time of The Hill Billies' Okeh session. Naturally he was most curious about their luck with Peer. In response to his query, they reported success and the christening. "Pop" laughed until tears came to his eyes. "Well, boys, you have come up with a good one. Nobody could beat it." [33]

Following the New York success the band put on its first live show in a Carroll County high school under its Peer-selected name. Dr. Hopkins had died earlier on July 26, 1924, and there was no incentive for Al to stay in Galax. He now turned his father's Washington home into band headquarters, and following the release of their initial record the boys began a heavy schedule of personal appearances in nearby states, as well as radio work in the capitol city. About March, I929, as The Hill Billies, they made their broadcast debut on WRC with the theme song, "Going Down The Road Feeling Bad." Al's mother frequently accompanied her boys to the station and joined in singing the old ballads that were interspersed between the breakdown instrumentals and humorous skits. Fan mail began to come in addressed to The Hill Billies. Simultaneously, record buyers and radio listeners responded to the new association, hillbilly music.

The full story of the band that named the music is reserved for a separate paper. A few events, however, are salient to this account. On May 8, 1925, the Mountain City, Tennessee, Ku Klux Klan sponsored a tremendous fiddlers' convention, [34[ and, among others, invited The Hill Billies, having heard them on WRC broadcasts. At the gathering Charlie Bowman, a young country fiddler from Gray Station, near Johnson City, Tennessee, joined the band. He was the first of many newcomers to augment the original group's rank. Not only did he contribute his fine talent and humor at that time, but in later years he was to convey much of the band's story to discographers and folklorists.[35]

Following Mountain City a heavy schedule of personal appearances from South Carolina to New York commenced-at schools, vaudeville shows, fiddlers' competitions, political rallies, and even a White House Press Correspondents' gathering before President Coolidge. Much of the road work was correlated with trips to New York for recording sessions. On the final trip early in 1929 the band made a film sound short for Vitaphone that was released as a trailer with Al Jolson's The Singing Fool. It was certainly the first movie to couple the sound and sights of hillbilly music. A few years later Al Hopkins died following a car accident at Winchester, Virginia. [36]

The band did not survive his death. Ralph Peer's contact with The Hill Billies occurred during one memorable session. Later in 1925 he left Okeh for Victor but the band he helped launch did not go along with him. Instead, it went over to the recently combined Vocalion-Brunswick companies to work with A & R man Jimmie O'Keefe. All their post-Okeh discs  were released for dual sales purposes as The Hill Billies on Vocalion and as Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters on Brunswick. For personal dates they used both names interchangeably. During one New York recording session they were surprised to see on the Hippodrome Theater marquee lights, The Ozark Hillbillies. They responded to the competitive threat by having a Washington lawyer incorporate (January 21, 1929) their group-complete with an embossing seal and stock shares-as Al Hopkins' Original Hill Billies. But the gesture was of no avail. Other bands, singers, and units in show business appropriated their name. In time, they accepted the rivalry philosophically-especially when hillbilly became the generic term for southern country music.

Until this point I have developed a unilinear narrative from Carson's June, 1923, Okeh session through the incorporation of The Original Hill Billies. In reality this development did not flow on an even or straight plane. It is not likely that one group alone could have had such an important neologistic influence unless other conditions were propitious in the record industry. My personal research had focused on the crucial Okeh label. Other students have explored the many companies that climbed onto the hillbilly music bandwagon. Here only a sketchy outline of a few key persons and events is listed to provide the backdrop against which The Hill Billies' name got away from its band. [37]

It was early in I924 when Ralph Peer and Polk Brockman first sensed the dimension of the old time tunes boom, and many of their rival company colleagues were as quick as they were in their response to the new idiom. (The recording industry is notorious for the speed with which it covers hits-quick pressings by different artists of best sellers.) The talent was there in Atlanta waiting to be discovered.

Columbiae xecutivesf ound Riley Puckett,a blind street-singera nd guitaristw ith a sweet tenorv oice.H e had broughth is songbagt o the city from AlpharettaG, eorgia. Also from rural Georgia was Gid Tanner, a Dacula cotton farmer and fiddler. [38] Late in February they made Atlanta test pressings and on March 7-8, 1924, they were in Columbia's New York studio repeating the earlier Okeh pattern. Puckett sang and picked his way through "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" with fiddle accompaniment by Tanner. For the coupling, "Rock All Our Babies to Sleep," he yodeled a bit, thus introducing a technique that was destined to longevity in country music. Their disc (107-D) was released on May 20 in Columbia's popular series, and the Georgians were soon followed north by two ladies from Sylva, North Carolina, Samantha Bumgarner, banjo, and Eva Davis, fiddle. "Big-Eyed Rabbit/Wild Bill Jones" (129-D) was their vocal-instrumental debut. [39]

Next came a blind minstrel, Ernest Thompson, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who could play twenty-five instruments. Just as Puckett had used Carson's" Log Cabin" for a first record, Thompson covered Whitter's "The Wreck of the  Southern O ld 97," linking it with "Are You from Dixie" (Columbia 130-D).

The specific identity of the sales and recording executives who so quickly established Columbia's eminence in the hillbilly field is not yet determined. Probably, the credit was shared by W. S. Fuhri, a phonograph industry pioneer and Okeh's general sales manager in I923 prior to becoming a Columbia vice president in I924, and
Frank Walker,a talent scout with particular skill in recording race artists. By November, 1924, Columbia printed a booklet, Familiar Tunes on Fiddle, Guitar, Banjo, Harmonica, and Accordion, designed to list the records of Tanner, Puckett, Thompson, and others "whose names are best known where the square dance has not been
supplanted by the fox-trot." [40]

This publication became the first exclusive compilation of traditional folk material gathered by the then very young hillbilly record industry. By January, I925, the firm had enough folk material to begin a Columbia 15000-D series, Familiar Tunes-Old and New, paralleling its own I4000-D race offerings. At this time Okeh was still releasing country material on pop labels. Hence, Columbia was the first company to see the possibilities in an exclusive white folk series. By October, 1925, Okeh followed suit with a similar 45000 Old Time Tunes category, and, eventually, nearly every American record company established some type of hillbilly series.

The second firm to emulate Okeh in 1924 was Vocalion, finding three traditional and colorful Tennessee performers for starters. Blind George Reneau, still in his twenties, had come down from the hills to play his guitar-harmonica combination on the streets of Knoxville. Discovered by a local Sterchi Brothers record distributor in May, he was sent to Cliff Hess, Vocalion's New York A & R man, to cover Whitter's initial disc. Reneau's version of "The Wreck on the Southern 97/Lonesome Road Blues" (14809) was the firm's opening bid for the new market. During July it was released in the Red Records pop series and soon led to a Special Records for Southern States listing in public announcements. Next came "Uncle Am" Stuart, a 73-year-old
safe and vault salesman, champion fiddler, and raconteur from Morristown, Tennessee. 41 In the first week of June he was in Manhattan recording "Cumberland Gap/ Grey Eagle" (I4839). While in the Aeolian Hall studio, he favored New York's WJZ radio audience with a program-perhaps the first Tennessee mountain music to be
broadcast in the metropolis.

The third and most influential Vocalion pioneer was "Uncle" Dave Macon (The Dixie Dew Drop): banjoist, entertainer extraordinaire, shaper of the developing commercial country music tradition. [42] His first offering was "I'm Going Away to Leave You, Love/Chewing Gum" (I4847). Macon's seventh released disc, "All I've
Got's Gone/Hill Billie Blues" (I4904), was recorded in July, 1924, and issued at the year's end, a few months before The Hill Billies record was on the market. To my knowledge, Macon's blues, which opens "I am a billy and I live in the hills," is the first in a long series of songs using the catchy word hillbilly in a title. Also, it is the first record label to bear the term. The song is actually Macon's reconstruction of a W. C. Handy recomposed folksong usually called "Hesitation Blues"-the name Macon used when he sang it in personal appearances and on the air. [43]

Today we lack knowledge as to why or when he altered or renamed the old song. Was "Hill Billie Blues" part of his early theatrical repertoire or was it put together for recording purposes? Nor is there evidence of any special role for this particular disc in extending the term. Seemingly, Macon never asserted any semantic priority as did both Peer and Hopkins for their January, 1925, meeting.

During 1924 three competitors-Okeh, Columbia, Vocalion-had entrenched themselves in the hillbilly arena, and, finally, the largest and richest unit of the American record industry, Victor, decided to enter the field. Its own personnel could not have escaped notice of competitive sales by the new country artists in the area roughly bounded by Roanoke, Atlanta, and Knoxville. Because the three firms who had discovered Carson, Whitter, Tanner, Puckett, Reneau, and Macon were New York-based and geared to national distribution, it was inevitable that the new discs would sell themselves simply by being in the catalogs. Nevertheless, in May, 1924, Columbia began to advertise such records with full pages in the monthly Talking Machine World, a handsomely designed and well edited dealers trade journal. Of the initial Tanner-Puckett disc Columbia stated: "No Southerner can hear them and go away without them. And it will take a pretty hard-shelled Yankee to leave them."

In June the firm's copy writer exclaimed that "The fiddle and guitar craze is sweeping northward," and Okeh, not to be outdone, announced that "the craze for this 'Hill Country Music' has spread to thousands of communities north, east, west, as well as in the south and the fame of these artists is ever increasing." By September Okeh had to remind the trade again via a full page, two-color ad that Fiddlin' John Carson's records "were the very first of their kind ever offered." [44] During November, 1924, Victor made its own discreet announcement to the trade:

The old-time fiddler has come into his own again with the music loving public and this fact is reflected in the demand for records of the music of the old fiddlers. The Victor Talking Machine Company has taken cognizance of public interest to issue an attractive four-page folder for dealer distribution with a cover design showing the fiddler presiding over the oldtime barn dance, and a caption of "Olde Time Fiddlin' Tunes."

In the folder are listed four records by Fiddlin' Powers and family, three records by A. C. (Eck) Robertson, and two Southern mountaineer songs on a record by Vernon Dalhart with fiddle accompaniment. The back of the folder is used to call attention to a negro spiritual record by ex-Governor Taylor of Tennessee and his Old Limber Quartet, and two novelty records. [45]

Victor's press release writer could not have known that Dalhart's record was destined to nationalize hillbilly music; nor could the writer have sensed any irony in his item's juxtaposition of Robertson's and Dalhart's names. On June 30, 922--a year before Peer's Atlanta expedition-Victor had recorded in its New York studio a pair of traditional fiddlers, Henry C. Gilliland from Oklahoma and A. C. Robertson from Texas, playing a solo, "Sally Gooden" (Robertson), and a duet, "Arkansaw Traveler."46 The southerners had journeyed to New York to break into records following a trip to the I922 United Confederate Veterans' Reunion at Richmond, Virginia.

Victor did not release the pair's beautiful, archaic tunes (18956) until April, 1923-well before Okeh's similar discs were on the market. Robertson was fully as traditional as Carson, Tanner, or Stuart; however, the Texan's piece led to no trend, let alone movement, within this major company. Whether Victor was unable or unwilling to exploit folk music in I922 we do not know. However, by the fall of 1924, apparently induced by one of its own very popular artists, Victor made a cautious entry into the hillbilly area.

Vernon Dalhart, born Marion Try Slaughter in the bayou region of east Texas, had come to New York in 1912 as a light opera tenor and had succeeded on the stage. [47] By 19I6 he turned to a new recording career, favoring the sentimental and popular pieces of the day including much pseudo-Negro "plantation" material. An apocryphal story tells us that Thomas Edison himself launched Dalhart's recording career because of a favorable response to "Can't Yo' Heah Me Callin' Caroline?" But the Texas tenor had heard enough traditional folksong-Anglo and Negro-in his boyhood to be able to leave both Victor Herbert and Stephen Foster behind in favor of his down-home folk style.

We do not know now whether Dalhart was prompted by someone in the record industry to turn to the new field of country music or whether he followed his own instincts, but for the Edison firm during the summer of 1924 he covered Whitter's railroad ballad accompanied by his own mouth-harp and Frank Ferara's Hawaiian guitar. "The Wreck on the Southern Old 97" (Edison Diamond Disc 51316) was backed with an Ernest Hare black-face song. It was issued in August, and in a month the ballad was dubbed for release on Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder 4898. Neither disc nor cylinder made a special stir, but their good sales did help Dalhart persuade his Victor executives, one of whom was Nat Shilkret, to let him record the ballad for them. Dalhart now coupled "The Wreck of the Old 97" with his cousin Guy Massey's piece, "The Prisoner's Song" (19427). It was released on October 3, 1924, entered in Victor's Olde Time folder, and went on to make history by selling more than seven million copies and precipitating complex legal battles. The fascinating story of these two songs and this particular record has been commented on in writing that ranges from erudite Supreme Court decision to popular fiction by Harry K. McClintock (Haywire Mac).

Here we need pause only to note that Dalhart's nasal "Wreck" and banal "Prisoner's Song" nationalized old time music. Victor 19427 quickly reached a coast-to-coast market where records by Carson, Tanner, Macon, and the Hopkinses had had chiefly local or regional appeal. A previous Victor disc, "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'" (19I71), by a Chicago radio artist, Wendell Hall, had been the company's best seller late in I923 and early in 1924. [48]
 
Although Hall's song, self-accompanied on ukulele, was based on a country dance tune and was widely covered by other artists and labels it had no direct influence on the new genre. The public accepted "Rain No Mo'" as a pop item and "Prisoner's Song" as a hillbilly piece. Why the difference? Dalhart's songs followed a trail blazed by traditional folksingers; Hall's piece was a novelty. Also, Victor was willing to exploit Dalhart as a country singer. In their 1920-23 catalogs they had described him as a Century Theater light opera tenor. After the release of 19427 this publicity was deleted, as were his operatic and standard discs. In fact the company made a conscious search for southern mountain material for him.

When in February, I925, Floyd Collins died in a Kentucky sand cave, the public was galvanized. His dramatic rescue attempt was covered by nationwide press and radio; his death struggle was excruciatingly slow; many symbolic elements were sensed in his story. Polk Brockman, still searching for good sales material, asked (by telegram from Florida) his own Okeh recording artist in Atlanta, the Reverend Andrew Jenkins-blind newsboy, evangelist, poet, and musician-to write a Collins song. Until this time each pioneer hillbilly performer had come into the studios with his own stock of traditional ballads. But now "Blind Andy" composed a new one on demand for a music industry executive. Jenkins' daughter, Irene Spain, recalls the scene on her front porch after the receipt of the assignment. The news story was known to both of them from press and radio. As her father composed, accompanying himself on the guitar, Irene took down the words. Within four hours she scored the music and sent text and tune on to Brockman. [49]

She now recalls, wistfully, that if she had known it was destined to be a million seller, and an American folksong as well, she would have added a few grace notes to color its melodic simplicity. Brockman gave "The Death of Floyd Collins" to Fiddlin' John Carson for recording on April 14-26 days after Collins was found dead in his cave-but Carson's Okeh version did not take hold. In time, it caught the ear of Dalhart, who recorded it for Victor on September 9, 1925, in New York. It was coupled with another fresh topical item, "The Wreck of the Shenandoah" (19779), composed by Carson J. Robison under the pseudonym Maggie Andrews (his mother's maiden name), and announced in the November supplement. However, in December the dirigible piece was dropped (at the request of Commander Lansdowne's widow) in favor of another Jenkins song, "The Dream of a Miner's Child"-itself a recomposition of an earlier English parlour ballad-and the new pair (19821) was Dalhart's second national hit. "The Wreck" he had gained from tradition; "Floyd Collins" he gave to tradition. The public made no such distinction. Instead, it began to link his dolorous contemporary pieces with the older ballads, as well as the string-band social music and southern rural humor available on discs. The industry was most acute in helping its consumers relate the new topical pieces to old ballad themes and styles. Victor's supplement writer for November described the "Shenandoah/Collins" disc in these terms:

Popular songs of recent American tragedies. They belong with the old fashioned pennyballad, hobo-song, or "come-all ye." The curious will note that they are even in the traditional "ballad" metre, the "common metre" of hymnodists. They are not productions of, or for, the cabaret or the vaudeville stage, but for the roundhouse, the watertank, the caboose, or the village fire-stationB. oth have splendids imple tunes, in which the guitar accompanies the voice, the violin occasionally adding pathos. These songs are more than things for passing amusement; they are chronicles of the time, by unlettered and never self-conscious chroniclers. [50]

The year 1925 to the phonograph industry is marked by Western Electric's introduction of the electrical recording process-a revolutionary technological change. The year can also be seen in retrospect as including the national acceptance of Dalhart's "Prisoner's Song," the release of The Hill Billies' first record, the launching of Columbia's exclusive Familiar Tunes series, followed by Okeh's Old Time series, and the beginning of Nashville's role in country music. Chicago's WLS National Barn Dance had begun on April 19, I924, and Nashville's WSM Grand Ole Opry (first called WSM Barn Dance) on November 28, 1925.

One additional event important to hillbilly music was Victor's discovery in mid-1925 of Carl T. Sprague-ranch boy, World War I cavalryman, Texas A & M athletics coach-with a songbag of traditional cowboy ballads. His "Bad Companions/When the Work's All Done This Fall" (I9747) was released before Dalhart's "Floyd Collins." Victor, slow in discovering the lode in mountain music, compensated by opening wide the field of recorded western music. Very conveniently, the buying public identified and related the two in spite of important stylistic and regional differences.

A significant step in the blurring of the genres was the addition of sound to western movies in 1928. Westerns, from their origin, had already developed to include historical epics, occupational tales (metal mining, railroading, logging), and melodramas set anywhere and anytime on the frontier beginning with the French and Indian War in the Alleghenies. The line between mountain and cowboy movies was no stronger or higher than a barb wire fence. One of the very early horse operas directed by John Ford in 1918 was actually titled Hill Billy. [51]

Western films had always required some music, whether Rossini or American folksongs in concert arrangements by such native composers as Lamar Stringfield (North Carolina) and David Guion (Texas). By 1930 the piano and organ gave way to the voice-initially homespun and flavored by campfire smoke and rodeo dust. The first silent star to introduce authentic cowboy pieces to "talkies" was Texasborn Ken Maynard. He had made his way to acting via an apprenticeship as a young Army Engineer and a Ringling Brothers Circus rider. He could sing the old songs and he could fiddle. Maynard's I933 film, The Strawberry Roan, was written around the popular ballad; it was one of the few full length feature movies based on a folksong. In 1935 Gene Autry, soon followed by Tex Ritter and Roy Rogers, inaugurated a cycle of elaborate and colorful musical westerns. [52]

They, and other Singing Cowboys, now turned from traditional sources to newly composed screen songs that quickly fed back into hillbilly repertories. Autry and his progeny were of equal importance to the phonograph and the movie industries. The film's perforated sound track itself became an artifact tending to fuse mountain and western music-old and new-into a single artistic form and marketable commodity.

The stage complemented the cinema in creating synthetic outdoor songs. When The Ziegfield Follies of i934 presented the national hit "The Last Round-Up," its Boston-born composer, Billy Hill, providentially was named with the inverted noun. His song was instantaneously accepted in New York, Nashville, and Cheyenne. In the decade from Carl Sprague to Billy Hill-Gene Autry, the American cowboy's legendary glow, as well as a Hollywood tailor's version of his dress, moved onto the WLS and WSM barn dance stages. Mountain boys born in Piedmont textile villages, Cumberland coal camps, and Great Smoky lumber towns were costumed in cowboy togs by Nashville. Hillbilly musicians had now acquired a ready-made uniform, [53] and, more importantly, a heroic and dramatic mythology. It was to help record-radioscreen fans, as well as persons within show business, compensate for the bleak color in the Poor White portrait.

In the formative years of folksong recordings the industry received an unsolicited gift in the campaign for its new product. We have no consumer polls to tell us how sophisticated were the purchasers of hillbilly records, but we do know that both Broadway and book and magazine publishers were simultaneously selling their own views of southern mountain tradition. Frederick Koch's University of North Carolina student actors and writers-The Carolina Playmakers-had stimulated interest in regional folk drama in the early I920's. A number of New York plays in 1923-25 took up such themes: Sun Up, The Shame Woman, Hell-Bent Fer Heaven, Ruint, This Fine-Pretty World. [54] In March, 1926, Rose Wilder Lane published a popular novel, Hill Billy, with an Ozark setting, in which she used play-party songs that she had heard in the region. [55] Her title was common in the Ozarks; did she select it because of the prevalent interest in mountain music or was her choice coincidental? We do not know; we know only that the new combination hillbilly music caught on against a backdrop of urban as well as rural drama, circuit vaudeville as well as medicine tent show, middle-brow fiction as well as cracker barrel tale sessions. [56]

The parallel between the music industry's reaching out to Carson and his peers and concomitant discoveries by writers is striking. In March, 1925, Century Magazine first printed Stephen Vincent Benet's delightful literary ballad, "The Mountain Whippoorwill: How Hill-Billy Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize." The poem's narrator is an orphan child who pictures his parents as fiddle and bird; he wins the Essex County Fiddlers' Show. Benet had heard old time music at Highlands, Macon County, North Carolina, where he summered between 1911-15 while his father was stationed at the Augusta Arsenal. The ballad was written in New York early in 1925 almost simultaneously with the release of the first disc by The Hill Billies. It is highly unlikely that the poet ever met fiddler Tony Alderman, but he epitomized Tony in his work. Although Benet got the tune of the boxwood fiddle as well as the tone of hill dialect into "The Mountain Whippoorwill," nowhere did he label the fiddlers' music as hillbilly; the term was reserved to name the hero. [57]

Today no chronicle is available that reports whether a country dweller in a remote general store, or someone in a big city music shop, perhaps influenced by drama, poetry, or fiction, first asked for a record of hillbilly music; nor do we know what radio fan first sent a letter to a station requesting a hillbilly song, but we do know that by 1926 Vernon Dalhart was as much in the public domain as Babe Ruth, Rudolph Valentino, and Will Rogers. There existed a need for a nationally known tag for "The Prisoner's Song" that was as catchy as jazz or pop. [58]

Hillbilly filled the need. Words rush in to fill vacuums. Something of the exact process can now be reconstructed. It is possible that hillbilly and music were linked in speech before 1923; we have no such evidence today. We can use the Talking Machine World to trace the word's extension to music in print after December, 1924, when the journal first listed Macon's "Hill Billie Blues" (Vocalion 14904) in its Advance Record Bulletin. By the following April the word moved from song title to name of a string-band in the first released story on The Hill Billies. In November it was applied within the trade to a general category of records when an Edison cylinder sales director commented to a World reporter on the relationship of farm prosperity and the firm's extensive mail order business. The Edison official found that rural demand "is largely for Blues, Coon songs, and Hilly-Billy numbers...." Finally in December, 1925, a feature writer in a long article was impelled to comment on "the popularity of hill-billy songs." [59] He was correct in assuming that record dealers, song publishers, and public buyers of music could identify his category.

During 1926 the association could be found in print beyond trade journal pages. In January a Columbus, Ohio, newsman caught a Washington WRC broadcast of The Hill Billies. He responded to their skill and humor with a perceptive review that revealed his own knowledge of folk music and his awareness of the negative overtone of their name. He wrote: "These Hill Billies, as they wished to be called, came from the mountain regions of our southern states with a collection of oldtime melodies, some of which have never been written down but have been passed on from fiddler to fiddler through the generations.. .." It was far and away the best program of its kind we have ever listened to....[60]
 
He had not heard them before but he liked their music and accepted the string-band's title. His response was personal. The next step was a generalized response that linked music and title. At year's end Variety (December 29, 1926) presented its annual show business roundup. What was fresh; what did music editor Abel Green use for industry front page news? He wrote:

"HILL-BILLY" MUSIC
This particular branch of pop-song music is worthy of treatment on its own, being peculiar unto itself. The "hillbilly" is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creeda nd allegiance are to the Bible, the chautauqua, and the phonograph. The talking machine's relation to the show business interests most. The mountaineer is of "poor white trash" genera. The great majority, probably 95 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all unto themselves. Illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons, the sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalizing of a Vernon Dalhart or a Carson Robison on the disks, reciting the banal lyrics of a "Prisoner's Song" or "The Death of Floyd Collins" (biggest hillbilly song-hit to date), intrigues their interest.

Not only was Green the first writer, to my knowledge, to combine hillbilly and music in print, but he went to the heart of show business's exploitation of the new product. In later years he was to reconsider and modify his early view of the Southern mountaineer and his songlore, [61] opening Variety's pages to sympathetic treatment of the idiom, but his 1926 front page feature brings into focus cultural and esthetic problems that are still current. Green in 1926 had heard the term hillbilly records from music business colleagues-publishers, bookers, talent scouts-Tommy Rockwell, Ben Selvin, Jack Mills, Louis Bernstein, Ralph Peer, "Korky" O'Keefe. Even though the executives used it freely in speech, they were cautious in applying it in advertising media. While their copy writers continued to coin euphemisms- Songs From Dixie, Old Southern Tunes, Old Time Singin'-the public continued to use the common label. It was not until I929 that Sears, Roebuck actually entered hill-billy as a tag for records in its catalog, followed by Montgomery Ward in 1930. A 1933 Okeh brochure finally identified its own 45000 series as Hill Billy, and after 1935 the adventurous Decca company issued several Hill Billy Records catalogs with sub-heads: Old Time Singing, String Bands, Sacred, Fiddlin,' Old Time Dance.

None of the other companies fell into line. As the music itself responded to change under the very impact of records and radio, the industry began a search for an ameliorative term to replace the stereotype. (That section of the industry that was quickest to loosen the hybrid's link with tradition eventually coined country-western, a combination beyond the scope of this paper.) The attitude of the music business towards hillbilly jelled soon after general acceptance of the term. In I930, Bradley Kincaid, a fine Kentucky folksinger and early record and radio interpreter of traditional material, wrote to his own audience:

There is a practice among recording companies, and those who are inclined to speak slightingly of the mountain songs, to call them Hilly Billy songs. When they say Hilly Billy songs they generallym ean bum songs and jail songs.... [These] are not characteristic of mountain songs, and I hope ... you will come to distinguish between these fine old folk songs of the mountains, and the so-called Hilly Billy songs. Five years later John Lair, WLS impressario and himself a performer with the Cumberland Ridge Runners, stated, "Hill billies in radio? They ain't no such thing. Mountaineers and folk from the hill country, maybe, but no hill billies. 'Tin Pan Alley' hung this name on certain types of music and entertainers." By World War II, George D. Hay, "The Solemn Old Judge" who announced Grand Ole Opry's broadcasts, wrote, "We never use the word [hillbilly] because it was coined in derision. Furthermore, there is no such animal. Country people have a definite dignity of their own and a native shrewdness which enables them to hold their own in any company. Intolerance has no place in our organization and is not allowed." [62]

His championing of country people is noble and has been echoed by everyone who has profited from selling country music to the folk, as well as by academicians grimly intent on rescuing "true folk music" from engulfing waves of "hillbillyism." 63 It is left to Jean Thomas, Kentucky's "Traipsin' Woman," to marshal all the cliches of the defense in one pronunciamento. In her fictional biography of blind fiddler J. W. Day (renamed Jilson Setters), she portrays him upon return from a London concert before the English King and Queen. At home the learned Judge rebukes the crude Sheriff for having previously rejected the fiddler's old fogey songs. Mrs. Thomas ends her morality play scene with these words: "It would not be expected of all who hear Jilson's music to discriminate between his Elizabethan tunes and a hill-billy parody that so shamefully ridicules mountain minstrelsy." [64]

But why was such a shameful and demeaning term linked to folksong in the first place? Ralph Peer saw it was a funny word; Tony Alderman as a fighting word. Both were right. It contained sufficient semantic elasticity to parallel the music industry's ambivalence, the scholar's distrust, and the public's acceptance of the new product. Only the individual consumer placing his quarters and half-dollars on record store counters seemed to ignore problems posed here in etymology and cultural history. High Society and the Academy frequently joined in their downgrading of Folk Art. The heroes and heroines-Henry Lee, Silly Bill, Floyd Collins, Fair Ellen, Sally Gooden, Omie Wise-all seemed much too uncouth when released on discs. Similarly, previous song variants circulated via broadsides, stall ballads, and pocket songsters had also been stigmatized.

It is unfair to the amorphous record buying public of the mid-I920's that so enthusiastically took the new hillbilly music to its heart to say precisely why it accepted a pejorative title for something it liked. Perhaps the folk sensed the larger community's antipathy to the discs that both commented on and documented traditional values. Out of the long process of American urbanization-industrialization there has evolved a joint pattern of rejection as well as sentimentalization of rural mores. We flee the eroded land with its rotting cabin; at the same time we cover it in rose vines of memory. This national dualism created the need for a handle of laughter and ridicule to unite under one rubric the songs and culture of the yeoman and the varmint, the pioneer and the poor white. So long as we both exploit and revive hillbilly music, so long as we feel tension between rural and urban society, we are likely to continue to need Ralph Peer's and Al Hopkins' jest. [65]

NOTES

1. New York Journal citation from Mitford Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms (Chicago, 1951), 808; Harben from William Craigie, A Dictionary of American English (Chicago, 1944), 1248; Hibler from James Masterson, Tall Tales of Arkansaw (Boston, 1943), 274-5; Carr from "A List of Words from Northwest Arkansas," Dialect Notes, II (I904), 416-22.

2. Tobacco song reported by Nannie Fortson from her father's singing: Western Kentucky Folklore Archive, University of California, Los Angeles. Texas couplet from John and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York, I934), 51; these lines had previously appeared in Thomas Talley, Negro Folk Rhymes (New York, 1922), 43.

3. Alfred Holt, Phrase Origins (New York, I936), 164.

4. Joseph Hendron, "The Scholar and the Ballad Singer," in The Critics and the Ballad, ed. MacEdward Leach and Tristram Coffin (Carbondale, Illinois, 1961), 8.

5. A WNS feature by Margaret Anderson, Champaign-Urbana Courier( June I9, 1962).

6. Charles Seeger's comments in "Conference ... on Folklore," JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, LIX (1946), 5I2; D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1959), 433.

7. "Folk Singing," Time, LXXX (November 23, I962), 60.

8. Academic inattention can be measured by: (I) contrast between bibliography on jazz-blues and hillbilly; (2) the first major compilation on Mass Culture, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David White (Glencoe, Illinois, 1957) contains but one peripheral reference to hillbilly music; (3) no hillbilly records were reviewed in the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE until April, 1948, a quarter-centurya fter they began to circulate.

9. David Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered (Glencoe, Illinois, 1954), I85.

10. Kemble citation from A. N. J. Den Hollander, "The Tradition of 'Poor Whites'," in Culture in the South, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I934), 416. See also F. L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1949).

11. Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor-White: From Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Oklahoma, 1939). The most comprehensive and valuable current work on Southern Highland literature is Cratis Deal Williams' unpublished New York University dissertation, "The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction" (1961).

12. McIlwaine's poor-white analogs are taken from Southern fiction. Ozark speech reveals two dozen additional terms, acorn-cracker to weed-bender, in Vance Randolph and George Wilson, Down in the Holler (Norman, Oklahoma, I953), 252. McIlwaine and Randolph, of course, do not exhaust the list!

13. Kyle Crichton, "Thar's Gold in Them Hillbillies," Collier's CI (April 30, 1938), 24-5, reprinted in Linnell Gentry, A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music (Nashville, 1961), 39-45.

14. In this paper I refer to record companies by their labels rather than full corporate names. Company genealogies are exceedingly complex and are developed elsewhere. See Oliver Read and Walter Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo (Indianapolis, 1959), 399-407, 484-9. Generally race and jazz discographers fill in corporateg enealogy in their compilations.S ee for example Dan Mahony, The Columbia 13/14000-D Series: A Numerical Listing (Stanhope, New Jersey, 1961). Because of the crucial importance of the Okeh label to my study I have outlined a brief chronology in Appendix III.

15. Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (New York, 1959), is praiseworthy of Peer and makes a start at an appraisal of his role.

16. Variety (November 2, I955), 52; letter to me, November 4, I957.

I7. No discography of this corpus is available. Scattered references to songs and singers can be found in Jim Walsh's biographical series on popular artists in Hobbies from I942 to present.
18. Jim Walsh, "Late Carson Robison Pioneered Hillbilly Disc Biz 30 Years Ago," Variety (April 24, 1957), 45.
19. Much of the narrative in this paper comes from oral interviews listed in Appendix I. The arrangement of material from Brockman and others interviewed is, of course, my own.

20. Fortunately, the Atlanta Constitution found its own station WGM newsworthy. Byron Warner's Seven Aces had come together in the spring of I922 when the station was launched and the band was billed as the nation's second radio orchestra. Constitution stories on the Aces' radio programs are useful, today, to establish the chronology of Okeh's 1923 Atlanta expedition. See: (June I2), i8, (June 14) i6, (June I9), 7, (June 21), I8, (June 22), I6, (August 3), 9.

21. The Atlanta Journal gave even more coverage to its station WSB than the rival paper to WGM. Journal radio news for 1922-23 is particularly valuable, today, to document pioneer broadcasts of traditional folksong. The specific Journal story cited on the Okeh expedition is (June 15, 1923), 4.

22. The precise date of Carson's recording debut has long eluded discographers. (Okeh ledger files of the period are lost; letter to me from Helene Chmura, Columbia Records librarian, March 28, I96I.) However, hillbilly research can ride piggyback on jazz discography. Brian Rust, Jazz Records A-Z I897-1931 (Middlesex, England, 1962), lists master numbers for Warner's Seven Aces' first released record, "In a Tent/Eddie Steady" (Okeh 4888) 8376/8378. This disc can be compared to Carson's first record, "Log Cabin/Old Hen" 8374/8375. The Constitution stories cited in footnote 20 indicate that Warner finished recording on Thursday, June 14.

23. Brockman recalled Peer's initial response to Carson's singing in interviews. In Brockman's first letter to me, September 3, 1957, he wrote: [Carson's disc] "was recorded by the Okeh Company at my insistence with a 'fingers crossed' attitude...."

24. In addition to interviews, three Atlanta Journal Magazine feature articles on Carson have been of particular value: (April 2, 1933), i, (March I8, 1934), 9, (April i6, 1939), 7.

25. The date of Whitter's first recording is a real discographic mystery. Brockman clearly recalls that Hager recorded Whitter in New York before the Atlanta expedition. In Whitter's only folio, Familiar Folk Songs (Jefferson, North Carolina, ca. 1935), the author asserted a March 1, 1923, recording visit to New York City. However, his first released disc, "Lonesome/Wreck," bears master numbers 72168/72167, which indicate a December, 1923, session. Either Whitter's March test pressings were not assigned master numbers until December, or he was called back to New York to re-record his own material.

26. All Okeh supplements, brochures, and catalogs quoted from or cited in this paper are from the private collection of Jim Walsh, Vinton, Virginia. A microfilm reel of these holdings is deposited at the John Edwards Memorial Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles.

27. The usage old time in a musical context is not cited in standard dictionaries.

28. The first use of the term singing community is unknown to me.

29. A & R man, the acronym or initialism for Artist and Repertoire man (talent scout-recording producer-studio factotum), does not appear in standard American references for alphabetic designations. The earliest usage I find is in Talking Machine World, XX (July 15, 1924), 106.

30. Letter to me, May 6, I96I. A photograph of the Victor studio in which the string-band recorded is found in Oliver Read, The Recording and Reproduction of Sound (Indianapolis, 1952), 15.

3I. My treatment of this core anecdote comes from Tony Alderman. It is confirmed by Charlie Bowman (who recalled it from the telling of Al Hopkins). One "folk" variant by Clarence Ashley has already appeared in an educational film The Roots of Hillbilly Music in the "Lyrics and Legends" series produced in I962 by WHYT-TV, Philadelphia.

32. As with Carson and Whitter, I lack documentary evidence for exact date of first recording by The Hill Billies. Again, jazz research is of great help. Albert McCarthy and Dave Carey, Jazz Dictionary (London, I957), list a discography for The Goofus Five-a unit of a larger group, The California Ramblers. The unit recorded "Alabamy Bound/Deep Blue Sea Blues" (Okeh 40292) master 73099/73I00 on January 14, I925. This disc can be compared to The Hill Billies' first release, "Silly Bill/Old Time Cinda" master 73118/73122. Hence, the latter probably recorded on January 15, 1925.

33. Stoneman's recollection of his own role in the naming of the band differs from Alderman's in time sequence.

34. Alderman preserves a set of Hill Billies band photographs, including one of John and Joe Hopkins, John Rector, Uncle Am Stuart, John Carson, and himself at the May 8, 1925, Mountain City convention. After my first meeting with Alderman, he generously presented me with a full set of his pictures, and I have used them to supplement interviews. Many of the photos were taken by Alderman including the very first of the band in Galax about March, 1925. It was sent to New York and used as the model for Okeh's publicity sketch. Alderman recalls photographing himself in the band by using his own delayed action camera.

35. My personal debt to the late Charlie Bowman is great. Although I began piecing data for this paper together in I956 I had no direct lead to The Hill Billies until corresponding with Bowman following his letter-article to Joe Nicholas in Disc Collector, Issue I6 (January, 1961).

36. Because vital statistics for many persons named in this paper are not readily available I have included a log of such data in Appendix II.

37. Just as The Hill Billies' name "got away" from the band (Alderman's phrase), a similar process took place three decades later when another band's name, Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, "got away" to become a generic musical term, bluegrass.

38. Unfortunately, records by most of the pioneer hillbilly performers are out of print and their reissues have not kept pace with jazz or blues reissues. A private LP disc by the Folksong Society of Minnesota, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, dubbed from early recordings, was pressed in limited quantity in I962. It is an excellent sample of the music considered here. Frank Driggs, Columbia Records, has announced a three-part set of hillbilly reissues, including many artists named in this paper, for 1965 release.

39. To my knowledge only three pioneer hillbilly singers made the transition from pre-1925 discs to LP records: Samantha Bumgarner, Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains (Riverside RLP 6io) reissued (Washington WLP 712); Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Smoky Mountain Ballads (Folkways FA 2040), and Minstrel of the Appalachians (Riverside RLP 645) reissued (Washington VM 736); Ernest V. Stoneman, The Stoneman Family (Folkways FA 2315) as well as more recent Starday and World-Pacific albums.

40. Talking Machine World, XX (November 15, I924), 51.

41. William Cobb, "Cousin Am and Cousin George," American Mercury, XV (October, 1928), 207-I4.

42. "Uncle" Dave Macon can be heard on a I963 Folkways LP reissued from various labels (RBF 5I).

43. W. C. Handy, Blues: An Anthology (New York, 1926), 42, 94. I am indebted to Bob Hyland for help in establishing "Hesitation Blues" history.

44. Talking Machine World, XX (May 15, 1924), I53; (June 15, I924), I7, 66; (September 15, I924), 58.

45. Talking Machine World, XX (November 15, 1924), I78.

46. John Cohen, "Fiddlin' Eck Robertson," Sing Out!, XIV (April, 1964), 55-9.

47. Jim Walsh, "Vernon Dalhart," Hobbies, LXV (May, I960), 33-5, 45; continued in seven following issues.

48. George Kay, "Those Fabulous Gennetts," Record Changer (June, 1953), 3-I3, asserts for the Gennett label "the start of the hill-billy catalogue" in August, 1922, based on Wendell Hall's recording of "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'" in Richmond, Indiana, prior to covering his own song for Victor in Camden, New Jersey. I find no evidence to support this claim for Hall or Gennett.

49. Jenkins' own account of the composition of "Floyd Collins" was sent by D. K. Wilgus to G. Malcolm Laws, Jr. for use in the revised edition of Native American Balladry (Philadelphia, 1964), 51.

50. Jim Walsh indicated to me that James Edward Richardson, Victor's supplement writer between 1917-28, was the best in the business. It can be said, in retrospect, that he was ahead of folklorists by many decades in his sophisticated treatment of hillbilly ballads.

5I. William Wooten, "An Index to the Films of John Ford," Special Supplement to Sight and Sound, Index Series 13 (February, I948), 5, lists Hill Billy as a five-reel Universal film. However, George Mitchell, "The Films of John Ford," Films In Review, XIV (March, 1963), 130, does not list this item. Correspondence from Mitchell, July 29, 1963, and Wooten, September 15, 1963, leads me to believe that Hill Billy was a working title for a film actually released in  19I8 under the title The Scarlet Drop.

52. See George Fenin and William Everson, The Western: From Silents to Cinerama (New York, 1962), 193-225, for music in western movies.

53. Fenin and Everson, I8I-90, for the cowboy's dress.

54. For the development of regional folk drama see Archibald Henderson, Pioneering A People's Theatre (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I945); Samuel Selden, Frederick Koch: Pioneer Playmaker (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I954). For hillbilly drama on Broadway see Arthur Quinn, "New Notes and Old in the Drama," Scribner's, LXXVI (July, 1924), 79-87.226 Vol. 78, No. 309 Journal of American Folklore July-Sept., I965

55. Lane's book was one of a long line of mountain novels that used folklore themes; see Arthur Palmer Hudson, "The Singing South," Sewanee Review, XLIV (July, 1936), 268-95. For an excellent criticism of Ozark dialect used by novelists and dramatists, as well as perceptive asides on the show business hillbilly, see Vance Randolph and George Wilson, Down in the Holler (Norman, Oklahoma, 1953), 122-48.

56. This paper's focus is on record industry events after 1923. The combination hillbilly music could have been made earlier in time at any place where southern mountain or rural folksingers gathered to entertain. A study of the roots of hillbilly entertainment in all its professional forms is needed. The work of the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, a Missouri Ozark trio, needs particular attention. The group mixed country music and rural humor on the vaudeville stage before 1923.

57. "The Mountain Whippoorwill" has been widely reprinted since first publication in Century Magazine, LXXXVII (March, 1925), 635-9. For commentary see Charles Fenton, Stephen Vincent Benet (New Haven, 1958), 143-9, 392. John Flanagan first directed my attention to this poem; see his "Folk Elements in John Brown's Body," New York Folklore Quarterly, XX (December, 1964), 243-56.

58. Peter Tamony, "Jazz the Word," Jazz, I (October, 1958), 33-42.

59. Talking Machine World, XX (December 15, 1924), 207; XXI (April 15, 1925), 50; (November 15, 1925), 186; (December 15, 1925), 177.

60. "Heard on the Radio," Ohio State Journal (January II, 1926), 6.

61. A significant facet of my interview with Green was his comment that in the 1920'S he accepted race records as folksongs because he identified them with Negro spirituals which were "folk," but nothing in his education or experience before 1923 had given him a base to which to relate hillbilly records. He did not place them in a folkloristic context until 1939 when records, including hillbilly items, were packaged in albums for sale to urban audiences who "enjoyed folksongs."

62. Bradley Kincaid, Favorite Old-Time Songs and Mountain Ballads, Book 3 (Chicago, 1930), 6; John Lair, "No Hill Billies in Radio," WLS Weekly, I (March i6, 1935), 7; George Hay, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, 1945), 37.

63. Typical of academic criticism of hillbilly music is the view stated by West Virginia Professor Patrick Gainer when interviewed by G. C. McKown, New York Times, Section II (June 30, 1957), 7.

64. Jean Thomas, The Singin' Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow (New York, 1938), 205.

65. In addition to participants whom I interviewed, collectors who shared tapes and records, and scholars whose works are cited in this paper and footnotes, I am indebted to Fred Hoeptner for his article which advanced some ideas presented here, "Folk and Hillbilly Music: The Background of Their Relation," Caravan, i6 and 17 (April and June, 1959). The late John Edwards and I corresponded on many of the problems discussed in this paper. Gene Earle, D. K. Wilgus, and Ed Kahn helped me formulate ideas during 1961, 1962, and 1963 field trips. Harlan Daniel and Ronald Foreman helped "talk" the paper through its writing stage. The Modern Language Association (Washington, D. C., December 29, 1962) provided an opportunity to read a portion of this paper. Finally, I am indebted to my colleagues Mrs. Barbara Dennis and Mrs. Judy McCulloh for criticism and cheer.

APPENDIX I: INTERVIEWS 1960-1965 (see footnote  19)
A. E. Alderman Clayton McMichen
Charles Bowman Callie Payne
Elbert Bowman William Randle
Polk Brockman Vance Randolph
Irene Futrelle Charles Rey
Abel Green Ernest Rogers
Hattie Hader Carl T. Sprague
Kemper Harreld E. V. Stoneman
Otto Heineman Colen Sutphin
Bill Hopkins Peter Tamony
John Hopkins Jimmie Tarlton
Lucy Hopkins Dock Walsh
Walter Hughes Jim Walsh
Rosa Lee Johnson Byron Warner
Lambdin Kay Paul Whitter
Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol

APPENDIX II: LOG (see footnote 36)
Alonzo Elvis "Tony" Alderman
b. Sept. 10, 1900, River Hill, Va.-

Charles Bowman
b. July 30, 1889, Gray Station, Tenn., d. May 20, 1962, Union City, Ga.

Polk C. Brockman
b. Oct. 2, 1898, Atlanta, Ga.-

"Fiddlin'" John Carson
b. March 23, 1868, Fannin County, Ga., d. Dec. 11, 1949, Atlanta, Ga.

Vernon Dalhart (Marion Try Slaughter)
b. April 6, 1883, Jefferson, Texas, d. Sept. 15, 1948, Bridgeport, Conn.

Albert Green Hopkins
b. June 5, 1889, Gap Creek, N. C., d. Oct. 21, 1932, Washington, D. C.

Andrew Jenkins
b. Nov. 26, 1885, Jenkinsburg, GA., d. April 25, 1957, Thomaston, Ga.

"Uncle" Dave Macon
b. Oct. 7, 1870, Smart Station, Tenn., d. March 22, 1952, Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Ken Maynard
b. July 21, 1895, Mission, Texas-

Ralph Sylvester Peer
b. May 22, 1892, Kansas City, Mo., d. Jan. 19, 1960, Los Angeles, Calif.

Carl T. Sprague
b. May 10, 1895, Manvel, Texas-

Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman
b. May 25, 1893, Monarat, Va.-

Frank Buckley Walker
b. Oct. 24, 1889, Fly Summit, N. Y., d. Oct. 15, 1963, Little Neck, N. Y.

William Henry Whitter
b. April 6, I892, Fries, Va., d. Nov. 17, I94I, Morganton, N. C.

APPENDIX III: OKEH CHRONOLOGY (See footnote 14)
December 4, I914
Otto Heineman Phonograph Supply Company opens New York office: 45 Broadway. Firm imports Swiss phonograph motors and contracts with Garford Manufacturing Company, Elyria, Ohio, to produce its own motors.

June I, I918
Firm places first records (popular and standard music) on the market. They are doublefaced and hill-and-dale (vertical cut). Labels and sleeves carry an Indian head design. The series begins with release of "Star Spangled Banner/American Patriotic Medley" by a Band (Okeh IooI) and continues through Okeh 1288 released in November, I9I9.

October I, I9I9
Firm's name is changed to General Phonograph Corporation: 25 West 45th Street. ca. November, I9I9 Vertical cut Okeh records are replaced by lateral cut discs in a new series which begins with release of "The Vamp/My Cairo Love" by Rega Dance Orchestra/Green Brothers Xylophone Orchestra (Okeh 4000).

February 14, I920
Mamie Smith records "first race disc" in New York, "That Thing Called Love/You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" (Okeh 4II3) [7275/7276]. Record is placed in popular series and released July, I920.

ca. November, I920
Heineman begins to distribute Odeon and other foreign languages records in America. Classical music originally recorded in Europe is featured; however, some non-English popular and folk material is included.

ca. June, I92I
Firm begins a separate 8000 race series with release of "Play 'Em for Mama, Sing 'Em for Me/I Won't Be Back 'Till You Change Your Ways" by Daisy Martin (Okeh 8ooi) [7854/ 7855].

June 14, 1923
Fiddlin' John Carson records "first hillbilly disc" in Atlanta, "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane/Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow" (Okeh 4890) [8374/8375]. Record is placed in popular series and released July, 1923. The success of Okeh's first out-of-town expedition leads to many subsequent field trips particularly rich in recording early jazz, blues, hillbilly, and non-English folk material from ethnic groups in America.

ca. January, 1924
Okeh 4999 is released and popular series continues with a numerical jump to Okeh 40000. ca. October, 1925
Firm begins a separate 45000 hillbilly (old time) series with release of "Run Along Home with Lindy/To Welcome the Travellers Home" by Fiddlin' John Carson (Okeh 45001).

October 22, 1926
General Phonograph Corporation purchased by Columbia Phonograph Company and renamed Okeh Phonograph Corporation: still at 25 West 45th Street. Otto Heineman continues as president of subsidiary to carry on sale of motors, needles, and parts as well as Okeh and Odeon records. Subsequent Okeh history integrated with Columbia's own complex development with some crossing of material between labels.

November I6, I926
Okeh switches from accoustical (True Tone) to electrical recording process. First such race item to be released is "Candy Lips/Scatter Your Smiles" by Eva Taylor with Clarence Williams (Okeh 8414) [80214/80215] (rec. 11/16/26).

January 28, 1927
Earliest released electrical disc in hillbilly series is "West Virginia Rag/Coney Isle" by Frank Hutchinson (Okeh 45083) [80354/80356] (rec. I/28/27). March 31, 1931 Otto Heineman leaves firm. Okeh moves to Columbia office: 1776 Broadway.

ca. December, 1931
Columbia, beset by depression and buffeted by English owners, is purchased by Grigsby- Grunow (Majestic radios and refrigerators).

ca. November, 1933
Grigsby-Grunow goes bankrupt. Assets acquired, in February, 1934, by Sacro Enterprises (banking syndicate). Columbia and Okeh labels are continued by a Sacro unit, American Record Corporation.

ca. March, 1934
Okeh hillbilly series thins out during depression years and is terminated with a release of "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad/Leaving on the New River Train" by the Crazy Hillbilly Band (Okeh 45579) [152680/15268I] (rec. ca 1/15/34).

ca. January, 1935
Okeh race series also thins out in these years and is terminated with a release of "Little Green Slippers/Jug Band Quartette" by the Memphis Jug Band (Okeh 8966) [C-794/C-807] (rec. 11/7-8/34).

NOTE: Columbia has kept the Okeh label alive through the last three decades; however, I have closed my chronology with the termination of the 45000 and 8000 series. In these two sets, Otto Heineman and his staff inaugurated large-scale, serious recording of American folk music (albeit Okeh never made such a claim for its role during 1921-1931).