An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 14 | COUNTRY MUSIC DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II 343

music originating in the Southwest. In both feature fi lms and the “shorts” that

accompanied them, string bands and other hillbilly acts made occasional appear-

ances as well. So profi table were such acts that even non-hillbillies tried cashing

in on the craze, a trend parodied in a fi lm musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. In one of

the movie’s scenes, a group calling themselves Zipky’s Kentucky Hillbillies enter

a Broadway producer’s offi ce seeking an audition. W hen their Yiddish accents

give them away, the producer tells them to scram back to their old Kentucky

home. The implication is that country music, on screen and elsewhere, had the

power to attract persons born well outside the rural South.

COUNTRY MUSIC IN THE SOUTHEAST AND MIDWEST

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, radio barn dances and shorter “song and pat-

ter” shows, originating mostly in the Southeast and Midwest, broadcast perfor-

mances that developed the styles heard on early hillbilly records. For example,

the characteristic sound of the string band was combined with the vocal harmo-

nies of the Carter Family in a new format: the “brother” duo. Brother acts that

gained popularity during the Great Depression included the Delmore Brothers

(from Alabama), the Monroe Brothers (from Kentucky), and the Callahan Broth-

ers and the Blue Sky Boys (both from North Carolina).

All of these duos featured a lead vocal with a higher harmonizing tenor voice,

closely blended to produce what became known as “the high lonesome sound.”

Moreover, many of these duos featured one brother playing guitar and the other

playing mandolin, an instrument rarely heard on 1920s hillbilly records. Dur-

ing the 1930s the mandolin eclipsed the banjo, which, except in the hands of a

few musician-comedians such as Louis “Grandpa” Jones, temporarily went out

of fashion until an exciting new style of playing emerged in postwar bluegrass

(see chapter 17).

Not all country vocal duos were brother acts. Two popular sister acts were the

Girls of the Golden West (from Illinois) and the Cackle Sisters (from Minnesota).

The Cackle Sisters sang fi rst on WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago and later on

the nationally syndicated Purina Mills Checkerboard Time, where their distinctive

novelty yodeling won them their stage name (the show’s sponsor manufactured

chicken feed). WLS in Chicago was also the radio home of Lulu Belle and Scotty,

a husband-and-wife team whose comic skits and sentimental love songs made

them one of the most popular radio acts of the 1930s.

Musically and lyrically, these acts generally stayed within the broad categories

already established for hillbilly music: ballads, sentimental songs, breakdowns

(fi ddle tunes played as virtuoso showpieces), and rowdy songs about drinking,

gambling, and living outside the law. Event songs kept up with changing times:

the Dixon Brothers’ “I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray” (1938, recorded by Roy Acuff

as “Wreck on the Highway” in the 1940s) describes a drunk-driving accident in

which “whiskey and blood mixed together.” In 1939 the Rouse Brothers, a duo

from Florida that included fi ddle instead of mandolin, recorded “Orange Blos-

som Special,” a train song that alternates twelve-bar blues vocal choruses with a

lively instrumental breakdown, an effective marriage of Anglo-Celtic and African

American musical idioms. That fi rst recording featured Ervin’s imitation of a

train whistle, and ever since, contest fi ddlers have used “Orange Blossom Spe-

cial” as an occasion for virtuoso display and mimicry of all kinds.

brother duos

sister acts

country genres

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