Tag Archives: Grand Ole Opry

How-dee-eee: Country Hokum and Humor

Grandpa Jones and Minnie Pearl/Grand Ole Opry

Every week when I go to my local Trader Joe’s market, I pick up a pack or two of small grape tomatoes, which some clever employee has chosen to brand as Mini Pearls. It never fails to amuse me, and I’m sure others have noticed my grin almost every time I put them into the cart. It’s an unusual connection point for this city boy’s appreciation of country music and culture, yet one that serves as a reminder of a time that’s come and gone.

I am old enough to have seen the late Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon perform countless times on television in character as Minnie Pearl from Grinder’s Switch in the late ’50s on Ozark Jubilee, then for years on Hee Haw and countless appearances on variety and game shows. Always wearing that hat with a price tag dangling from it and a gingham dress, she debuted on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1940 and was an instant hit. Fears that her country-bumpkin comedy would offend the audience quickly evaporated as she used wit and humor that was often directed at herself. “A feller told me I look like a breath of spring,” Pearl would say. “Well, he didn’t use them words. He said I look like the end of a hard winter.”

While watching Ken Burns’ Country Music series, I was pleased that it included not only a feature on Minnie Pearl, but also spoke of the use of humor and comedy within the country music genre. And the connection to Garrison Keillor’s visit to the Opry at its final broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium was something I didn’t know. His Prairie Home Companion monologues about a fictional Lake Wobegon seem to owe a debt to Pearl’s Grinder’s Switch.

The term “hokum” came out of the minstrel and vaudeville shows, and it represented a “low comedy” style that included gags, routines, and songs using bawdy and risqué innuendo along with social and racial insults. Early blues musicians, jug bands, and string bands popularized thinly veiled sexual songs that were recorded and released in the ’20s. Here’s an example from Bo Carter of the Mississippi Sheiks that includes the lyrics:

Some men like lunch meat
And some they likes cold tongue
Some men don’t care for biscuits
They likes a dog gone big fat bun
But baby don’t put no more baking powder in your bread you see
‘Cause your two biscuits plenty big enough for me

Early in his career, Bill Monroe had appeared in blackface at minstrel shows, and he incorporated hokum into his bluegrass shows. The tradition was carried over with performers in blackface at the barn dances, radio shows, and early days of the Grand Ole Opry. Lee Roy “Lasses” White and his partner, Lee Davis “Honey” Wilds, were the first of such comedians who joined the Opry in 1932, and eventually “Lasses” was replaced with a new partner named “Jam-Up.”

Wilds was given permission to do tent shows during the week throughout the South before having to return to Nashville for the Saturday night broadcasts and was often accompanied by other Opry celebrities such as Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, Stringbean, and Monroe. In an interview with Wild’s son David by No Depression co-founder Grant Alden that appeared in the original print magazine in 1996, he shared what his dad and partner brought to the Opry:

“Music was a part of their act, but they were comedians. They would sing comedic songs, a la Homer and Jethro. They would add odd lyrics to existing songs, or write songs that were intended to be comedic. They were out there to come onstage, do five minutes of jokes, sing a song, do five minutes of jokes, sing another song and say ‘Thank you, good night’ as their segment of the Opry. Almost every country band during that time had some guy who dressed funny, wore a goofy hat, and typically played slide guitar.”

Through the years there has been a long tradition of hokum-style, comedic, and just plain silly country songs that have been released. Some, from writers such as Ray Stevens, Shel Silverstein, and Tom T. Hall, have placed high on the charts, while others remain simply a footnote in history. You probably have noticed I’m staying away from the most popular and longest-running series that traded on endless hokum, and that’s Hee Haw. I loved the music but hated the humor on many levels, so I’ll leave it at that.

A woman named Barbra Mies Waterman recently pointed me to a list of modern-day country hokum and humor originally compiled by Southern Living magazine. Check out the list here. Some are almost as sentimental as my Trader Joe’s Mini Pearls grape tomatoes.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column on the website of No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Easy Ed’s Guide to Roots Music Videos

Alan Lomax filming American Patchworks

Hardly a day goes by when I’m not visiting YouTube multiple times, and it’s usually to search for music-related clips or the occasional instructional video on things like how to clean my Magic Bullet smoothie maker, fix a busted radiator hose, or the best way to store bananas. If I’m ever stuck on a tech problem, it seems like there are thousands of 14-year-old kids who have filmed and uploaded detailed solutions. Education, art, fashion, politics, news, old radio shows and television commercials, speeches, health, fitness, 5K parachute jumps off the roof of Dubai skyscrapers, cute cats, funny dogs, and kitchen sinks: If you can think of something you want to know more about, I guarantee you’ll find it. While YouTube is probably the easiest and my favorite roots music video source, there’s a few other places you might want to explore.

I thought I’d share some search tips and links to some of the long-form and historical musical content I’ve come across through the years. But it’s accompanied by a warning and advice: video content often comes and goes like a case of beer and a bag of chips on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s often a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t proposition, as content owners have the absolute right to demand that it gets pulled off the site, or if they prefer, they can choose to let it stay up and share in the advertising revenue. So keep that in mind. If I share a link that’s dead by the time you read this, just search the title and it’ll likely pop up from another user’s account.

Lost Highway: The Story of American Country

This four-part series was produced back in 2003 and it first aired on BBC and then again on CMT in the United States in 2010. For the latter version, Lyle Lovett was hired to replace the original English narrator. The series traces the history of country music from the Appalachian Mountains and up to the present-day multibillion dollar industry it has become. It is not quite definitive, and there are a number of small but annoying inaccuracies. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty interesting series and you can try this link to start you out. I’ve only found the BBC version so far, but I’ll keep looking for Lyle.

Mother Maybelle’s Carter Scratch

I’m clueless what the origin is of this one, and I wonder if it was perhaps released under a different name. It’s not a documentary per se, but offers a number of clips with an oral history provided by Johnny Cash, Maybelle’s daughters, and a few others. Guitarists will enjoy the focus on her playing style, but it’s not technical in the least. I think much of it comes from The Nashville Network archives, Johnny’s television show, and the Grand Ole Opry. It’s an interesting way to spend an hour. Here’s a sample for you.

Alan Lomax: Archives and Documentaries

Not only did Lomax travel around the world making audio recordings, he also shot a huge amount of film stock. The official Alan Lomax Archive has its own channel on YouTube, and “is a resource for students, researchers, filmmakers, and fans of America’s traditional music and folkways. Shot throughout the American South and Southwest over the course of seven years (1978-1985) in preparation for a PBS series, American Patchwork, which aired in 1991, these videos consist of performances, interviews, and folkloric scenes culled from 400 hours of raw footage, many of which have never been seen publicly.”

American Patchwork consisted of five one-hour documentary films that focused on African American, Appalachian, and Cajun music and dance. While you can search for the individual titles on YouTube, the complete series is best found here. These are the titles of all five: The Land Where the Blues Began, Jazz Parades: Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, Cajun Country, Appalachian Journey, and Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old.

Folkstreams

Connecting documentary filmmakers with niche audiences, Folkstreams is a nonprofit website streaming major films on American vernacular culture. The films on are often produced by independent filmmakers and focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The site is divided into various categories, and if you choose music we’ll probably lose you for a few weeks. There are well over a hundred 30-90 minute documentaries posted covering every area of roots music, including some you never knew existed.

The Johnny Cash Show

This 58-episode series ran from June 7, 1969, to March 31, 1971, on ABC and was taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Many of the episodes are scattered throughout YouTube in their entirety or broken into hundreds of individual clips. This was far from the schlock production you might think would have been produced back then, with the first show’s guests featuring Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Doug Kershaw. Other guests represented all areas of music from blues, folk, country, pop, jazz … you name it. If you haven’t seen it, go forth. Here’s two scoops.

Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest

From 1965 to 1966, Pete Seeger hosted 39 episodes of Rainbow Quest. It was taped in black-and-white and featured musicians playing in traditional American music genres such as folk, old-time, bluegrass, and blues. The shows were unrehearsed, there was no studio audience, and songs were often traded between Seeger and his guests.

Odds and Ends

Here’s a few more I’ve found this bottomless well, and I’m sure to have only skimmed the surface.Historic Films Stock Footage Archive seems to have thousands of clips, with a large proportion devoted to music. A&E’s Biography episodes are up on YouTube, and while most aren’t music-related, there are a few gems, including The Everly Brothers and Hank Williams. And in no particular order: Rebel Beat: The History of LA Rockabilly, Rock N’ Roll Country Blues Archive Videos, Grand Old Opry Classics, Town Hall Party, and Smithsonian Folkways channels all deserve two thumbs up.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

The Death of Country Music: Natural Cause or Homicide

Some days my bones feel weary. It especially hurts when I get down on my knees, slowly bend over, and flip through dusty shelves of old, used books. Years ago it was record stores, but I can barely recall the last time I opened my wallet for a hunk of plastic. It’s so much easier to stream it, and when I leave home I can fit a few thousand songs inside my phone. But when it comes to words on a page, I still prefer paper to pixel.

A few months ago I found a copy of Nicholas Dawidoff’s In The Country of Country: Peoples and Places in American Music that was published almost 20 years ago, and I just got around to reading it. Named “one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature” by Conde Nast Traveler, Dawidoff’s series of short profiles and conversations with some of the pioneers of country music at times feels more like a eulogy to the music than a tribute to a living tradition.

The question of what or who killed country music has been discussed and written about endlessly, and it inspired a song called “Murder on Music Row” which you may recall was popularized in 2000 by George Strait and Alan Jackson.

While most people agree that it was pressure from New York record label executives on Nashville producers in the ’60s to sweeten up traditional country songs with syrupy orchestrations and arrangements that could appeal to a suburban audience, that’s just one of the theories about what went wrong with country music. Another finger points at the 1980 film Urban Cowboy, which re-calibrated the story from Saturday Night Fever and changed up the music.

While Urban Cowboy spawned a fashion trend in big cities of men wearing cowboy boots and women in tight denim jeans doing line dances and two-stepping at strip-mall bars, I’ve always believed it was the pop-country radio playlists — along with the emergence of the Walmart consumer driving a pickup truck and watching Shania Twain doing a virtual lap dance — that killed off hard-core country.

I might have been wrong.

The Stanley Brothers “Rank Stranger” is a beloved country classic, and Dawidoff spent time with Ralph Stanley talking about what it was like growing up in rural Virginia. No running water, no electricity, no bathrooms. They had a horse to plow the field and a washboard to clean their clothes. They were Primitive Baptists, and as such they sang sacred music without instruments on Sunday mornings. When the family moved to Smith Ridge, their father acquired a Philco battery-operated radio, and as they listened to the music of the Manier Brothers and Carter Family, Ralph and his brother Carter would sing along.

The Louvin Brothers grew up in Henagar, Alabama, on a five-acre government allotment where their father grew vegetables and sorghum cane. The town had a post office and cotton gin. Charlie was 12 and Ira 15 when they saw Roy Acuff pass by in an aircooled Franklin, on his way to a show at the Spring Hill schoolhouse. They didn’t have the money to get in, so they stood outside with three or four hundred other folks.

Buck Owens was born in Texas just ahead of the Dust Bowl exodus, in 1929. Seven years later, the family of 10 loaded up their old Ford coupe and a trailer to head West in search of a new life. They settled in Arizona and were “fruit tramps,” picking grapes, carrots, peaches, and cotton. Many nights, Owens went to bed hungry, with only cornbread and milk in his stomach. The whole family would travel to California when the seasons called for field work, and they stayed in migrant camps that were often filled with music. According to Dawidoff, “The Mexicans sang folksongs, the blacks sang the blues and spirituals, and the whites sang country gospel and Jimmie Rodgers’ songs.”

These are only three stories he captured, but Dawidoff also profiles Harlan Howard, Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt, Bill Monroe, Chet Atkins, Sara Carter, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, the Maddox Brothers, Sister Rose, Merle Haggard, and Iris DeMent. Along the way he meets many other musicians, and there is a common thread.

Pretty much all of the early country artists came from rural areas and their families were, if not poor, then of barely modest means. Religion was a large part of their upbringing, and there was also a consistent tug of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” behavior. Liquor, drugs, gambling, womanizing, and other diversions were often mentioned.

Seems as if, more than anything, what killed country music was our own country. The population has shifted from living off the land in sparse areas of small populations to larger towns, cities, and suburbs. As much as there is a financial divide of the haves and have-nots, even the poorest of the poor have iPhones and access to popular music and culture.

If you’re searching for a type of music that shares raw stories of people’s lives and experiences, you’re more likely to find it in hip-hop or rap than in the studios of Nashville or on the airwaves. And while we’re fortunate in these times that there is a new generation of great musicians embracing old-time music, bluegrass traditions, folk singing-songwriting, honky-tonk, classic country, and alt-whatever, it all flies under a flag called Americana, which sometimes feels too encapsulated and formulaic. Beware of an Urban Cowboy backsplash and whiplash.

In 1997, Dawidoff closed out his book with an epilogue appropriately titled “No Depression”:

To call today’s mainstream country music county at all is a misnomer. Hot Country is really pop music for a prospering, mostly conservative white middle class. It’s kempt, comfortable music – hyper-sincere, settled and careful not to offend nor surprise. A lot like Disneyland, in some ways its model, contemporary country thrives because it is sleek and predictable, a safe adventure in a smoke-free environment.

In this final chapter Dawidoff offers up a bit more hope and optimism. He cites Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Junior Brown, Alison Krauss, Suzanne Cox, Dwight Yoakam, and Lucinda Williams as having “fresh things to say about life.” He mentions Son Volt and Golden Smog as the heirs to Hank Williams and Gram Parsons. And to close out the book he quotes Joe Ely: “You know, good stuff, people’ll want to hear it.”

This guy sure gives all of us country music fans hope.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Image from 1947, Carnegie Hall NYC: CC2.0 Wiki

Will The Circle Be (Triple Word Score)

We were looking at an old Scrabble game the other night, one that was handed down through the years. The plain brown box was in pretty good shape, with hardly any rips or tears, and the glue that they used to hold it all together hadn’t come undone. It appeared from the markings to be at least 50 or maybe even 60 years old, and the colorful board was clean and crisp, the tiles and wood holders were spotless. I was told it was well used, but it obviously was also well made. It was a lot of fun for families and friends to play Scrabble together in the dining room or kitchen, but the board game business has likely taken a hit. Like music and video and books, and games and newspapers and magazines, we simply use apps these days. Staring at our little cell phone screens and electronic tablets, we either play against the processor chip or some faceless opponent on the internet.

Last month I went to the library. I still read books made of paper. My last holdout to the digital world. Everything else can reside on my hard drive, but I still like a book. I was there to pick up the latest mystery from Stephen White, the 20th and final novel in a series that takes place in Boulder. As I got ready to check it out (they scan barcodes these days–no more pockets in the front or rubber stamps that notate the due date), my eyes caught sight of an oversized book which I usually don’t ever read. They call them coffee table books. Being hard to hold and all, usually we think of them at Christmastime because they can be a cooler gift to give than a tie or pair of slippers. You leaf through them and look at the pictures. Hardly anyone ever reads them.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken: Country Music In America is different. Published back in 2006 by the Country Music Hall of Fame, our co-founder and former co-Editor Grant Alden wrote the review for No Depression in issue #65, and he liked it. Which, if you know him or have read Grant’s words in the past, is not a low bar to easily jump over. Edited by Paul Kingsbury and Alanna Nash, it is a series of essays and incredible visual representations. Grant noted that it was “written by some of the most respected scholars of country music, several of whom can be credited with creating the field: Bill C. Malone, Charles K. Wolfe, Ronnie Pugh, and Rich Kienzle among them. Other chapters come from comparatively younger pens, including Jon Weisberger and Peter Cooper. (And, yes, all those—save the late Professor Wolfe—have written for ND over the years.)”

While I have studied and read extensively about the history of music in America, I found myself thouroughly enthralled by the chronological details and stories that takes the reader all over the radar from minstrel shows to Tin Pan Alley to the Child and Broadside ballads to the Skillet Lickers and Plow Boys and Patsy Montana and the National Barn Dance and Louisiana Hayride and the Carters and Delmore Brothers and Hank and singin’ cowboys and Buck and Merle and Willie and Waylon and Elvis and Cash and Gram and Earle and Dylan, and on and on and on. A bonus that Grant points out: the modern day “hat acts” and “Garth era” take up barely thirty pages at the end. In addition to the interesting essays, photos, handbills and drawings, there are first person pieces from Mary Chapin Carpenter, Rosanne Cash and many others that really add perspective. The phrase “treasure trove” comes to mind.

The music.

After taking my ol’ sweet time to cradle and read this beauty, I went out to find the music. While I have a ton of audio files and all, what I wanted was to see and watch and experience the performances . Thankfully, we have You Tube. And sadly, we have You Tube. For every great show or clip you can find, there are others so laden with banner ads that it makes them unbearable. And so much is missing. Or never existed in the first place.

But we should be thankful for what we’ve got, and I’d challenge you to surf the search bar and see what you can come up with. The Grand Ole Opry has done a great job is preserving much from the early sixties, and you can watch many films of the era, including the full National Barn Dance release. There’s some great things found from the Johnny Cash Show, and many of the early variety shows from folks like Kate Smith and Tennessee Ernie Ford. I’ll drop in a few that I’ve found for you to check out below.

As the board games of our youth such as Scrabble slip away to the world of apps, the book world will eventually be completely digitized…and obviously its well on it’s way. Bookstores are few and far between these days. (Last time we checked in with Grant, I believe he was running one in Kentucky.) While it might be possible that this book is already out of print, I’ve found a few for sale and you will too if you just look around the interwebs. Better get it while you can.