CHAPTER 11 | HILLBILLY: THE INVENTION OF COUNTRY MUSIC 263
his melodic line, as in the second phrase of the opening stanza, where Smith
reduces Handy’s melody to basically two notes—the tonic and the lowered third—
but bends the blue note to powerful effect. Likewise, Longshaw does not restrict
himself to Handy’s basic blues progression, instead inserting additional chords
in the second bar of each phrase and an elaborate turnaround at the end of the
fi rst two choruses. Freest of all is Armstrong’s improvised commentary, which
corresponds to nothing in Handy’s sheet music. Father of the Blues though he
may have been, Handy is merely an attendant to the Empress and her cohort in
this supreme example of performers’ music.HILLBILLY: THE INVENTION OF COUNTRY MUSIC
After the unexpected success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920 proved the
existence of a market for race records, the search was on to fi nd more blues per-
formers who could match her in sales. Smith’s label, Okeh, hired Ralph Peer to
comb the rural South as a talent scout—or, as industry lingo would later have it, as
an A&R (artists and repertoire) man. With two engineers and a carload of portable
recording equipment, Peer would arrive in a southern town, set up an improvised
recording studio, and allow himself to be interviewed by the local newspaper,
whose free publicity spared his company the expense of advertising his presence.
While auditioning blues musicians in Atlanta in the summer of 1923, Peer
was persuaded to record an entirely different sort of performer: a fi fty-fi ve-year-
old white entertainer called “Fiddlin’ John” Carson. With no accompaniment
other than his fi ddle, Carson played and sang a traditional dance tune, “The Old
Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow,” and an 1870s minstrel song, “The
Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” Carson’s playing was marginally adequate,
Peer thought, but his singing was “plu-perfect awful.” Peer saw no commercial
potential in the two sides Carson recorded, but an Atlanta record distributor
persuaded him to press fi ve hundred copies for local sale.
When the distributor ordered more copies a few days later, reporting that the
fi rst fi ve hundred had all been sold, Peer belatedly assigned the record a serial
number and placed it in the Okeh catalog for national distribution. Eventually, the
record sold several thousand copies, and a new market had emerged in the record
industry. W hereas race records were by, for, and about African Americans, this
new music was created by and marketed to rural white southerners. Okeh and the
other labels that soon competed in this market tried out various names for the
music through the 1920s: “old-time tunes,” “old southern melodies,” “old familiar
tunes,” “mountain songs and jigs,” “popular ballads and mountaineer tunes.” But
the label that stuck, at least through the 1920s and 1930s, was the one coined by
Ralph Peer, drawing on a colloquialism with mocking overtones: hillbilly records.
Just as race records would develop into a variety of African American popu-
lar styles after World War II, hillbilly records would later develop into the genre
known today as country music. But in the years between the two world wars, the
boundaries between country music and other genres were not clearly marked.
On the contrary, hillbilly records embraced a wide diversity of styles and infl u-
ences. L i ke ma ny other t y pes of A mer ica n music, countr y music, from the beg in-
ning, found its strength in hybridity.Ralph Peer“Fiddlin’ John” Carsonhillbilly records172028_11_254-279_r3_ko.indd 263 23/01/13 8:42 PM