Category: Music & Songs

By Ed Hagen, Gallery Assistant and Guest Blogger

What’s the difference between Country and Western?

Many people are familiar with a popular scene in The Blues Brothers movie where the character played by Dan Ackroyd asks the woman tending bar, “what kind of music do you usually have here?” She responds, “Oh, we got both kinds, country and western.” Although intended as a joke, the question can be taken seriously. They are two distinct musical styles. And both styles were popularized by musicians from the 1927 Bristol sessions. 

The words we use to describe music have changed almost as much as the music itself. In the 1920s, the music we now refer to as country was known as hillbilly music. The phrase “country and western” first started to appear in print in 1944, with peak usage in 1973. Billboard charts, which initially had listings for “folk” and “hillbilly” records, switched to “country and western” in 1949, and used that label before settling on “Hot Country Singles” in 1962. Listeners in the 1950s knew what you meant when you said “country and western.” Today, not so much.

Country music has its roots in Appalachian music, which in turn can be traced to Scotch and Irish folk music and African musical traditions. It typically involves storytelling. Popularized by the Carter family, it is the music associated with Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry. The emphasis in country music is on melody and lyrics. Think of songs like He’ll Have to Go, I Can’t Stop Loving You, He Stopped Loving Her Today, and Jolene. These songs are country, not western.

It is a bit harder to define western music. Many listeners would think of cowboy songs sung by artists like Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers. Autry started out as an obscure radio singer in Chicago. His big break came in 1935 when he was signed by Republic Pictures to make low budget Westerns. These films featured Autry using his own name, breaking into a song from time to time, often while riding his horse Champion. His theme song was Back in the Saddle Again, but he is also remembered for his popular Christmas songs: Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, Here Comes Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The Sons of the Pioneers was a vocal group formed in 1933 in the Los Angeles (LA) area. The original trio consisted of Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer and was led by a truck driver and fruit picker named Leonard Slye. They soon added the brothers Karl and Hugh Farr. These five are often referred to as the “Original” Sons of Pioneers since the band has continued to rotate members and is still active today! LA in the 1930s was a good place to be for talented cowboy singers. The group found work in western movies and recorded a best-selling record, Tumbling Tumbleweeds. In 1937, Slye left the group, changed his name to Roy Rogers, and became one of America’s favorite singing cowboy stars. His place in the Sons of the Pioneers was taken by Ken Curtis, who is better known today for his role as Festus in the TV show Gunsmoke.

These cowboy songs were typically accompanied by simple first-position triads played on a guitar. In fact, first-position triads are often called “cowboy chords” today.

But that’s just one type of western music. Another variant can be traced to the Bristol sessions, specifically to up-tempo tunes recorded by Jimmie Rodgers. Rodgers, a native of Mississippi, was strongly influenced by African American acoustic blues players that he met and played with when he worked on railroads in the South and West. Rodgers often played songs that featured bass runs between the chords that swing hard. 

In the 1930s and 40s the big jazz bands of stars like Benny Goodman and Count Basie dominated popular music, and a number of them started specializing in western songs. The most famous of these western swing bands were organized by Bob Wills (the Texas Playboys) and Spade Cooley. Western swing bands featured fiddles, horns, brass, and piano players. Playing in giant ballrooms like the Aragon in Santa Monica, they got the volume they needed with drums and modern electric and steel guitars, instruments that drowned out conventional acoustic basses. So guitar players like the Texas Playboys’ Eldon Shamblin, playing in the Jimmie Rodgers style, mixed bass runs with the rhythm chords. This style worked for Rodgers and Shamblin because they both swung those bass lines hard.

Western swing, unlike cowboy songs, was dance music. It differed from big band swing because wasn’t based on jazz music. Take, for example, a song like Take Me Back to Tulsa, which was originally a traditional fiddle tune, Walkin’ Georgia Rose. The Texas Playboys changed the words and had a hit with it as a big band tune. The underlying harmony of the song was just two cowboy chords. Western swing bands didn’t play complex extended chords or rhythm changes. But they got you out of your chair.

The big western swing bands died out at about the same time that the popular jazz swing big bands broke up, probably due to the economics of keeping a large band together. But western music stayed popular with the next generation of smaller combos led by western stars such as Ernest Tubb, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard. Powered by drums and electric instruments, these more modern western stars kept people dancing.

So when the bartender told the Blues Brothers they have both kinds of music, perhaps she meant the bar featured old-time and traditional country musicians as well as western and western swing acts! Either way Jake and Elwood probably were not what the crowd at Bob’s Country Bunker was expecting.

By Sam Parker, AV & Technology Specialist at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum.

Protest and labor have been common themes of American folk music for a long time. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Phil Ochs are all notable for their recordings of old union ballads and folk tunes, as well as the many songs they each wrote detailing the struggles of America’s poor and downtrodden. One musician penned nearly thirty songs and poems within the span of just four years that remain in the American folk lexicon to this day. In the century after his death, he’s been remembered as a troubadour, a rebel, and a martyr. His music has been sung by numerous artists for decades, and tributes to him have been performed by artists such as Billy Bragg, Paul Robeson, Bruce Springsteen, and most famously Joan Baez at the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. To commemorate May 1st – known around the world as International Workers’ Day – let’s dive into the life and music of Joe Hill.

Joel Emmanuel Hägglund was born in Sweden in 1879. His father died when he was just nine years old, a tragedy that forced Joel and all of his siblings out of school and into the workforce. As a child laborer, Joel worked in a rope factory and later as a stoker for a steam-operated crane until his mother passed away in his early twenties. After her death, the six Hägglund siblings decided to sell the family home and went their separate ways. Joel and his brother Paul emigrated to New York, and from there he traveled with the millions of other itinerant workers thronging the nation’s cities, farms, and railroads.

As Joel walked and train-hopped westward, his hopes of America being a land of wealth and opportunity quickly faded. He lived and worked among the deep wealth disparity that dominated the receding Gilded Age of the United States, working for dollars a day and facing discrimination as an immigrant. By the time he reached San Francisco, Joel was going by the name “Joseph Hillstrom,” later shortened to “Joe Hill,” likely to protect himself from anti-union blacklisting. By this time, Joe had become a “Wobbly”, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a labor union rising in both membership and notoriety at the time.*

The IWW differed from other unions of the period. They advocated for One Big Union across all industries, workplace democracy – where workers collectively decided on pay and conditions, and vehemently opposed scabbing – when workers cross a picket line to fill jobs left by those on strike. They advocated for direct action, valuing strikes and sabotage to force rapid changes over gradual reforms through political avenues. These characteristics led Wobblies to be called radicals, and anyone carrying the IWW’s little red membership card was viewed as a troublemaker and rabble-rouser.

Since childhood, Joe demonstrated musical talent, which he continued to do when he became a Wobbly. Joe often wrote lyrics set to the melodies of popular songs, including  “The Preacher and the Slave,” which is set to the tune of “In the Sweet by-and-by.” This song attacked the Salvation Army, which IWW members referred to as the “Starvation Army,” for focusing on workers’ spiritual rather than their material well-being. The song even coined the phrase “pie in the sky” with its lyrics.

One of Joe’s most famous songs is “The Rebel Girl,” which he wrote for fellow Wobbly and suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to expand IWW recruitment among women. Joe believed the organization was incomplete without the representation of working women. In the Wobbly newspaper Solidarity, Joe wrote that without women, “We have created a kind of one-legged, freakish animal of a union.” In 1990, Hazel Dickens, another musician and activist, recorded the song for the Smithsonian Folkways album Don’t Mourn, Organize! Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe Hill.

Joe also wrote a song for “Mr. Block,” a cartoon character appearing in the IWW’s newspaper. Mr. Block is a literal blockhead meant to represent workers tricked by capitalism and patriotism, or sometimes who just belonged to the wrong union. Many comic strips involved Mr. Block praising the United States, hoping he’ll get rich if he works hard enough, or decrying the IWW’s radicalism, only to end up unemployed, destitute, injured, or a combination of the three. Almost all of Joe’s songs had political undertones. He saw music as the best way of reaching other working-class people, as he wrote: “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.”

During the night of January 10th, 1914, Joe arrived on the doorstep of a Salt Lake City doctor, bleeding from a gunshot wound. He claimed it was from an angry husband, but across town, local police had been investigating the shooting of a former policeman. One of the shooters had been wounded, and this was enough for the police to pin the crime on Joe. Though no witness could identify Joe conclusively, and the murder weapon was never recovered, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Joe chose to be executed by firing squad, remarking, “I have been shot a few times in the past and I guess I can stand it again.” While in Prison, he wrote to one of the IWW founders, Big Bill Haywood: “Goodbye Bill: I die like a true rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning, organize! It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.”

Joe wrote a short poem on the day of his execution, requesting to be cremated and his ashes spread. While blindfolded and tied to a chair, Joe shouted the order to fire himself. There was a small service in Salt Lake City before his remains were moved to Chicago, where thousands of supporters listened to his songs and followed his casket to the cemetery where he was cremated. His ashes were divided up and mailed to IWW locals and supporters across the globe – Utah was exempted per his wishes. Most were spread in the wind, while other parcels were collected, confiscated, and in a few unusual cases even consumed.

Joe Hill’s musical legacy didn’t die with him. After his death, poet and screenwriter Alfred Hayes wrote the poem “Joe Hill,” later put to music by Earl Robinson and performed by artists such as Paul Robeson, Joan Baez, and Bruce Springsteen. The song tells of a vision of Joe Hill visiting the narrator in their sleep. The ghost’s message echoes his final letter to Bill Haywood: Don’t waste any time mourning, organize!

Some Labor/Protest Musician Museums in the US to check out:

The American Labor Museum

National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum

West Virginia Mine Wars Museum

Woody Guthrie Center

*For more on a 1916 strike the IWW was involved in check out our interview with the American Labor Museum from 8/15/2024 on Museum Talk!