1960 - Dim Lights, Thick Smoke And Hillbilly Music

Various - Country & Western Hit Parade

1-CD-Album deluxe with 72-page booklet, 32 tracks. Playing time: 82:43 minutes.
'Dim Lights, Thick Smoke And Hillbilly Music 1960'
Country & Western Hit Parade 1960
The faux folk music craze that gripped country music in 1959 disappeared as quickly as it arrived. The banjo was suddenly passé again unless you were playing bluegrass. The focus returned to making country records that would cross over into the featureless middle ground between country and pop. By 1960, crossover had a name, the Nashville Sound. Journalist Charlie Lamb had coined the phrase in 1958, but it became common after 'Time' magazine published a typically condescending article to coincide with the annual dee-jays' convention in November 1960.
As 'Time' pointed out, the hub of the business wasn't the area now known as Music Row around 16th Avenue South, but the Cumberland Lodge Building on 7th Avenue North. "Behind frosted glass doors in a ramshackle former Masonic lodge building," wrote the anonymous correspondent, "sit the song peddlers. Their product, proclaimed in gilt letters on the door, is variously billed as Wonder Music or Surefire Music or Tenn-Tex Music, but in the industry it is known simply as C. & W. Country and Western. Last week, to the planeloads of disk jockeys descending on Nashville for the ninth annual National Country Music Festival, C. & W. seemed surefire indeed. Its demise has often seemed near, but it is now going stronger than ever, and Nashville has even nosed out Hollywood as the nation's second biggest (after New York) record-producing center."
Under a paragraph headed NASHVILLE SOUND, the correspondent continued: "One out of every five popular hits of the past year was written and recorded in Nashville, e.g., 'He'll Have To Go,' 'Stuck On You,' 'Cathy's Clown,' 'Please Help Me, I'm Falling.' The last, say the experts, is the countriest of all, a distinction that suggests the difficulty these days of distinguishing a true country song from a straight pop number. The basic C. & W. ingredients have always been a tune with folkish overtones, lyrics of Pleistocene simplicity, and a theme preferably proclaiming undying devotion to a faithless loved one. But country music is now wearing city clothes: the traditional fiddle and guitar accompaniment is being replaced by saxophone, drums, violins and even harpsichords. Many a country record is arranged for trio, quartet or even small chorus."
Crossover cut both ways. Quite a few old country songs became hits for pop artists in 1960. In the 1940s and early 1950s pop singers covered then-current country songs; in 1960, they revived old ones. Wink Martindale tackled Deck Of Cards, Guy Mitchell rejigged three Ray Price hits (Heartaches By The Number, My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You, and Same Old Me), Debbie Reynolds did City Lights and Am I That Easy To Forget, Freddy Cannon revived Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy, Bob Beckham dented the Top 40 with Crazy Arms, Pat Boone’s fall single was A Dear John Letter coupled with Alabam, Bobby Comstock revived Tennessee Waltz and Jambalaya, Lenny Welch redid You Don’t Know Me, and while Down Yonder wasn’t really a country song, it was a 1951 country hit that became a 1960 pop hit for Johnny & the Hurricanes.
It all added up to good times for Nashville. In 1945 when this series began, Acuff-Rose was the only music publisher in town; by 1960, there were more than 100. There were 1000 members of the Nashville local of the musicians' union, and so many booking agents that, according to 'Time,' "they have to wear badges to keep from booking each other." The local studios were much in demand day and night. Bradley's was especially busy with sessions for Decca (where Owen Bradley was employed), Columbia (which soon bought Bradley's), and Capitol.
The'Time' correspondent should have dug a little deeper and gone to Bakersfield, California. The Bakersfield Sound was the music that Nashville forgot or preferred to forget. Warped and hardened in the isolation of the California honky-tonks, it was steel guitars and Fender Telecasters playing off each other. Drums made it danceable. It was music that had migrated from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, and it was kept very much alive as a statement about roots in the vast melting pot of Southern California. Named for Bakersfield, it could be heard anywhere in California that had a large southern migrant population.
There was a little bit of rock 'n' roll in the Bakersfield Sound, notably in the pinched, stinging Telecaster tone, but it was essentially 1940s' honky-tonk music. Hardly surprisingly, the only west coast-based major label, Capitol, snagged many of the best Bakersfield artists, and its country A&R chief, Ken Nelson, understood the music. "The Nashville Sound is the musicians," he said. "The musicians are all fairly well trained; that is, they have studied music and they have a smoothness about them. Bakersfield has a roughness about it because of their background, where they lived, where they came from." Nineteen-sixty marked the emergence of Buck Owens as Bakersfield's godhead and spokesperson.
But of course, it wasn't quite that simple. George Jones and Ray Price were harder than hardcore, and Cowboy Copas topped the charts in 1960 with a minimalist arrangement of an ancient song, and they all recorded in Nashville. But the exceptions didn't disprove the rule. Nashville was in search of crossover, and the reason was obvious. A country hit that went no further than country might sell 25, 30, or 50,000, but if it crossed over it could sell half-a-million or a million. With the chance of a relatively cheap country record getting pop sales, some independent labels made a commitment to country. Liberty hired Joe Allison to start a country division, Top Rank hired industry veteran Paul Cohen with the same idea, UA Records poached Art Talmadge from Mercury so that Talmadge would boost the label's country releases, and Warner Bros. forged a link with Acuff-Rose.
In other industry news, 1960 was dominated by payola investigations that largely left the country music business untouched. Otherwise, the year marked the arrival of Loretta Lynn and the departure of one of the country music industry's founding fathers, Ralph Peer, who died on January 19.