![]() ![]() As the daughter of the radio cowboy singer Tex Owens, McBride was well connected in the country field. Wills had also added another twist to his band by adding a female vocalist, Laura Lee McBride, the first featured woman singer in the western swing genre. Wills himself was devoting more attention to fiddle hoedowns, and he acquired two new fiddlers, Johnny Gimble (from Texas) and Keith Coleman (from Oklahoma), both at home in any style. His Texas Playboys had moved away from their earlier emphasis on horns, once again becoming basically a fiddle band. When Bob Wills relocated to California in September 1943, the dance hall business had already begun to thrive, but he soon became a major musical force in the state, breaking attendance records everywhere he went, operating a club in Sacramento called Wills Point, and occasionally making cross-country tours. The most vigorous region for live country performances may very well have been with major emphasis devoted to ballroom performances and the big radio barn dances that began in the mid-1940s. Country music even ventured into historic Carnegie Hall in October 1947, when a Grand Old Opry unit headed by Ernest Tubb played two nights for a gross of over $9,000. Billboard claimed that country performers were major box-office attractions almost everywhere in the United States, even in “sedate New The South, as usual, remained a lucrative area for hillbilly entertainers, but Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan were recognized as important markets for country music. In addition to established shows like the Grand Ole the period saw the emergence of regional barn dances like the Wheeling Jamboree on WWVA in West Virginia Atlanta’s WSB Barn Farm and Fun Time (heard each day at noon over a five-state area), from Bristol, Virginia Dallas’s Big D Los Angeles’s Town Hall Party and Dinner Bell Roundup (later called the Hometown and, most important of all, Shreveport’s Louisiana In addition to providing local entertainment, these shows started many successful country musicians on the road to wider fame.Ĭountry music, therefore, was in the midst of a burgeoning commercial success most evidenced, perhaps, by the growth and development of the personal-appearance field. But with their newly discovered popularity, country entertainers were scheduled at more advantageous hours and were produced with the same care given to other musical offerings. ![]() In the early commercial years, most of the hillbilly shows had been broadcast at noon or during the early morning hours, since program directors felt that only early-rising farmers listened to the programs. By 1949, at least 650 radio stations featured live country performers. Radio continued to be an indispensable means of exploiting hillbilly talent. Bing Crosby, moreover, crossed once more into the country field and recorded the biggest song of all, “Sioux City Sue” (done the previous year by Dick Thomas).Īt the conclusion of the war, at least sixty-five recording companies, fifteen of them on the West Coast, were releasing country records. In 1946, songs like “Oklahoma Hills,” performed by Jack Guthrie (soon to die in a veteran’s hospital), Tex Williams’s “Shame on You,” Wesley Tuttle’s “Detour,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” and Merle Travis’s “Divorce Me C.O.D.” were jukebox favorites all over the nation. Country music, which had prospered despite (or perhaps because of) defense regulations, was already showing signs of increased national recognition. Records could now be produced in quantities above their prewar levels, and an entertainment-hungry public was ready to buy them. ![]() Later decades would bring greater material rewards to country musicians, but no period would experience a happier fusion of “traditional” sounds and commercial burgeoning than did the immediate postwar era.Īs the nation converted successfully to a civilian, domestic economy, the music industry, unhampered by wartime restrictions, geared itself for a highly prosperous period. In many respects, the dawning period should be perceived as the real “golden age” of country music. Country music profited as one consequence of the pursuit of pleasure and amusement that followed the war. Freed from wartime restraints, anxious Americans now sought the stability and material abundance that had been denied them in earlier eras. The uncertain peace that followed World War II ushered in a period of unparalleled prosperity. The Emergence of a Big Business, 1946–1953 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |