He Gave Country to the World

It’s called “the Big Bang of country music,” an explosion that shook tiny Bristol, Tenn., 75 years ago this week, and eventually vibrated throughout the world. In terms of cultural impact, it’s almost as if one person found and first recorded the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the same week.

On July 25, 1927, record company scout Ralph Peer, having lugged a load of clunky recording equipment from New York to Bristol, started recording “hillbilly” singers for his employer, the Victor Talking Machine Co. (later to become RCA Records). Within a few days of each other, Peer stumbled on the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, seminal figures in what became known as country music.

A series of concerts and special events started Thursday in that region and continues through Aug. 4, celebrating the anniversary and legacy of the recordings known today as “the Bristol Sessions.”

Anyone who thinks this is just the realm of historians and musicologists need look no further than this week’s country music charts to find the ongoing ripples generated by the sessions.

Toby Keith’s No. 1 hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” is the type of “event song” that Peer favored and was especially looking for on his venture to Bristol. Kenny Chesney’s “The Good Stuff” is a celebration of family and home akin to much of what made backwoods singers A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter famous nationally. And Brad Paisley’s good-humored “I’m Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin’ Song)” echoes the footloose and fancy-free attitude that was a central part of Rodgers’ rapid rise to fame.

“You take those same songs, give them a modern arrangement and today they can still be very popular. The success of the ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ soundtrack proved that,” says Bill Hartley, executive director of the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance in Bristol, which is sponsoring concerts by Appalachian-rooted artists including Earl Scruggs, Loretta Lynn and Doc Watson.

Other performances will feature descendants of the key musicians Peer brought to the world 75 years ago: the Carters, dubbed the first family of country music; Rodgers, known as the father of country music; and Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, a carpenter whose early country hits about the Titanic and other disasters lured Peer to the mountains of east Tennessee looking for more raw talent.

The songs by the Carters (“Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Wildwood Flower,” “Keep On the Sunny Side”) and Rodgers (“Blue Yodel [T for Texas],” “Any Old Time,” “In the Jail House Now”) have profoundly influenced generations of musicians, from Hank Williams and Bill Monroe to Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash to Emmylou Harris and the Dixie Chicks. They also affected the development of folk music as played by Woody Guthrie and, in turn, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and others.

The Carters and Rodgers also established traditions that continue to be practiced today.

“They represent two different traditions in country music,” notes John Rumble, senior curator at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. “Rodgers represented the rambler, the solo singer with a guitar talking about his travels while still longing for the pleasures of home. The Carter Family represents the domestic tradition, emphasizing family and home.”

Even Peer’s act of recording them, Rumble says, “represented a reaching out to the roots-based or folk-based styles that have really distinguished American music for 100 years.”

Hartley notes that Peer, who later founded a music publishing company, was savvy: “He recognized the potential of coming to this region. Other labels might not have thought this music could sell beyond a rural market. But Peer realized they could have national significance.”

While rock, country and folk artists have recorded songs by the Carters and Rodgers countless times in succeeding decades, the original recordings also live on. The Country Music Hall of Fame put out a two-disc set in 1987 containing those early Peer recordings. “The Bristol Sessions,” which generated two Grammy nominations, is still in print, and compilations culled from hundreds of Carter Family and Rodgers recordings are reissued year after year.

“Those early recordings are hard to hear and that can make it hard to appreciate how good they were,” says Mark Zwonitzer, co-author with Charles Hirshberg of a new biography, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music” (Simon & Schuster, $25).

Yet, as Zwonitzer writes in the book, “[e]ven from the wheeziest Victrola, their voices ricocheted off the bone, because they leaned so hard on their own notions of tragedy.”

“One of my dreams,” he says, “is to be able to be in a room when they were making this music. But there’s something in that music that still grabs people. They keep playing them and making new versions of them.”

In large part that’s because those songs were more intensely personal than most that had been recorded before them.

“One of the nieces of the Carters said to me, ‘All their songs had deep-gutted meaning, because they were about feelings that somebody had actually felt,’ ” Zwonitzer says.

“One of the things that keeps drawing people to this music is the pure, simple sound of it,” says Hartley.

“People don’t necessarily want to hear something that’s commercialized, prepackaged and manufactured for them. They want to hear music from the heart,” he says.

“And you find a lot of that in this music. For a lot of these people, that’s why they got started, because they truly love singing and have a gift that they want to share with other people.”