CHAPTER 11 | THE BIG BANG IN BRISTOL 267
W hereas ballads, old or new, were generally sung in the impassive, undra-
matic tone of traditional folk singers, a more emotive vocal style was sometimes
applied to such sentimental numbers as “The Prisoner’s Song.” Sentimental
songs complemented the previous century’s parlor-song repertory with newer
compositions in a similar vein. Nostalgia, family solidarity, tragic love, and reli-
gious affi rmation are hallmarks of the sentimental country song.
In contrast to both ballads and sentimental songs were the lively instrumen-
tal dance tunes of the string bands. Old Anglo-Celtic fi ddle tunes made their
appearance, transformed by southern fi ddling traditions, which emphasized a
rhythmic “saw stroke” bowing technique and double stops, in which two strings
are sounded simultaneously, so that the melody is heard against a droning back-
ground note. Newer fi ddle tunes found their way onto hillbilly records as well,
many of them drawn from minstrelsy, such as “Turkey in the Straw,” an instru-
mental version of the minstrel song “Zip Coon.”
String bands often drew their vocal repertory from minstrelsy as well, or
from its later Tin Pan Alley descendant, the Negro dialect song. Most of these
are comic songs, often with bawdy lyrics celebrating a dissolute lifestyle, as also
heard in many blues records. Like the performers of minstrelsy and turn-of-
the-century Tin Pan Alley ethnic novelties, hillbilly musicians used racial mas-
querade to express the lure of sexual promiscuity, hard drinking, and even,
occasionally, the use of drugs such as cocaine—proclivities hard to own up to in
the intensely religious culture of the rural South.
The tone and subject matter of early country songs, then, cover a wide spec-
trum, from pious sentimentality to raucous immodesty. The breadth of subject
matter is no better illustrated than in the work of the fi rst two country acts to
achieve stardom. By pure coincidence, both acts were discovered by Ralph Peer
within days of each other.THE BIG BANG IN BRISTOL
Ralph Peer spent the summer of 1927 touring Georgia and Tennessee in search of
new talent for Victor’s race and hillbilly catalogs. Arriving in Bristol, Tennessee,
near the Virginia border, in late July, he was the subject of a front-page story in the
Bristol News Bulletin that attracted musicians from as far away as Kentucky and North
Carolina. Among them were two acts that, each unknown to the other and repre-
senting two distinct strands of early country music, recorded for Peer in the fi rst
few days of August: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The popularity of their
records transformed country music from a small specialty market into a major seg-
ment of the American music industry. The discovery of these two major forces in
the same town in the same week has been called “the Big Bang of country music.”THE CARTER FAMILY
Tr a v e l i n g t o B r i s t o l f r o m t h e i r h o m e i n V i r g i n i a l e s s t h a n t h i r t y m i l e s a w a y w e r e
the three members of the Carter Family: A. P. Carter; his wife, Sara Dougherty
Carter; and Sara’s cousin Maybelle Addington Carter, who was also marriedfi ddle tunesminstrelsy and
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