Antecedents of the Nashville Sound

Crosby Croons.jpg 

Barry Mazor responded to our last post by noting that Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby,” a contemporary of Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” sounds like a Nashville Sound record, too. The opening piano of Hunter’s hit definitely anticipates the slip note style that Floyd Cramer would soon mark as a distinguishing element of the Sound, and of course Hunter is also an example of tha crooner–

Today, country crooners are frequently dismissed by those who prefer melismatic honky tonkers such as Lefty Frizzell, George Jones and their descendents. But the truth is that crooning has been a prominent country vocal style throughout the genre’s history, from Vernon Dalhart to Al Dexter to Hank Snow, George Morgan, Ray Price and so on.

Crooning was the vocal style for country singers of the 1930s and ’40s. And I don’t just mean singing cowboys like Gene Autry, or western swingers like Tommy Duncan, or country pop warblers such as Red Foley.  Early honky tonkers–think Floyd Tillman and Ernest Tubb–were crooners too, albeit ones who had to “make do” with vocal instruments that were less supple and smooth than that of a crooner’s crooner like Bing Crosby. Tillman was an unabashed Crosby acolyte, as you can hear on his burbling reading of “I’ve Gotta Have My Baby Back.” Tubb, who was among Der Bingle’s Decca lablemates, more than once borrowed Crosby’s famous collaborators, the Andrews Sisters, for backing on his own records.

So one key element of the Nashvile Sound era had been a part of the country mix for a long, long time–long before C&W was threatened by rock ‘n’ roll. As far as antecedents go, however, probably no record set in motion the immediate pop dreams of country musicians than Patti Page’s 1951 mega smash, “Tennessee Waltz.” If she could have such a hit with that Pee Wee King country song, why couldn’t country acts have hits like that too?

But you could name antecedents to the Nashville Sound all day long and never extinguish the supply. I think “Don’t Be Cruel” has as good a claim to the title of first Nashville Sound record as any other contender, but my point in identifying it, as opposed to say Eddy Arnold’s very Nashville Sound-ing version of Cindy Walker’s “You Don’t Know Me” from 1956, is just to note Presely didn’t simply fuel Nashville’s country pop reaction; he provided a template for that reaction. But do did Crosby.

Bing Crosby “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” (Decca, 1945)

Floyd Tillman “I Gotta Have My Baby Back” (Columbia, 1949)

Patti Page “Tennessee Waltz” (Mercury, 1951)

Eddy Arnold “You Don’t Know Me” (RCA-Victor, 1956)

Ivory Joe Hunter “Since I Met You Baby” (Atlantic, 1956)

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5 Responses to “Antecedents of the Nashville Sound”

  1. Roy Says:
    November 13th, 2006 at 5:13 pm

    So, are you arguing that crooning is a key element of the Nashville Sound, or just of the emergence of Nashville Sound? I mean there are like a couple thousand NS cuts that aren’t crooning at all, right?

  2. David Cantwell Says:
    November 13th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    A couple of thousand non-crooners, at least, but none of them from that moment when the Sound emerges. All of the acts who are considered today to be part of that transitional/beginning moment were crooners, broadly defined. How broadly? Not heavily melismatic singers–a la Lefty and Jones–and with some attempt to pop smoothness. Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, Eddy Arnold, Marty Robbins, Sonny James, Ferlin Huskey, Bobby Helms, even Elvis.

  3. Barry Says:
    November 13th, 2006 at 9:48 pm

    Hwve you hd any particular thoughts so far, dave, on why it was crooning that became the vocal element then? I tried my hand at the return of crooning in general in the 50s in tlakig about the gene Austin semi-comeback years. But it certainly is interetsing to contemplate why a Lefty type singer was as outside the Nash Sound bounds as the particularly twangy/rural ones.

    The easy shot–which just doesn’t seem accurate– is that Nashvile Sound singing had to be more “vanilla” than that–but, of course, the really good crooners could do some rich French Vanilla that didn’t leave you pining for the addition of fudge. i don’t think that’s a racial metaphor per se, BTW–since here were black crooners, too, just like there were melesmatic white singers. (Ivory Joe Hunter, in fact, had been something of a crooner all the way back to his 40s R&B days.) And rally good French Vanilla crooning doesn;t necessarily leave me, personally, pining for the Anita Kerr singers either–but, so it goes.

  4. David Cantwell Says:
    November 13th, 2006 at 11:47 pm

    I need to think more about this but one thing that happens in the Nashville sound is that the croon–which was a big part of country music and related music all along–is foregrounded against the twangless (?) background like it had never been before. But many of the singers who were already successful and who then continued their success in the NS era didn’t sing all that differently–think of Ray Price or Hank Snow or Jim Reeves.

    But why crooning? I think it has a lot to do with country folk, or more accurately southerners who were viewed as country folk (read, dumb, backward, etc) by the American mainstream, even though they were of course long gone from rural lives, attempting to negotiate some since of keeping it down to earth and fitting in to middle class American ideals–a big deal in the 50s especially. So vanilla is actually not a bad descriptor, as long as we allow for the negative connotations that come with it which from case to case may not be very appropriate.

  5. Don Thieme Says:
    December 10th, 2006 at 6:05 pm

    I vote for Ray Price, and “Release Me” in particular. Jim Reeves as well, with “Four Walls” and then “He’ll Have To Go.” I wonder what Reeves would have gone on to do had he lived.

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