Author
Moments in Country Music History
The world has fallen in love with country music. Its audience now spans continents and cultures, and shows no sign of slowing. But how did a regional American folk tradition become a worldwide phenomenon?
The answer is not found in a single artist, a single song, or a single moment.
Country music did not travel in a straight line.
It wandered down back roads, crossed state lines, merged onto new highways, and sometimes doubled back toward its roots. Along the way, musicians, songwriters, producers, radio broadcasters, entrepreneurs, and dreamers changed its direction forever.
Moments in Country Music History takes you behind the familiar names and famous songs to uncover the extraordinary people, unlikely places, and forgotten chapters that helped build one of America’s greatest musical traditions.
This is not a traditional history of country music.
Most music histories focus on careers, recordings, and chronology. These stories focus on turning points. They ask a different question.
What changed?
Country music has traveled through twelve major genres, many with their own subgenres, and each represents a significant turn in the road. Even devoted fans often recognize the music without fully understanding what changed from one era to the next.
Through storytelling, these histories explain those changes, the people who made them happen, why they mattered, and who followed.
Approaching history through feature storytelling allows these stories to move beyond facts and dates to the human moments behind them. The result is a collection of stories about the moments when the road turned.
Originally written for radio broadcast and researched from rare first-edition sources—some more than a century old—these stories are crafted to be heard as much as read. The voices are real. The history is unusual. And some of it has rarely been told.
From the ancient Celtic roots that helped shape Appalachian music to the birth of commercial country music in the 1920s, from isolated mountain communities to the bright lights of Nashville, these stories trace the people and events that transformed a regional sound into a worldwide cultural force.
You will meet pioneers, performers, promoters, producers, broadcasters, entrepreneurs, and larger-than-life characters whose influence still echoes through the music today. Some were famous. Many were not.
Yet each left fingerprints on country music.
All of them helped shape the sound of Real Country Music.
Welcome to the road.
Kwilder’s Book
Story No.19
Pop Ernest Stoneman, Galax, Virginia
Once Upon a time, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the mountainlaurels grow, there lived a man with the hands of a craftsman and the magic fingers of a musician.
One day, he was listening to the radio when he heard the recording of musician Henry Whittier of Galax Virginia. “Wreck on the Southern Old ’97.” He turned to his wife and said, “I could surely do better than that!” His wife replied in true wifely fashion that if “indeed” he could do so, then he had “best” get himself up to New York City and make his own recording. Ahhh. “Behind every man, there is a good woman”, so it is said.
Thus, in 1924 he found himself in New York City presenting his music to Ralph S. Peer of Okeh records. The rest is country music history. His first commercial recording was his song titled “Sinking of the Titanic.” The song sold over a million copies and charted on the Billboard/Variety charts, at number 3 for 10 weeks.
The man, “Pop” Ernest Stoneman, not only made his first recording that September in New York, City, he would record over 200 songs within the next 5 years. He became instrumental in the location of countless mountain musicians to be interviewed and recorded at the “Big Bang” of country music. The Bristol sessions in 1927.
Ernest Stoneman would record at the Bristol sessions and go on to have a successful 50-year, career, singing gospel and mountain music. After 1930 his performances included his wife and the 13 of their 23 children that survived to adulthood.
The Stoneman family was presented the first CMA Award as vocal group of the year in 1967. “Pop” Stoneman would pass-on the following year. The family had appeared on the “Jimmy Dean TV variety show,” “the Grand Ole Opry” and had hosted their own syndicated television series titled those “Stonemen” playing a progressive brand of country and bluegrass.
Over the years the family broke into as many as six separate family bands to record, perform, tour Stateside as well as in Europe, making hundreds of recordings, and participate in two motion pictures.
End of True story: Story No. 19
Moments in Country Music History Book
Story No.24
AT&T, NBC
Long before country music had stars, radio had to learn how to make money.
By 1911, the American branch of Marconi Wireless had become the largest radio company in the United States. This held true until the end of World War I.
By 1922, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) announced a plan for a national broadcast network supported by advertising. This was good news for country performers, who were not being paid for their live radio performances.
For the first time, country music had a business model.
Keep in mind, this was before most people in the world had even heard a radio broadcast.
AT&T set the standard for the future broadcast industry and provided patent licensing to the existing 500 radio stations, allowing stations to use AT&T’s telephone lines for remote broadcasting and sell advertising during their broadcasts.
In May 1926, AT&T decided it did not want to run the daily operations of a radio network. Instead, it sold its flagship station, WEAF, and its network holdings for $1 million to a group comprising General Electric, Westinghouse, and the Radio Corporation of America.
This was the birth of the National Broadcasting Company.
NBC made its debut broadcast on November 15, 1926. Competition in the form of CBS and ABC would follow in the years to come.
When stations began selling airtime, they were not as regulated as they are today. According to writer Ben Gross, around 1928, WLTH of Brooklyn sold one minute of airtime each day to a mysterious bearded old man.
The man used his daily minute to proclaim the words, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”
He gave no explanation as to whom, what, or why he loved, and the station did not care. The station had sold its one minute of time and moved on to the next sixty seconds.
And that’s the way it was in country music history.
End of True story: Story No. 24
Moments in Country Music History Book
Story No.73
Vaudeville III / The Jig
Last week, if you were here with me, we tried to travel to London, England, and the year 1599. We found that as many as 15,000 working- and upper-class Londoners viewed a play every week, with over a third of the entire population seeing a play every month.
Plays in the Elizabethan playhouses changed daily. Unlike modern productions that run for months and years, the resident companies of London introduced as many as 100 new plays annually. Women and children were in constant attendance. It is said that William Shakespeare and his fellow writers were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history.
An interesting aspect of all plays from that time is that, upon the ending of the featured play, there followed a short, semi-improvisational one-act play titled “The Jig,” consisting of a few hundred lines and usually performed by four actors exhibiting explosive energy, side-splitting gestures, high-spirited singing, and rich in merry jest and mad clowning about the stage.
The Jig concerned itself with what happened after marriage—adultery, deception, and irrepressible sexual desire. Thereby, it provided an independent counterpoint to the content of the main production.
There were fans that so loved the jigs that they would arrive late to the theater and push themselves into the audience in an attempt to see the jig for free. By 1598, Will Kemp was the greatest performer of The Jig ever to play Elizabethan theater.
The cultural aspect of attending theater by the common folk, including women and children, as well as The Jig, would emigrate to America and find its way into another form of theater entertainment, which was born in 1881 and christened Vaudeville—the beginning of America’s clean, modern family entertainment tradition as we have come to know it.
That is the way it was and is in country music history.
End of True story: Story No. 73
Moments in Country Music History Book
This book is dedicated
To Jewell Caudle Cornett,
In appreciation
for sharing her Southern Culture
and the City of Galax, Virginia,
with me;
To Buford Kegley,
Blue Ridge Country Radio,
WBRF 98.1
for his enduring friendship; and
To Virgil Donovan
for his unending smile.