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This chapter examines the role of “hillbilly” in commercially recorded rural white music, by the early 1930s commonly (although often disparagingly) labeled “hillbilly music”. The hillbilly image in country music was both a fabrication of music industry producers and promoters, and an outgrowth of farcical performances by folk musicians. The hillbilly label and image was accepted by most musicians of the 1920s and early 1930s because it partially evoked a nostalgic sense of a mythic mountaineer. By the late 1930s, however, the growing power of a derisive hillbilly stereotype led musicians and the burgeoning country music industry increasingly to embrace the more unambiguously positive cowboy image and the less stigmatized term “country”. Nonetheless, as “hillbilly” and string-band music became interwoven in the popular imagination, its meaning shifted from one denoting only threat and violence to one that primarily signified low humor and carefree frivolity.

Country music in the late 1930s was more disconnected from the mainstream than swing. Appearing initially only in cover versions of songs by crooners, or in the recordings of “singing cowboys,” turmoil in the music industry during the war years created an opening for a few extremely successful country recordings exemplified by Al Dexter’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” “Hillbilly Music” (as country was usually called during this time) was associated with the concept of “corn,” which allied the music to rural agricultural production and lowbrow, “corny” comedy routines. The popularity of recordings like “Pistol Packin’ Mama” affected a discursive shift, and the status of the music was worked out via the use of labels such as “Folk Music,” “Hillbilly,” “Country,” and “Western.” By the late 1940s, a major hillbilly hit like “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” drew on some of the same minstrelsy tropes as had “Open the Door, Richard.”

In the early history of the phonograph and recorded music, if not in the minds and performance practices of all vernacular musicians, blues and hillbilly music should receive separate consideration; the recording industry rigidly distinguished between rural white and rural Black recorded music by creating and maintaining segregated recording and marketing categories. Making and replaying sound reproductions of what record producers first called “old familiar tunes”, “hill country tunes”, “old time music”, and, beginning in 1925, “hillbilly” music, swiftly intertwined supposedly rustic white southeastern American musicians with complex patterns of northern urban industrial commerce. Producing, recording, and consuming records of what passed for white rural southern music primarily served the economic interests of the northern recording companies that discovered remarkably little difficulty in harnessing southern entrepreneurial ambitions to their own corporate ends. Hillbilly records were born when northern and southern entrepreneurs began to envision how professionalized southern vernacular musicians would appeal when recorded and packaged as untutored rural southern mountaineers. Pioneer record producers like Ralph Peer liked to call their work in the South “recording expeditions”.

The early decades of the 20th century was a time of progress for the United States. Shreveport played a vital part in the story of the rise of the phonograph industry. After advances in research into phonographs, they began to appear in drugstores and bars. The affluent image associated with the phonograph began to widen in the 1920s. Due to the effect of the phonograph, many early hillbilly musicians portrayed the stresses and ambivalences of the era when mass media began to change music and musical practice. The impact of hillbilly music as characterizing southern sounds extended beyond any previous negative undertones. However, later on as phonograph companies struggled, radio moved to the center stage as the medium for listening to popular music.

This chapter focuses on “Fiddlin' John” Carson's debut record, which marked the advent of what OKeh would soon designate as a new field of recorded commercial music called “hillbilly music,” or, less pejoratively, “old-time music.” The modest but surprising sales of this record indicated to Peer and his superiors at the General Phonograph Corporation, the manufacturer of OKeh records, that a promising, previously unrecognized market existed for old-timey grassroots music sung and played by ordinary white southerners. “One of the most popular artists in the OKeh catalog is Fiddlin' John Carson, mountaineer violinist, whose records have met with phenomenal success throughout the country,” the Talking Machine World, a phonograph dealers' trade journal, reported in April 1925.

The early history of what would eventually be called “country music” drew on many of the same ideas about genre and audience that had been developed in the marketing of foreign music and race music. The idea that rural, white people from the South constituted a distinct audience led to a rapid formation of the category some three years after the initial interest in “race” music. The ambiguous social position of southern, rural white people led to difficulties in finding a convenient label for the category, although “Old-Time Music” came closest to achieving official status, and “Hillbilly Music” was used informally in the press. Old-Time Music increasingly pursued connections to mainstream popular music even while continuing to refer to an imagined rural past. One of the most successful recording artists of the 1920s, Vernon Dalhart, is used to exemplify the trajectory of Old-Time Music during the mid-1920s.

More than we used to realize, the phonograph and recorded music served to stimulate collective memories among Americans of different social and ethnic backgrounds, who were, like the few large recording companies that survived the Depression, caught up in the swiftly changing patterns and politics of national life. The personal changes brought on by life itself provided ample stimulus for seeking solace in musical memories, but the additional burdens of national economic adversity and war, which drew workers into urban factories and GIs onto lonely battlefields, led many in both groups to long for the music they had left behind. Record producers often mixed stylistic genres and, less creatively, simply issued ethnic cover versions of hit records. Such processes of cultural and musical assimilation created another basis for shared popular musical memories. With bebop, as with 1920s jazz, blues, hillbilly music, and big band swing of the 1930s and 1940s, the recording industry mediated cultural and musical diversity in the United States.

This chapter examines Hank Williams, who was the greatest country artist in history. He put the poetry into hillbilly music and influenced innumerable country, rock, and Americana songwriters. His sad story also anticipated the tragic tales of such artists as Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. A brilliant example of Williams's technique was when he put a yodel into “Lovesick Blues,” a song which came from a mid-1920s Broadway musical that flopped (O-oo Ernest). Hank Williams emerged at a time when hillbilly hits were being covered for the pop market. His songs are distinguished by the pared-down poetry of his lyrics; songwriters study the artful concision of Williams's best songs.

This chapter looks at the Ku Klux Klan in the context of American music history, arguing that the idea of the 1920s as “Jazz Age” is a pernicious cultural myth. Many vocally hated jazz, with Klan members particularly highlighting both the white supremacism and anti-Semitism central to much of this criticism. Those same Klan members also engaged in widespread cultural appropriation, retooling popular songs – including jazz and blues ‘race records’ – into propaganda for the Klannish ideology. While Klan members recorded these songs at Gennett Records, similar ideas were being commercialized and incorporated into novelty songs from Tin Pan Alley. Klan members formed jazz bands even as they propelled the career of old-time fiddlers like John Carson and the development of the hillbilly music genre.

This chapter discusses the romantic genealogy of rock 'n' roll and how its style resulted from the happy integration of white hillbilly music with black “race music” or, as it came to be known in the 1950s, “rhythm and blues.” Supported by recent scholarship that has delved into the files of record companies, analyses affirm that rock 'n' roll represents a blatant appropriation of black music by white entrepreneurs. A postmodern view might regard rock 'n' roll not even as music, but as simply “a marketing concept that evolved into a lifestyle.” The chapter also analyzes how Bill Haley's recording of “Rock Around the Clock” turned the tide of American popular music in late 1955.

This chapter presents an article by Monty Brown that first appeared in the 1988 volume of Louisiana Folklife, and which recounts the history of an Ark-La-Tex musical family dating back into the 1870s. The Grigg family’s oral history includes encounters with prominent figures in radio and recording. Their story also shows how one family in northwestern Louisiana experienced transformations of life resulting from the early twentieth-century revolutions in media and transportation.