Hidden Country

The secret family tree of country music

Damon W. Root from the October 2002 issue

Where Dead Voices Gather, by Nick Tosches, New York: Little, Brown, 330 pages, $24.95

Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, by Barbara Ching, New York: Oxford University Press, 186 pages, $22

The indigenous American art form of country music is frequently slandered, shunned, and mocked. It's routinely dismissed as either tacky nostalgia or the soundtrack for menacing rednecks. Often condemned by tastemakers and the tragically hip as one of the most conservative and stifling arenas of popular culture, country is bigger than its detractors imagine. More U.S. radio stations program country music than any other format, while country album sales netted a cool $1.5 billion in 2000. And in spite of the fact that most big city critics probably can't name one of his songs, Garth Brooks is the biggest selling solo act in history.

Two recent books, Nick Tosches' Where Dead Voices Gather and Barbara Ching's Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, help tell country's long, complex, and fascinating story. In the process, the authors map a busy intersection between culture and commerce that has produced not just a sound but a whole set of meanings that has helped delight -- and define -- millions of American lives.

Nick Tosches has written critically acclaimed biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin and the indispensable histories Country (1977) and Unsung Heroes of Rock & Roll (1984). In Where Dead Voices Gather, he turns to the forgotten roots of country music. On the surface an account of the life and times of Emmett Miller, a largely unknown blackface minstrel singer, the book is in fact a treatise on the meaning and making of culture itself, laying bare the hidden origins and strange currents of popular entertainment. Tosches gladly tips over more than a few sacred cows, most notably the notion that pop music was stolen from black culture.

Born in Macon, Georgia, sometime around the turn of the 20th century (birth certificates weren't required there until 1919), Emmett Miller was, in Tosches' words, "the most singular emanation of that bizarre twilight fusion of blackface minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz -- an emanation through which the forces of country music and the blues swirled as well." At his brief peak in the mid-to-late 1920s, this "yodeling blues singer" emerged as "one of the strangest and most stunning of stylists ever to record."

He transformed yodeling from a novelty into something "plaintive and disarming," a technique appropriated with great success by singers as different as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bob Dylan. Merle Haggard, one of country music's greatest figures, declared his debt to this mysterious minstrel on his 1973 album I Love Dixie Blues, while Western swing legend (and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer) Bob Wills auditioned vocalist Tommy Duncan with Miller's "I Ain't Got Nobody." Tosches convincingly argues that Emmett Miller is "a Rosetta Stone to the understanding of the mixed and mongrel bloodlines of country and blues, of jazz and pop, of all that we know as American music."

Tosches illuminates the myriad ways country inspired contemporary pop culture. In one memorable passage he unearths the origins of black blues shouter Big Joe Turner's "I Got a Gal for Every Day in the Week" in "a ragtime coon song composed in 1900." In another he traces Bob Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell" back through Jimmie Rodgers' "Gambling Bar-Room Blues," Blind Willie McTell's "Dying Gambler," and Louis Armstrong's "St. James Infirmary" to an Irish ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake." And in a story central to the heart of the book, he reveals how Emmett Miller's 1928 version of "Lovesick Blues" became "the direct inspiration for the 1948 performance that 25-year-old Hank Williams rode to fame." These events and countless others like them are, Tosches writes, "the story of American music itself: the story of the black stealing from the black, the white from the white, and the one from the other."

Tosches presents Emmett Miller as a deep source for pop music, one whose influence rippled outward throughout the last century. Consider The Georgia Crackers, Miller's backing band from his 1928 sessions for New York's Okeh label. There is Eddie Lang, "the first great jazz guitarist," who performed with luminaries such as Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Drummers Gene Krupa and Stan King both played in Benny Goodman's celebrated orchestra. The most notable Crackers were Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, on alto saxophone and trombone, respectively. The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra briefly featured rising superstar Bing Crosby, while Tommy Dorsey's big band introduced a young Frank Sinatra to a world waiting to swoon. In 1956 Elvis Presley made his national television debut on Stage Show, a CBS program hosted by the Dorsey Brothers.

Of course Miller was himself another node in a network of cross-influences that long predated him. He was one of the last popular "minstrels." Tosches provocatively describes minstrelsy as "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture." A stage show where whites blackened their faces with cork, mimicked the alleged behavior of Southern blacks, and performed songs supposedly created by those blacks, minstrelsy was born and bred in the heart of the North. The first documented performance occurred in New York City in 1769. By the 1820s and 1830s, lower Manhattan was abuzz with performances such as George Washington Dixon's "Zip Coon" and Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice's song-and-dance routine "Jim Crow." In 1843 the Virginia Minstrels performed the first ever all-blackface program before a capacity crowd at the Bowery Amphitheatre. Soon all blackface performers were known as minstrels.

For some geographic as well as cultural perspective, consider this. The Bowery, a street in lower Manhattan, runs north for about a mile from Chatham Square to Cooper Square. Luc Sante, author of the remarkable urban history Low Life (1991), calls it "the proverbial den of all vices." From the early 19th until the turn of the 20th century, this street and its environs were synonymous with lowbrow entertainment. The area was lousy with saloons, dime museums, oyster bars, minstrel theaters, and establishments promising women in varying states of undress.

In 1875 Samuel F. O'Reilly invented the electric tattoo machine and helped found the modern tattoo profession in his shop at 11 Chatham Square. Before opening his famed American Museum, P.T. Barnum had great success at a coffeehouse at Bowery and Division, where he exhibited an elderly woman he claimed was George Washington's wet nurse. In 1859 Bryant's Minstrels debuted the song "Dixie" (written by Northerner Dan Emmett) at 472 Broadway, several blocks to the west. Abraham Lincoln, in New York City shortly before his election, heard "Dixie" at a minstrel show and called for an encore. Today the Bowery is perhaps best known for the punk club CBGB's (an acronym for "country, bluegrass, and blues," incidentally).

"Minstrelsy, coon songs, and blackface humor," Tosches notes, "were a staple of the recording industry since its birth." George Washington Johnson, a Northern black and the first recording star, hit the big time in 1891 with his Columbia label smash "The Whistling Coon." Stephen Foster, America's first professional songwriter, wrote many of minstrelsy's greatest hits. "Oh! Susanna," "Camptown Races," and "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground" all flowed from the pen of this lifelong Yankee, a man who had traveled no farther south than Cincinnati. "Foster's South," Tosches writes, "a South dreamt by the North, was a romance embraced by the South itself; for the greatest nostalgia is that for what has never truly been." (Think about that the next time Pat Buchanan gets moist about how good everybody had it in the 1950s.)

Irving Berlin, composer of "God Bless America" and "White Christmas," also wrote "coon songs" (the accepted term at the time), although he achieved greater acclaim with "Sweet Italian Love," a "wop song" (another once-accepted term) that inspired Dean Martin's 1953 hit "That's Amore." Al Jolson, the first true multimedia star, got his start as a blackface minstrel. Bessie Smith, "The Empress of the Blues," began in the Rabbit Foot minstrelsy troupe, as did jazz great Louis Jordan.

Strangely, blacks regularly performed in blackface. "As for the grotesquerie of minstrelsy," Tosches writes, "there were many, both black and white, who found it no more offensive than the comedy built upon any exaggerated ethnic stereotyping." Maybe that sounds insensitive. Well, as those homeboys in Limp Bizkit like to say, he's just "keepin' it real," or as Tony Soprano might counsel, "fuhgeddaboudit."