Country Music: The Nashville Sound

November is Country Music Month. Not exactly heart-pounding news—except in Nashville, Tenn., where it is cause for an annual whoop-‘n’-holler hoedown called the Country Music Festival. Hundreds of back-hill singers and strummers, sporting mail-order toupees and $300 hand-tooled boots, turn out for the event, and aspiring singers corner recording producers in elevators for impromptu auditions.

Big Business. The celebrants at the 13th annual festival had a lot to whoop about. Country and Western music, known in the trade as C & W, has never been more widely popular. Beginning with World War II, when every barracks and afterdeck resounded with homespun hits like Wabash Cannonball and Great Speckled Bird, C & W has spread with the rural populations to the industrial centers of the North and beyond. Today C&W is a bristling $100 million-a-year industry with a network of more than 2,000 radio stations from Massachusetts to California airing country tunes. Nashville, with 21 recording studios, produces 30% of the nation’s hit singles.

Highlight of the festival was a premiere of the movie Your Cheatin’ Heart, the life story of Singer-Songwriter Hank Williams, the “hillbilly Shakespeare.” The songs on the sound track are sung by Williams’ son, Hank Jr., 16, who wheels around town in the white Cadillac in which his father was found dead of a heart attack on New Year’s Day 1953, at the age of 29 (“He just lived himself to death,” the legend goes).

Williams, who never spent more than 30 minutes dashing off a song, was remarkably successful in all categories of gutbucket country—ill-fated love (Cold, Cold Heart), sacred (When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels), “weepers” (My Son Calls Another Man Daddy) and novelty (Jambalaya). His records are still strong sellers, attesting to the tenacious loyalty of C & W fans, who through the years have made country music the most durable sound on the popular market.

Heart, Not Art. The magic ingredient that keeps C & W perking along is an elusive something called the “Nashville Sound.” More than the drawling, sowbelly accents and nasal intonations of the singers, it is the background music provided by the sidemen on twangy electric guitars. They are a small, seasoned corps whose musical prowess is more heart than art. Few, lest it cramp their style, have had formal training. In fact, they tend to pride themselves on their inability to read music, “and the few who can,” says RCA Victor Executive Steve Sholes, “don’t let it interfere with their performance.”

They practice instead something called “head arranging,” i.e., playing a song through a few times to get the “feel,” then improvising and embellishing the rest of the way. Says Decca’s Owen Bradley, the pioneer of C & W in Nashville: “Perfection is not necessarily what you’re looking for. You just want to play free. There’s a lot of highly organized faking.”

The Nashville Sound, its practitioners claim, is absolutely indigenous to the town and can’t be had elsewhere. It is something about “the warmth of Nashville,” they explain, almost misty-eyed at the thought of it. Guitarist Grady Martin says he has tried playing C & W in New York and Hollywood with “foreigners,” but it never worked. Explains one musician: “Country people play their feeling and feel their playing. That’s the big difference.”

Prized and Prime. Nashville Sound is now so prized that performers of all musical persuasions, from Doris Day to Fats Domino, have flocked to Nashville to cash in on it. Distilled into a variety of musical idioms, the Sound has made Trumpeter Al Hirt, for example, into the hottest instrumentalist around. Tele vision now has a prime-time C & W program in The Jimmy Dean Show. The Nashville folk have even gained some measure of respectability from folk-music buffs, mindful that C & W traces its roots to Scottish, English and Irish ballads brought to the U.S. two centuries ago. Earl Scruggs, virtuoso of the five-string banjo, Lester Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys have been admitted to the folk pantheon. So has Johnny Cash, the most popular as well as the best of the modern country singer-composers (Ring of Fire, I’ll Walk the Line).

The fact that Nashville is Cashville has attracted a lot of big-city operators to town, and there is some concern that the Nashville Sound might lose its pure rural flavor. Cautions RCA Victor’s Sholes: “It behooves Nashville to remain unhip, that is, to avoid losing the attitudes and points of view which have made country music the great culture it is.”