Country After Elvis
Erupting from country's southern soil, the rock & roll outburst of the mid-1950s severely damaged the country industry. The vibrant sounds of Elvis Presley and his rockabilly companions had extraordinary youth appeal and cut into country record sales, gate receipts, and radio airplay. As Opry veteran Faron Young put it, the business reached a point where "a hillbilly couldn't get a job."
To overcome the crisis, the Nashville industry banded together to produce and promote a pop-oriented blend of country that came to be known as the Nashville Sound. At the same time, a number of artists in Nashville and Bakersfield, California, extended country's stylistic range with new "hard country" styles so electrifying that they rivaled the excitement of rock & roll itself.
Rockabilly
Rich in both country tradition and the Beale Street blues, the city of Memphis proved to be the ideal setting for what many describe as the birth of rock & roll. Memphis teenager Elvis Presley absorbed the sounds of both Beale Street and the Grand Ole Opry, and fused them into a unique style that changed popular music-including country-forever. As singer Bob Luman once said, describing his reaction to seeing young Presley perform live in Texas, "That's the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell." Others felt the same way, and soon a generation of rockabillies, as they were called, were heating the airwaves with a wild blend of hillbilly music and rock & roll attitude.
The Nashville Sound
With country's youth market and radio clout disappearing, Nashville began mixing pop music elements into country productions to attract the adult audience. In the studios, fiddles and steel guitars gave way to string sections and backing vocalists, as exemplified in the recordings of Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, for instance. The top producers relied on a small group of studio musicians-the "A-Team"-whose quick adaptability and creative input made them vital to the hit-making process. Behind the scenes, the newly formed Country Music Association promoted the music, and the media began to notice the nationwide popularity of a phenomenon they called the Nashville Sound. In 1960, Time magazine reported that Nashville had "nosed out Hollywood as the nation's second biggest (after New York) record-producing center."
The Return of Hard Country
Not everyone believed rock & roll had killed the appeal of straight-up hillbilly music. Many performers seized the moment to enliven their fiddle-and-steel country sounds with inventive rhythm and harmony. Among them, Ray Price juiced his honky-tonk with a propulsive "shuffle" beat, while in Bakersfield, California, Buck Owens fashioned a hot country sound that borrowed from Elvis and other rockers-instead of reacting against them. "In the honky-tonks I used to sing all the Little Richard songs, like 'Tutti Frutti,' " Owens said. "They were conducive to excitement." By the mid-1960s, hard country was firmly established as a counterpoint to the smoother Nashville Sound, though in practice, many country recordings took elements from both."
- Adapted from Sing Me Back Home: A Journey through Country Music, the permanent exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum.