An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 17 | POSTWAR COUNTRY MUSIC 415

whole. Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958) is one such album. While its

twelve songs, all in arrangements by Nelson Riddle, span almost three decades,

as a group they maintain a generally melancholy mood, with Riddle’s orches-

trations providing a contemporary sound. Aimed at adults, a concept album

like this one connected songs that had been written separately and testifi ed to

the excellence Sinatra found in the work of such songwriting teams as Rodgers

and Hart, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van

Heusen.

Mainstream popular music, rooted in the songwriting and performance

styles of the classic American popular song, reached even wider audiences

thanks to the new technologies in the record and television industries. (Main-

stream itself is a relative term, a label for that segment of the nation’s culture

considered to be predominant or a norm at a particular time.) But the main-

stream alone does not account for the huge revenues garnered by the music

business in the postwar era. Much of that commercial success was due to inno-

vative developments in music genres originating in the Caribbean and in the

southern United States: Latin music (as described in chapter 16), country music,

rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.

POSTWAR COUNTRY MUSIC

With prosperity growing in the South, the demand for amusement grew with it.

The Grand Ole Opry and other radio barn dances (see chapter 11) attracted wide

audiences, and jukeboxes reverberated with songs by country entertainers.

Country songs also appeared in the popular mainstream. In 1950 “Tennessee

Waltz,” by the country songwriter and performer Pee Wee King, was turned into

a hit record by Mitch Miller, whose production featured Patti Page’s signature

overdubbed harmony. Sung in a style free of regional traits, the record’s main-

stream success seemed to indicate that country songwriters’ emotional direct-

ness could jump barriers of social class and geography.

BILL MONROE AND BLUEGRASS

While postwar country music was proof of the staying power of old styles,

themes, and sounds, innovators like Bill Monroe infused the old forms with

a new energy. A mandolin virtuoso born in 1911 in the bluegrass state of Kentucky,

Monroe established himself on the Grand Ole Opry, whose Saturday-night radio

broadcasts on Nashville’s WSM included a half-hour segment distributed nation-

ally on NBC. The acoustic instruments of Monroe’s band—mandolin, fi ve-string

banjo, fi ddle, guitar, and double bass—preserved the old-fashioned fl avor of

prewar hillbilly music. Unlike the string bands of the 1930s, however, Monroe’s

Blue Grass Boys took their numbers extremely fast—much as bebop musicians

at the same time often improvised at accelerated speeds—and like jazz perform-

ers, they structured their tunes as a series of virtuoso solos. In vocal numbers

Monroe pitched his music high, with the tenor’s harmony line (which he sang

himself) set above the lead and sometimes reaching as far up as the C above

the concept album

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