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Reflected Glory: The Birth of Country Music Journalism, 1930s-50s (Part 5)

All Cowboys Aren’t Corny: How the Music Trades Made Country Hip

Country music journalism branched into two streams in the 1940s. As described in the previous post, fan magazines such as Country Song Roundup helped country music spread beyond rural America.

But during that decade another music press idiom took up the country cause. Music trade magazines such as Billboardbegan to…

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#"American Folk Tunes and Tunesters"#Nat S. Green #Record Review Columns

I hear the true voices every time I turn on the radio.

Van Morrison, Grateful Dead, John Lennon, the Who. A garden of delights. An atmosphere filled with sounds of beauty and words of poetry. They please the ear and they please the mind. They ring in your head long after the radio is off. They come at you out of unexpected corners of your thoughts, are sparked again by shadows and shafts of…

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Words + Music Interview with Baron Wolman

Baron Wolman – Rolling Stone’s first photographer – changed the course of rock music journalism during the pivotal counterculture era, and I was delighted when he recently agreed to an interview.

Born in 1937, Baron documented the counterculture’s most influential musicians and performances, and in doing so contributed to the collective memory of millions of rock fans.

With his compelling…

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#Baron Wolman #Rolling Stone

Reflected Glory: The Birth of Country Music Journalism, 1930s-50s (Part 4)

Hank Williams, 1938

To Give New Stars a Break: The 1940s

Music journalism became a louder voice for country musicians in the 1940s. It worked to legitimize unknown singers and bands, which contributed to the aesthetic evolution of the music itself.

Country music proliferated during that decade, under a variety of names. Cowboy music and Western music continued to become a pop culture…

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#Country Song Roundup #Cowboy Music World #Grinders Switch Gazette #National Hillbilly News #Song and Picture Barn Dance Magazine #Songmakers Magazine #WIBW Round Up

Reflected Glory: The Birth of Country Music journalism, 1930s-50s

Part Three: I Got Me an Old Guitar

WLS Stand-By!

Here’s a magazine title that radiates urgency. Named for the first radio station to broadcast country music, the birth of WLS Stand-By! in 1935 marked the birth of country music journalism. Just as Down Beat marked the birth of the jazz press the year before.

The newsprint weekly and its namesake – the amusingly generic WLS…

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Why Paste Believes We Still Need Music Criticism

What is the most important job in Western Civilization today? Music criticism.

Paste makes an audacious claim in Why We Still Need Music Criticism.

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Gary Stewart: He Did Everything 110%, Good or Bad

Declared the “King of honky tonk” by Time magazine, country musician Gary Stewart (1944-2003) is best known for the hit “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles),” from his 1975 LP Out of Hand. Stewart was a founder of outlaw country music and his wild ways are the stuff of local legend.

I recently had the honor of engaging with a number of Stewart’s friends and fellow musicians in a lengthy…

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#1970s Florida music scene #Gary Stewart

Reflected Glory: The Birth of the Country Music Press, 1930s-50s (Part 2)

Part Two: The Birth of the Country Music Press

Amanda Shires

Today’s alt-country artists such as Amanda Shires or Lucinda Williams are more likely to speak through the pages of Rolling Stone or No Depression than the middle-of-the-road country music press. Why?

Because these artists compose and perform for a community of music fans outside the mainstream. As did their 1920s predecessors, who…

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"He Communicated Like a Jazz Musician": Nat Hentoff on Ralph Gleason

“He Communicated Like a Jazz Musician”: Nat Hentoff on Ralph Gleason

In 2013, my wife Jessica and I conducted research for our article “Dispatches from the Front”: The Life and Times of Ralph J. Gleason” published in Rock Music Studies No. 1 (Routledge). Essential to our research were interviews with music writers Nat Hentoff, Joel Selvin and Gene Sculatti; musicians Sonny Rollins, John Handy, Denise Kaufmann and Jorma Kaukonen; and others including son Toby…

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#Nat Hentoff #Ralph J. Gleason

Reflected Glory: The Birth of the Country Music Press, 1930s-1950s (Part 1)

Part One: From Jimmie Rodgers to Jimmie Dale Gilmore

Jimmie Rodgers, Carrie Rodgers, their daughter Anita, Ralph Peer and Peer’s Wife: Circa 1930.

Carrie Rodgers – wife of pioneering country music performer Jimmie Rodgers – wrote these poignant words in Country Song Roundup in 1952:

It has been nineteen years since Jimmie’s passing, that dark day when the curtain descended on the chapter…

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#Early country music magazines #Jimmie Dale Gilmore #Jimmie Rodgers

Words + Music's Policies on Music Genre

Words + Music’s Policies on Music Genre

Because next week I launch a new series of posts on music genres, I thought this would be a good time to provide a few brief points about Words + Music’s views about genre categories:

Music genre categories are socially constructed (by record companies, music magazines and writers) and thus, while genre classes past and present are legitimate because of their widespread acceptance, these…

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“Tatum at His Best, and that’s Plenty Good”: College-Age Ralph Gleason on Art Tatum

When jazz writer Ted Gioia recently posted an extraordinary YouTube clip of pianist Art Tatum, a question came to mind, “Didn’t Ralph Gleason write about Tatum in his college newspaper?”

Here’s what I found:

Gleason reviewed at least two records by Art Tatum in his Columbia Spectatorcolumn, “Off the…

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Ralph J. Gleason and the Beat Movement (Part 8)

Stone sculpture by Thomas Wolfe’s father that was likely the inspiration for Look Homeward Angel.

The Great Forgotten Language of On the Road

Remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel

The “great…

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#Allen Ginsberg #Beat Movement #Howl #Jack Kerouac #On the Road #Ralph J. Gleason

Ralph J. Gleason and the Beat Movement (Part 7)

Far from Aesthetically Satisfactory: Gleason’s Critique of Jazz Poetry This series of posts explores eminent music writer Ralph Gleason’s contributions to the Beat Movement, from its precursors in the 1930s to its blossoming in the 1950s. Part 6 examined his important role in the recording and release of the album, Poetry Readings in the Cellar, which remains the best-known document of the…

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#jazz criticism #Jazz poetry #jazz writing #Kenneth Patchen #Kenneth Rexroth #Pop music press #Popular Music Journalism #Ralph J. Gleason #the Cellar jazz poetry

Words + Music Email

Words + Music now has an email address: [email protected]

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#Words + Music

Ralph J. Gleason and the Beat Movement (Part 6)

Debussy Strained Through a Sheet: Poetry Readings in the Cellar The sixth of a series of posts on writer Ralph Gleason’s contribution to the Beat Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Part 6 looks at his key role in the release of the groundbreaking Poetry Readings in the Cellar LP by San Francisco-based Fantasy Records.

From the start, Gleason was involved in the recording sessions of jazz poetry…

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#Jazz poetry #Kenneth Rexroth #Lawrence Ferlinghetti #Poetry Readings in the Cellar

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