I doubt that songwriters Wayne Carson, Mark James, Eddie Rabbitt and Mac Davis were thinking Hot Country when they wrote songs for sessions in Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals, or when they gathered at Wally’s Clubhouse in Nashville to drink beer and commiserate. But something happened when these songwriters crossed paths with producer Lincoln “Chips” Moman, who wasn’t thinking Hot Country either. Davis and Rabbitt would have major careers as performers later. James and Carson would make their mark and disappear, although Carson would record extensively but never score a hit.
A little anecdote will pave the way for understanding changes in musical trends.
In the summer of 1967, there was a battle of the bands in suburban Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia. Two noted residents of Bucks were roped in as judges: author James Michener, and bandleader Paul Whiteman, who had famously “made a lady of jazz” back in the Twenties. Michener was 60, and his musical tastes had never progressed beyond the Big Band Era. Whiteman was 77 and in the last year of his life. Michener admitted he was totally lost, so Whiteman gave him a fifteen minute crash course on rock and roll. Michener was flabbergasted that Whiteman understood and even loved this genre. Whiteman responded, “If I were a teenager today, I’d start my own rock and roll band.” Paul Whiteman, who had seen one musical trend succeed another for three quarters of a century, had kept in touch with changing times and had even played a role.
By the turn of the century, the sentimental popular songs and minstrel show tunes of the post-Civil War era were supplanted by ragtime and the two-step. This lasted barely two decades before Louis Armstrong and other pioneers brought jazz into public tastes after World War I. The Jazz Era, and subsets such as Swing, lasted a good 30 years before the Be-Bop movement turned jazz into something best appreciated by musicians and afficionados. Jazz had become too hip for its audience.
It took about a decade for a mixture of rhythm and blues, country, and pop to emerge into rock and roll and supplant jazz in the popular tastes. Elvis Presley provided a shot of adrenalin in the mid-Fifties, the Beatles in the mid-Sixties, and MTV in the early Eighties. But by the Nineties, rock had turned dark, the listenership had fragmented, and the music had gotten too hip for its audience. Black music had gone from soul to rap and hip-hop with its own urban listener base, and had turned dark with a hard edge in the process. It was time for something new. Paul Whiteman would have understood.
Country music had not stood still. Bill Monroe sped it up to produce Bluegrass in the Thirties, Hank Williams added elements of the blues in the postwar years, and Mitch Miller added production values in the Fifties. Miller’s role was important because it was he who led the Brill Building composers, profiled in previous entries, to cross the line between pop and country, making song writing fortunes in the process.
Chips Moman made his first splash as a producer at Stax Records in 1960 at the age of 23. Up in Detroit, Berry Gordy was making soul music accessible – and acceptable – to white audiences, becoming the Paul Whiteman of his era. In Memphis, Jim Stewart at Stax was aiming at a harder edged, more authentic sound. To showcase the voice of 18 year old Carla Thomas, daughter of blues legend Rufus Thomas, Moman turned to basic pop and created an instant classic.
In 1964, Moman and Stewart parted ways over money, and Moman started American Sound Studios in Memphis and a label of his own. Two years later, Moman tried his hand at producing country music and hit gold.
Thanks, Publius, for the start of a new genre of music. ((HUGS))