The History of Country Music by Kallen Stuart A.;

Author:Kallen, Stuart A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The History of American Pop
ISBN: 5538499
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Published: 2018-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Country Rock and Outlaws

In the second half of the 1960s Nashville, Tennessee, was known as the country music capital of the world. The people who worked in the city’s music industry were also known for promoting conservative political, religious, and social values. To many in Nashville during this era, it seemed as if people in the rest of the country were losing their minds. Beginning around 1966, millions of young people, especially in California and northern cities, began experimenting with marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid). This spawned a period of social upheaval that became known as the counterculture, or hippie movement. Hippies rejected traditional beliefs about politics, sex, and religion. They adopted their own slang and fashions, which included long hair and beards on men, tiedyed shirts, blue jeans, sandals, and love beads.

Many Nashville residents expressed open contempt for the counterculture. When singer Joni Mitchell visited the city in the late sixties, accompanied by an entourage of West Coast male musicians, she recalled “everybody was hostile to them. People yelled, called them shaggy-hairs and hippies. They felt unsafe.”39 The hippies, in turn, called country music fans rednecks, a derogatory term that had replaced hillbilly by the 1960s.

Given this hostile environment, many were surprised when Bob Dylan released the album John Wesley Harding in 1967. Recorded in Nashville, the album combined Dylan’s trademark storytelling lyrics with simple country music. By this time Dylan was one of the most famous singers in the world. He achieved fame in 1963 for protest songs, which addressed issues such as racial inequality, nuclear fallout, and the bomb builders he called masters of war. In 1964 Dylan abandoned what he termed “finger-pointing songs”40 that made political statements and began writing long epics. Today these influential songs from the mid-1960s, such as “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Visions Of Johanna,” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” are considered timeless classics.

Dylan’s music made him a hero of the counterculture movement, but his roots were in country music. He was around ten years old in 1951 when he heard Hank Williams on the Grand Ole Opry radio show. As he wrote in his 2004 autobiography, “The first time I heard Hank . . . [the] sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod and I managed to get a hold of a few of his [records] . . . and I played them endlessly.”41

The album John Wesley Harding appeared during the height of the hippie era. At this time, many rock musicians were experimenting with the psychedelic drug LSD, which inspired them to create some of the most influential music of the twentieth century. In 1967 rock artists such as Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones recorded dense musical masterpieces filled with swirling, cascading guitar licks, undulating drums, sound effects, and studio tricks. Dylan’s influence was so powerful, however, that the bare country textures of John Wesley Harding prompted the Beatles and other top acts to abandon their overproduced sound in an attempt to echo Dylan’s musical simplicity.

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