From Women's Experiences to the Cowboy Myth:
Associations Between Societal Change, the Making of
Professionalized Country Music and changed Gender
relations in Appalachia
This talk actually combines several of my research interests. It is in one way about working-class history, in another way gender history with particular emphasis on masculinity, and in a third way on history of popular music. What I actually have done is combining those three perspectives in attempts to explain why the so called country music in it’s early period of the 1930s became so conservative regarding family, gender and gender relations
keeping traditional gender roles and hegemonic masculine ideals very high. In 1924, fifteen year old Roba Stanley from Georgia recorded the song Single Life. It was just nine months after Fiddlin’ John Carson has recorded The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane, which use to be recognized as the first country music recording ever. Roba Stanley became the first woman to
record within the country style. In Single Life she expresses how women’s life conditions get worse if they marry and that single life is a much happier life than being locked in through marriage.
The chorus is:
Single life is a happy life, Single life is lovely,
I am single and no man’s wife, And no man shall control me.
Not many years after Roba Stanley’s pathbreaking recording, the emerging commercialized country music was connected with the cowboy myth
expressing very obvious masculine ideals. Is that a sign of rapid change in the music or was Roba Stanley’s recording just an exception within a prevalent male music tradition? How can those musical expressions be connected to the economic and social changes that took place in Appalachia the decades around 1900?
So how then did the Appalachian region change between about1880 and 1930?
The southern Appalachian region was rural. Up to about 1880, you couldn’t find much of capitalistic activities here within agriculture, commerce or industry. However, in the 1880s the region’s natural resources became of interest to American capitalists who begun to exploit the natural resources; coal below the ground and the forests above it, were main resources. Beside
the coal mining and the lumber industry there was not much of industrial development. A precondition for exploiting the natural resources was the construction of a railroad web, which made it possible to transport coal and wood from the remote areas to parts of the United States where it could be used for industrial purposes. The extension of the railroad web was made very rapidly. At about 1920 most of the Appalachian region was involved in such a web.
To secure access to those products, capitalists from outside the region
bought or gained control over considerable amounts of land aiming to exploit it. It was land owned by small farmers – who thereby became proletarianized – as well as large forest areas which had not previously been considered as private property. This process made land to a commodity that could be bought or sold in a market. Concentration of land property meant that considerable groups of small farmers became landless or that there was no land available for their children to take over. Many of the previously
independent farmers’ families were forced to leave the land their forefathers had tilled for maybe several generations . Instead, a new life as dependent wage workers in the newly erected company towns became the future. In this changing process, many people felt rootlessness and moved from town to town in order to create better life conditions or keeping up the dream that in the future get the opportunity to go back to the more independent farm-life.1
In Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia coal mines were opened up in remote areas. Narrow creek valleys, steep hillsides and inaccessible ravines were places where mines mushroomed in late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
But how did than actually life look like before capitalists from outside the region started to invest capital there?
An agrarian economy
Up to around 1880 the Appalachian South was probably one of the most rural parts of the United States. Farm production was the major source of maintenance for almost the whole population, which mainly lived on farms situated in fertile valleys and on plateaus. Considerable parts of the region were not possible to cultivate due to the steep sides of the valleys. Those hillsides were considered to be public land open for use - such as hunting, collection of logs, letting hogs feed themselves – by all members of
community. Hillsides were essential land for most farmers and served as a complement to the more fertile valleys.
When collecting folk songs in the late 1910s, British anthropologists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles visited the most remote parts of Appalachia,
1 Ronald D Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers. Industralization of the Appalachian
South, 1880-1930, Knoxville 1982, s xxif. Om bruksstäderna se Julie D Clark, Company Towns in America 1880 to 1930, Masters Thesis, Humboldt State University, May 2006
where coal industry has not changed living conditions. They described those often isolated areas:
“Economically they are independent. As there are practically no available markets, little or no surplus produce is grown, each family extracting from its holdings just what is needed to support life, and no more.”
Most mountaineers owned the right to their own land and cultivated it in a family based labor process without hiring anyone else. Since most families were self-sufficient, people, at least men, could, even if they were poor, experience a high degree of independence and freedom. No one from outside could subordinate you as part of a structural based power relation.
Practically all of the oral history evidences on farming and farm life I have went through emphasize those contents of rural life, having everything but no money, but being independent and not vulnerable to an unpredictable market. However, within the family internal power relations existed with an obvious gendered and generational division of labor.
The forests and hillsides were important, not only for keeping hogs and cows, but also for collection of logs, nuts, berries and hunting.
In this agricultural area with its self-sufficient family farms, particular perceptions of masculinity and femininity developed. In agrarian societies masculinity was centered on muscle-power, in order to conquer, master, and process nature. An essential part of masculinity was also independence and power to regulate men’s own life and to maintain the family.
However the agrarian material foundation for that masculinity was
threatened during the decades around 1900. When lumber industry grew and coal mining was in its infancy the demand for labor grew considerably. At about the same time the agrarian economy went into problems. Rural families couldn’t any longer produce enough for the own household, family group, and neighborhood. This development was a result of the increasing privatization of land and resources, which previously had been available as commons but “mainly because of the region’s population increase, farm subdivisions, and farm soil depletion and erosion”. The self-sufficient farm families did not possess capital resources enough to buy property that was now privatized.
It was also these two sectors that farmer’s sons went into to find work. Most of them in mining.
To be a coal miner
For proletarianized sons and daughters of farmers, life in coal-camps sharply differed from that on farms where they were raised.
In the company towns, mine-owners organized and controlled the whole life of the workers. The company owned, organized or controlled the store;
schools; churches; saloons; leisure activities; and health services. The company store held all goods that a miner and his family needed.
Most miners were paid in so called scripts only for use within the particular camp. What miner’s families bought in the shop, was in many coal-camps directly deducted from the wage.
The company town system meant a kind of serfdom. This restriction of coal miners’ independence also meant a serious threat to manliness and the rural masculinity.
Keeping the family and the woman was another part of masculinity. According to Homer Lawrence Morris, who made 300 interviews with coal miners in the 1930s, this was hard to do in the coalfields. Women might not have that kind of freedom that was possible among men in the coal fields. Women’s chores were to take care of the house, the children and the garden: The impoverished conditions resulted in frequent divorces among mine
workers, which also meant a threat to the masculinity. The feeling among many miners, not to be able to satisfy what they thought their wives’ dreams, meant a severe hit to their manliness. An even worse threat to miners’ manliness was if his wife left him for another kind of life. One miner told Morris this story:
“I married a coalminer’s daughter in 1912 and we moved to the coal camp where her father worked. I started to load coal at 28 c a ton and got better pay every year until I made $3,000 in 1919. At one time I had $600 in the bank. During the 1922 strike I spent all my savings and run up a store bill of about $600. When I got to work again everything I made for four years went to pay it back. We moved to another camp in 1926. Here’s where my wife left me. Her clothes got shabby and thin. She would go to the store and get turned down for orders because I couldn’t get
enough work. She said, *Ern, I like you – when you had work you get me nice clothes .’ She left while I was in the mine at work. She came back several times to see the children and said she was working in a hotel in Charleston. I heard that she had gone with another fellow, but I never knew. The life in a mining camp as surely ruined my family.”
To sum up about the economic and social change that took place in Appalachia is that it meant a serious threat to the rural masculine ideals, since less and less actually could be expressed in working men’s manliness.
.
So what is then Appalachian folk music?
So, what then happened in music? Roba Stanley made her recording in 1924. She came from a family deeply intersted in folk music. On Saturday
evenings musicians appeared at local festivities or dance venues. This was also the world of Roba Stanley.
The family seems to have been the most important arena for transferring musical skills and songs from one generation to another. In the family also different gender roles connected to music were transmitted from one
generation to the other. The most common gender division was that men played the instruments, except for organ and piano, while women mostly were the ones who used to sing.
Linda McCumbers recollects that she learned to sing from her mother and two aunts. As singing, in many Appalachian families, was part of family life, it became common that lyrics were passed from mother to daughter in generation after generation..
The content of those lyrics could be a heritage from an old ballad tradition with long stories about love-relations, crime, war episodes, ship wreckages or train accidents, but it could also be a woman talking to other women or a man talking to other men. Consequently, since singing primarily was women’s part of the music, many songs were built upon women’s
experiences and women’s dreams of a better life. Today they might have been characterized as feminist songs.
Towards a professional and commercialized country music
After World War I, competition between music companies focused on selling records. To meet the competition from radio, many new and small companies specialized in music that attracted the lower strata in society. When the OKeh Company in New York in 1920 recorded Mamie Smith, it became obvious that black singers attracted new groups of record buyers.
The Fiddling John Carson recording of The little Old Log Cabin in the Lane, sold very well, which meant that record companies’ eyes were opened to the “hillbilly music”. The invention of a new kind of microphone made it possible to bring the recording outside the studio. Ralph Peer, who first has recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson, went in 1927 to Bristol in Virginia to record local music.
Two months after the Bristol sessions had finished, papers advertised for the first records to be issued in the “New Southern Series”. By that a new era in American music industry was started, the Country Music. Johnny Cash has pointed out the “Bristol sessions as the single most important event in the history of country music". Altogether seventy-three songs were recorded in slightly more than a week. This definitively confirms that the record industry was on its way to become a mass-production industry using the ideas of Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford.
The Bristol recordings, however, not only started a new era in American popular music by spreading the mountain music. It also marked a change in the gender patterns of performing music. In the pre-recording folk music men mostly played the instruments and women mostly sang the songs. However, that was during a time when most music performances took place
within the family or within the close neighborhood. It is true, that in the early country music it was not rare that whole families including women performed together. Carter Family might be the most famous example of how older patterns were brought into the era of commercialization. But, it is obvious that women’s participation in music decreased considerably when it moved from the closeness of the neighborhood or the local church to a public sphere with records and radios. Women kept singing in the families and at different gatherings but they did not do it in the public sphere where new country stars as Jimmie Rodgers were born.
This process meant – like in the blues and later rock music – that men took over the arena while women, with the argument that they should marry and take care of children and spouse’ were exiled to consumption of music. This is obviously visible in Ivan M Tribe’s Mountaineer Jamboree. Country Music in West Virginia. Out of about sixty recording performers mentioned in the chapter on pioneer recording artists only five are women.
By that the Bristol sessions can be seen as a turning point in music history, where women and women’s experiences of life became invisible for a couple of decades. Of the more than seventy artists involved in the Bristol sessions just between 5 and 10 were women. The feminism that Roba Stanley had expressed two years earlier was now erased from the agenda.
When the first recordings with Appalachian musicians and singers were made in the mid-1920s the concept “hillbilly” was frequently used as a symbol for the music and the musicians, which celebrated their roots in an agrarian past. For record companies the strategy using the concept was to make records attractive to people in Appalachia, but also through creating a mythical otherness built on perceptions of old-fashioned ruralism, making them attractive to the “modern people” of the big cities.
However, since social change hit huge parts of Appalachia’s population severe around 1930, concepts as mountaineers or “hillbillies” lost its attractiveness and became more connected to poor life-conditions, impoverished families and social misery than to something idyllic and nostalgic. Instead the cowboy concept was introduced as a label and benchmark for the country-music.
To quote country-music historian Bill C Malone:
”The cowboy bound by a code of proper behaviour and loyalty to friends, symbolized freedom and independence. The mountaineer has once been identified with such qualities, but by the end of the 1920s comic depictions of hillbillies or accounts of snake
handling and other forms of eccentric behaviour tarnished much of the romance associated with the mountains. Above all,
persistent reports on Appalachian poverty and accounts of exploitation by coal operators and other economic interests
significantly diminished the image of mountaineer independence. The cowboy, on the other hand, seemed peculiarly unmarked by negative stereotypes… In the world of popular imagination, where
Americans encountered him most often, the cowboy remained a figure of unblemished virtue and assertive manhood. As a
horseman, he commanded mobility and power, and stood as an irresistible symbol to workers and shopkeepers who possessed neither attribute.”
It also means that the “hillbilly” concept was not anymore connected to hegemonic masculinity as it once was. A new concept that corresponded to the agrarian manliness had to be invented labelling the music. And the new was the cowboy.
The myth of the cowboy became a central issue within the professional country-music and in how leading representants fabricated a kind of authenticity. The cowboy became the connection to “the good old times” where men were men, as they are depicted within the rural hegemonic
masculinity. The cowboy myth thereby connected to agrarian manliness and to the masculinity that were threatened by the economic and social changes that took place in the Appalachian region during the first part of the
twentieth century. The music became the forum in which masculine ideals could be kept.
