I don’t listen to Country Music, so maybe I’m off a little here, but there doesn’t seem to be many Country Music “bands” like the bands one sees in Rock and Roll.
Country Music seems mostly to only have a front man/women singer that either just sings or sings and plays guitar. There are some bands like Alabama, Asleep At The Wheel and Rascal Flatts, but the industry seems to be dominated by solo artists. Anyone have an idea why this is?
Bonus question: What makes a band like Alabama get air play on Country Music radio stations while bands like Poco, The Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Stage, Eagles, etc. never would get played on Country stations? If Hank Williams jr. covered “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, would it suddenly be considered “country” as thus get air play on Country stations?
Do Country Music fans have something against Country Rock bands?
At the risk of sounding old, I remember hearing the Eagles, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Linda Ronstadt played on Country stations as a kid back in the 1970s. Just as some Country acts during that time like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers had hits that crossed over to Top 40 stations, there were some rock or Top 40 acts that crossed over to Country stations. However, during the 80s and 90s radio programmers started restricting playlists which resulted in many Country stations culling songs from many Country Rock bands. Thus, I don’t think it’s so much that Country fans have something against Country Rock (or Alt Country) bands as radio programmers do. They don’t think too highly of radio listeners.
The Nashville Country Music Industry prefers nice-looking stars with “good” voices, singing songs from the stable of songwriters, recorded in studios backed by Nashville session musicians. Executives put the pieces together to produce magic–or processed pap, depending on who you believe. Singers who write their own stuff and/or prefer to record with their touring bands don’t fit the model.
Hank Williams was valued as a songwriter–but was riveting live; substance abuse issues led his short career away from Nashville. Willie Nelson wrote hits but was considered too funny-looking to be a “star”–& he used odd, bluesy phrasing when he sang; he went home to Texas. George Strait worked with his Ace In the Hole Band in Texas before he came to Nashville; he’s often recorded with Nashville musicians–but sometimes with his band. He’s supposedly doing his last tour now. Here, he & Alan Jackson report on Murder on Music Row.
Country music has always thrived away from Nashville–rootsy Old Timey & Bluegrass in the hills (& the city coffee houses), Western Swing & Honky Tonk in Texas, the Bakersfield Sound in California. Country Rock was sung by long-haired, drug addled hippies–the Nashville crowd had short hair & used different drugs. Then there were the Cosmic Cowboys, alt-Country & even some Cowpunks…
There’s good stuff out there–old & new. Just not usually on Commercial Country Radio…
I’m not a country fan, but off the top of my head I can name Florida Georgia Line, The Band Perry, and Lady Antebellum in addition to the ones you named above, and f we go past just contemporary bands, I can also think of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Oak Ridge Boys, and a few others that are on the tip of my tongue.
Really, I’d say it’s a matter of traditions and different expectations from the fanbase. The principal unit of rock & roll is the ensemble because the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Doors were ensembles, and the principal unit of country is the singer-songwriter because Hank Williams and Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were all singer-songwriters.
I worked in country radio from 1973 through 1976 (and again in 1987-88). The stations I worked out NEVER played those artists, or any like them. There was a very strict divide between country artists and rock-based ones, as well as an antipathy toward hippies in general.
While those artists may have incorporated country elements, they did not play what was considered to be true country music.
Well, it might have been a regional thing. I lived on the west coast (Northern California and the Pacific Northwest) and I remember hearing some songs by the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt creep onto the playlist of some country stations my parents listened to. I’m guessing by the 80s, the playlists of country stations got more standardized nationally and any displays of independence by individual stations were quickly cracked down on.
Did the recording and release of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s (and friends) “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” soften that divide? I do remember that strict division; Johnny Cash tried to cross it in his TV program.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Circle albums (especially the first one) certainly featured country music legends–but not Nashville Stars of the Day. Some of them might have still been showing up on the Opry, but they were ignored by country DJ’s. Doc Watson was popular among the folkies, despite his real rural roots. Earl Scruggs was in a country/bluegrass/rock band with his sons–they all appeared & stayed “traditional.” But even Bluegrass is not in the Nashville mainstream.
In those days, there was a political divide. The Byrds were doing country but were jeered at the Opry. Their snarky “Drug Store Truck Driving Man” was a result–although I later saw Roger McGuinn on Ralph Emery’s TV show, with politeness on both sides. Merle Haggard recorded “Okie From Muskogee”–with his tongue slightly in his cheek; he later explained that, no, he had never smoked marijuana–*in *Muskogee.
Johnny Cash was always an exception–starting out at Sun Records, then showing up at the Newport Folk Festival & befriending Bob Dylan–while being a huge Country star. He broke some barriers on his TV show. But, at the end of his career, he was judged too old & decrepit for Nashville. Surely, the public wanted cute Hat Acts! So he made a new career–with a new audience. (And some of the old one-who still love some country music, no matter what Nashville Music Executives think.)
The station I worked at in 1973 briefly played the single release from that album, Jimmy Martin’s “The Grand Ole Opry Song.” But it didn’t really catch on. Other than this, that album, as monumental as it was, was a non-entity to most country fans of the day.
Funny thing is, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band soon after became accepted as a mainstream country act, and had quite a few hits that got plenty of airplay.
Emery remained as generally clueless as ever when it came to anything on the other side of that divide. When former Byrd Chris Hillman was Emery’s guest while a member of the successful Desert Rose Band, he was asked “And how is Gram Parsons doing?” To which Hillman replied, “He’s still dead, Ralph.”
To answer the OP’s original question, “bands” were more common in country music’s earlier era (say, the 1920s and 30s). For example, The Fruit Jar Drinkers, et all.
But the rise of Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb as stars changed the dynamic to focus more on individual singers. However, it should be pointed out that many of these stars toured with identified bands behind them, and were introduced as such (Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys, Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours). In many cases, these artists also recorded with their own band backing them, rather than studio musicians.
This continued into the 1950s (Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys, Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys, Carl Smith and the Tunesmiths, etc.) and even beyond (Merle Haggard and the Strangers, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos). The difference is, of course, that these were clearly up-front stars with backing bands, as opposed to integrated bands with no lead singer identified.
Off the top of my head, the latter trend didn’t start showing up till the 70s with the aforementioned Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the 80s with Restless Heart.
Interestingly, it would take until the 1990s before a true country band was found among the top 25 country artists of the decade (Diamond Reo, Sawyer Brown).
There was a lot of politics in those days. Flatt and Scruggs broke up because Flatt supported the US’s involvement in Viet Nam and Scruggs had some draft age sons. And there were the long hairs versus the short hairs. Easy Rider sort of stuff.
And a lot of the Rock acts (like the Byrds) who went to Nashville to record were pretty, well, disrespectful of the Nashville way of doing things. They’d have been wiser to just hire a pedal steel guitar player to come to LA to record with them. Or maybe they should have tried Austin.
I don’t recall reading anything about The Byrds being disrespectful in any way during the Sweetheart of the Rodeo sessions in Nashville. The disrespect all came from the other side. Despite cutting their hair much shorter than they normally wore it for their Grand Ole Opry appearance and playing acoustic instruments, the band was heckled relentlessly by members of the audience during their performance.
Gram Parsons deviated from the program by announcing that they would play his original song “Hickory Wind” (which he dedicated to his grandmother, a big Opry fan) rather than “Life in Prison,” a Merle Haggard song (they had already performed one Haggard song, “Sing Me Back Home”). This upset the tradition-bound Opry management, but I can’t fault Parsons for wanting to get a truly great country song he’d written out there, as opposed to leaving the impression that The Byrds were a Merle Haggard tribute act.
Furthermore, Ralph Emery was extremely disrespectful toward them when they appeared on his radio show, initially refusing to play an acetate of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” then speaking derisively of it (to The Byrds’ faces) when he finally relented and played it.
I generally defend “real” country music and the culture surrounding it against its many detractors, but this was a pretty shameful episode. I’m not the world’s biggest Gram Parsons fan, but his love of genuine country music was completely sincere, and The Byrds did nothing to deserve this treatment.
LA had pedal steel players; the Byrds finished recording “Sweetheart” in California. Of course, over in Bakersfield, Buck Owens & Merle Haggard had their own Sound. LA itself was one of the hotbeds of Country Rock–with groups like Poco, Hearts & Flowers and post-Monkee’s Mike Nesmith blending genres. Gram Parsons was not the only one! Let’s not forget the Dillards, whose Wheatstraw Suite was key. Linda Ronstadt left the Stone Poneys to go solo & was hugely successful; then her backup band left & became the Eagles…
The Byrds really wanted to be respectful of Nashville but Nashville was not having it. And it was a bit too early for Austin–where longhairs could still get beat up in country dives. Soon, Willie Nelson arrived from Nashville, started growing his hair & played the Armadillo World Headquarters. Everything changed.
Any musical genre that is dominated by the suits (producers, A&R men… you know, “the industry”) tends to be heavy on solo artists. In Mark Lewisohn’s new book on the Beatles, Tune In, he points out how, prior to the Beatles, you could scan the British pop charts all you liked and, other than Cliff Richard and the Shadows, it was all solo artists – and all picked and groomed for stardom. A predominance of bands is a sign of a more grass-roots-driven dynamic.
Through the late '70s and ‘80s, I was not into rock or disco at all. I listened exclusively to the only two country stations in New York: WHN-AM and WKHK-FM (Kick 106.7). They played a lot of Eagles, Alabama, Charlie Daniels Band, Gatlin Brothers, etc. They even played the Lovin’ Spoonful once in a while (usually “Nashville Cats”).
I first heard Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” on these stations. It was some time before I discovered that they weren’t known as country singers.
Country music in New York City has always been sort of a special case. My memory is that country stations have risen and fallen regularly in Gotham…succeeding for a while and then going under.
It’s probable that a station trying to make it there realized that, despite the huge population, there were not enough “hard-core” country fans to sustain it…so they had to broaden their base somewhat.
The situation you describe in terms of certain artists on those stations’ playlist was not replicated on country stations in most other parts of the US. (However, of the artists you listed, Alabama and the Gatlin Brothers were certainly considered to be country and had great success on the country charts…and Charlie Daniels to some extent also.)
Through the 70s, no one that wasn’t blessed by Nashville establishment got air time on country radio in East Texas. It wasn’t until the Outlaw movement that it started to change.
It was probably true before then, too, but I was too young to be aware of it.
