An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 14 | COUNTRY MUSIC DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II 341

Martin sang, played, and traveled with her singers until the late 1940s. From

then on, she concentrated more on writing and arranging for them and running

her own publishing business. Gospel was not only a performing style but also a

musical repertory, and new songs boosted the music’s appeal for singers and con-

gregations. Martin composed some fi fty gospel songs and arranged many more,

putting her stamp on gospel’s entry into a written tradition. Between 1939 and her

death in 1969, she published nearly three hundred pieces of gospel sheet music.

Unlike Dorsey, who issued only his own compositions, Martin published the songs

her group sang regardless of the composer. Alone among musicians of her era, she

seems to have recognized gospel music as an endeavor that could link spirituality,

music making, and commerce in a single enterprise. (The example of musician-

businessman Lowell Mason in the 1830s and 1840s comes to mind; see chapter 3.)

Martin’s funeral has been seen as a symbol of black gospel music’s place in

American life: a blend of acceptance and obscurity. W hen she died in January

1969 at the age of sixty-two, fi fty thousand Chicagoans passed through Mount

Pisgah Baptist Church, where she was music director, to view the body, although

no national newspaper or journal covered the event. Across the United States,

gospel fans heard the news through word of mouth and on the radio.

Gospel music’s roots lie in spirituals, ring shouts, and the blues; in turn it

became a wellspring from which other African American musical traditions have

fl owed. Many who have excelled in jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and soul have

served their apprenticeship in the black church. And partly because gospel music

making has been widely accessible to black Americans, its infl uence has been

broad as well as deep. Gospel music was responsible for much of what came to be

considered emblematic in A merican culture of the 1960s: from rock and roll’s beat,

drama, and group vibrations to the hymn singing at sit-ins and freedom marches.

COUNTRY MUSIC DURING THE GREAT

DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II

Country music in its second decade continued to grow and diversify, despite the

inhibiting effects of the Great Depression. Country performers, like other musi-

cians, struggled with the near-collapse of the record industry, as sales dropped

from 104 million records in 1927 to only 6 million in 1932. Helping to offset those

losses, however, were gains in publishing, radio, and movies.

Realizing that newly composed songs could be much more profi table than

recordings of traditional material, many country musicians in the 1930s followed

the example of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers (see chapter 11) by writing

and copyrighting songs that could then earn royalties when performed by other

musicians or printed in songbooks. Ralph Peer again played a signifi cant role in

this development, now as a publisher. The company he founded in 1928, Southern

Music, handled the copyrights for songs not only by the artists Peer recorded for

race and hillbilly records but also by mainstream jazz and popular musicians. In the

1950s, Southern Music would sign deals with many of the fi rst rock and roll artists.

Also benefi ting country musicians in the Depression years was the rise of

border blasters, radio stations owned by U.S. citizens but located just across the

Rio Grande from Texas and thus exempt from U.S. broadcasting regulations. The

most powerful of the border blasters had signals powered by up to half a million

border blasters

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