How Country Music Became the Sound of U.S. Patriotism

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Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek Podcast.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

God bless the USA.

That's one of Trump's most played songs at his rallies, his inauguration, and even at his June military parade.

And it's one you might hear at a July 4th barbecue this week, depending on your host's tastes in music and their politics.

Because today's country music industry is deeply associated with a certain jingoistic rally around the flag, support the troops spirit.

In this week's podcast, we're re-airing a conversation about that sound.

We sort of take for granted that country music is a patriotic genre, and I think we've missed the story of how that happened.

Joseph Thompson is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University and author of the new book, Cold War Country, How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism.

He begins the story in the 1940s with a man named Connie B.

Gay, dubbed by the Washington Post as Country Music's media magician.

Gay got his start in the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program.

He starts from really humble roots.

He's born on a dirt farm in a little town called Lizard Lake, North Carolina.

During the Depression, he gets a job at a radio station in Raleigh, North Carolina.

And there he begins kind of understanding the power of what was then called hillbilly music, what we would now call country music, and understands that matching that hillbilly music with the information that he needs to relay to North Carolina farmers who are suffering during the Great Depression, that that makes for a powerful pairing of message and music.

He gradually becomes involved with the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal years in the early 1940s, moves to Washington, D.C.

So the Department of Agriculture puts him to work writing and hosting something called the Farm at Home Our Radio Show.

And that's a show that's used to promote the agency's farm improvement programs.

So while working for this show, Gay figures out that if the accompanying music has anything with what he calls a rural flavor, then he gets a lot more participation from the listeners, a lot more male than ever before.

So he uses this observation to launch a country music radio show in the Washington, D.C.

area after World War II.

He begins in 1946 on station WARL in Arlington, Virginia.

And he actually offers to work as an announcer for the station strictly on commission if they'll let him play whatever he wants to play.

It's town and country time.

You're talking about his now legendary radio show and later TV show, Town and Country Time.

In 1946, he begins hosting this show.

Hi, neighbor.

This is Connie B.

Gay saying, pull up your mail keg and join us.

In his recollection, he says the phone started ringing and people were saying, Lord, have mercy, why hasn't somebody done this before?

This was a typical barn dance radio show.

There were these types of shows being broadcast all over the country.

Of course, the most famous one that people will know of is the Grand Old Opry.

So it's sort of a variety show for different types of hillbilly music.

So you might have a harmonica player, you might have some clog dancers.

Then you might have a bluegrass-style band.

I have always dreaming of my little home back among the hills of Tennessee.

And then a honky-tonk band.

It was a big deal, both for Connie B.

Gay and for Hillbilly music when he managed to book a concert at DC's Constitution Hall in 1947.

I grew up in DC.

I've seen concerts there.

It's a really nice venue.

It was a big deal that he managed to get Hillbilly performers at the venue because of the stigma surrounding that genre at the time.

Hillbilly, obviously, it comes with this connotation of someone who is perhaps unlearned, someone who's from a rural area, maybe from the mountains, possibly uncouth in a lot of ways that would not be welcome in the polite confines of a space like Constitution Hall.

In order to kind of overcome that stigma, Connie B.

Gay labels his music as folk music rather than calling it hillbilly music.

I read a Washington Post article from 1983 in which he claimed to have coined the term country music.

I'm not going to give him that.

In addition to being this media mogul, he was also great at self-promotion.

But he was actually a great talent scout.

People like George Hamilton IV.

Abilene.

Abilene.

Patsy Klein.

God a feeling calls on the moon.

Roy Clark.

Johnny Cash.

How I taught the weeping willow how to cry.

Andy Griffith.

You get a line and I'll get a pole, honey.

All got career boosts from Gay.

He discovered the accordion playing comedian Jimmy Dean in a Washington, D.C.

beer joint.

Howdy, howdy, howdy, good people, everywhere.

He booked an up-and-coming rockabilly star named Elvis Presley on Gay's Hillbilly Cruise on the Potomac River.

He took the yodeling banjo-playing Lewis Marshall Grandpa Jones on a high-profile tour of U.S.

military bases in Japan and Korea, where they visited the front lines.

And this was, I think, one of Connie B.

Gay's great country music innovations, as you write about in the book.

He cultivated a new fan base among U.S.

troops stationed overseas.

This is the Armed Forces Radio Circus.

This is during the Korean War.

He books Grandpa Jones and his grandchildren, which was his backing band at the time.

So when Grandpa Jones and his grandchildren go on tour, they're not only performing these concerts for service members, but these are being recorded as well.

Those recordings are then pressed onto records.

Those records are then shipped to DJs within the Far East Network, the FEN, which was the Asian branch of the Armed Forces radio service at the time.

And so, then that goes into circulation on DJ's playlist.

There's a way in which the government and then these private promoters like Connie B.

Gay and artists like Grand Paul Jones are cultivating a real market and a real audience for country music amongst U.S.

service members and we should mention international civilian listening audiences who can hear the AFRS even though they're not part of the U.S.

military.

In the early 1950s, the military was facing a personnel crisis.

It needed more recruits.

Tell me about Talent Patrol and the role it played in recruiting new soldiers.

If you turned on the radio, the television, or opened a magazine at the time, you were probably getting some kind of a pitch to join the U.S.

military.

So part of that was this show that you mentioned called Talent Patrol.

So imagine Star Search or American Idol, but it only features service members from the U.S.

military as its contestants.

And accompanying us at our service star night, we have the renowned 9th Infantry Division Band all the way from Fort Dixon, New Jersey.

So they would go on and showcase their diverse skills, their diverse talents, and then be awarded first, second, third place.

It was meant to generate goodwill toward the U.S.

military, but also serve as a kind of soft recruitment message.

And who were some of the more memorable acts who participated in it?

This is where a country singer named Farron Young launches his career as a country music Army recruitment singer.

Now, Farron Young would go on to become a country music Hall of Fame inductee.

He's maybe best known as the first singer of Hello Walls, a song written by Willie Nelson.

Hello, Walls.

What things

go for you today?

In the early 50s, he was this kind of struggling singer from a dairy farm in Shrefort, Louisiana.

He had started his music career in 1951 on a local barn dance show show called Louisiana Hayride.

But by 1952, his career was on the uptick.

He had signed a recording contract with Capitol Records.

He had made his debut on the Grando Opry in Nashville.

And then in November 1952, he gets his draft notice.

He tries to get out of service, right?

Yes.

He tried to convince the doctor that he had heart trouble.

But the doctor reportedly said, yes, son, I can hear it breaking.

That's so good.

And you can imagine, I mean, this is a 20, 21-year-old kid, essentially, who thinks he's got the world on a string and all of a sudden it all comes crashing down because of military service, or at least that's the way he saw it at the beginning.

Yeah, little did he know this might have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Absolutely.

His luck really begins to turn around in January 1953.

At that point, he's still serving in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

But his song called Going Steady, which he recorded before he entered the service, breaks onto the billboard charts at Rocket Suit number two.

The Army brass there at Fort Jackson realized that they have this potential resource on their hand to promote military service, and they put him to use.

So that spring, they send him off to compete on Talent Patrol, and lo and behold, he wins.

And that launches him on this career as someone who's passed with both entertaining soldiers and and then also being the voice of recruitment to lure others into the ranks.

And he was among a rotating cast of MCs on a show called Country Style USA.

That's right.

The Defense Department and U.S.

Army and Air Force Recruiting Service was casting this wide net for potential volunteer enlistees.

That was very important to them.

They wanted more volunteers rather than draftees.

One of the ways that they're doing that is through a show that begins on radio and then transitions to a television version called Country Style USA.

It's time for Country Style USA.

Stay all night,

stay a little longer.

Now, both the radio and television versions of this show were recorded by a Nashville country music legendary producer named Owen Bradley, the architect of the Nashville Sound.

He's also the producer behind people like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Klein, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, just to name a few.

The U.S.

Army and Air Force Recruiting Service links up with Owen Bradley and they begin producing this show called Country Style USA.

Hi there, neighbors, my name is Charlie Applewhite and welcome once again to Country Style USA.

And what Country Style did was present 15 minutes of country music with some of the top names in the genre at the time, along with a message about the career opportunities available through the armed forces.

Congratulations, Chum.

You've got your high school diploma, and now you're really ready to step out.

These days, it takes specialized training to get a really good job.

But did you know that you can get that valuable training you need in the U.S.

Army and you'll be paid while learning?

So, by the late 1950s, country music programming is really booming for the U.S.

Army.

It actually accounts for more than one-third of the U.S.

Army's televised recruitment campaigns.

Why country music?

Why do you think the military found it so attractive as a recruitment tool, but also as a kind of cultural force in the military's hearts and minds fight against communism?

I think country music serves a couple of purposes this way.

One is a demographic purpose.

The recruiting service noticed this kind of pipeline of young white recruits coming from the South.

They assumed that those white Southerners would enjoy country music.

There was some evidence to back that up based on the success of people like Grandpa Jones and Connie B.

Gay.

In the mid-1950s, you have the country music industry beginning to really coalesce in Nashville.

These songwriters, publishers, recording studios like Owen Bradley's, many of them on 16th Avenue South, which we now call Music Row.

But also, country music, particularly after its reputation has been burnished a bit and we're moving away from that kind of style of country music and the reputation it had as hillbilly music, that begins to read as a particularly down-home,

safe, patriotic sort of message that fits really well with the political climate of the Cold War consensus.

And that's interesting because black musicians played a significant role in creating the sound of country music, right?

And yet they weren't as featured in these military recruitment campaigns.

Yeah, we should acknowledge that there's white supremacy baked into the country music industry really from its beginnings.

There's a concerted effort on the part of record labels going back to the 1920s and 30s to create hillbilly music music as essentially an all-white genre.

Now, that is overlooking the influence and the pioneering music of African Americans who played hillbilly or country music for sure.

And particularly by the 1950s, that is definitely the case.

At least when we're talking about the industry and the artists that are being promoted through this professional infrastructure of Nashville, it's all white.

And that's not going to change until the late 1960s with Charlie Pride.

If you were a black folk or blues singer, you would literally be marketed as making race music.

That's correct.

At least through the 1920s and 30s, that begins to change in the late 1940s when the label RB comes around.

Now, this is not to say that country music did not benefit from the labor and talent of black musicians.

In fact, one of the stories that I tell in the book is about Cecil Gant, a black RB blues pianist, singer, songwriter from Tennessee, who actually played on a lot of of country music sessions back in the 1940s, but didn't get the credit that he really deserves, I think.

Cecil Gant actually billed himself in 1944, 45 as Private Cecil Gant.

He had a huge hit with a song called I Wonder.

I Wonder,

My Little Darling.

But he could not translate that wartime success and the labeling of himself as a military service member into a kind of post-war success because I think a lot of the kind of racism that was baked into the record industry in Nashville where he was cutting records.

One of the biggest stars of the Grand Or Opry in the 1920s and 30s was D.

Ford Bailey, an African-American harmonica singer.

But by the 1940s, he's actually fired from the Grando Opry.

And so when we're talking about this kind of Cold War era of country music in the 1950s and early 60s, it's an all-white genre for sure.

Coming up, the relationship between the military and country music hits a bump in the road in the 1970s with the anti-war movement.

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This is on the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Loewinger, picking up on my conversation with Joseph Thompson, author of Cold War Country.

In it, Thompson explains how country stars, some of whom got their start in the armed forces, lent their sound and fame to U.S.

military recruitment efforts.

In turn, as the Cold War kicked off in the 1940s and 50s, the Department of Defense became a major importer of country records and provided the country music industry with a captive audience abroad.

By the 1960s and 70s, that dynamic was complicated by the war in Vietnam and the birth of a counterculture peace movement.

Because of depictions of service members in country fighting in Vietnam in both fictional films and documentaries, there's a kind of baby boomer sort of understanding of what that music was, and it was Crenus Clearwater, it was Jimi Hendrix, it was rock and roll songs.

Thompson says that most soldiers were probably listening to country music.

That was what was being pushed at the time to the vast majority of U.S.

service members around the world who were working menial jobs and not stationed in Vietnam.

The war in Vietnam also marked a turning point when country music went from being patriotic to being partisan.

As the war became less and less popular among Americans.

If you still supported the military, you were seen as going along with this partisan agenda.

And there's a sort of capturing of this idea of patriotism, very narrowly defined as supporting the troops no matter what, by partisan actors.

And Richard Nixon and the Republican Party at the time were definitely part of that.

But even as the country embraced conservative pro-war messaging, messaging, for many country artists, it was way more complicated than that.

In fact, some of the musicians who helped create that image of country music were fighting against it at the same time.

Like Merle Haggard, known for his two backlash anthems, Fight Inside of Me and especially Okie from Muskoki.

That was a kind of character study of what Merle Haggard and his co-writer thought that a small-town person would think about the peace movement and the anti-war movement.

If people know the song, it's, we don't smoke marijuana in Muscogee, we don't take our trips on LSD, we still wave old glory down at the courthouse, et cetera.

But he supposedly said that Muscogee, Oklahoma was the only place he didn't smoke marijuana in 1969.

Of course, that kind of nuance is lost on not only country fans, but it's lost on politicians like Richard Nixon, who thought, oh, I have a essentially a spokesperson for my politics in which he wanted to, you know, beat up hippies and kill the peace movement.

Richard Nixon invites Merle Haggard to the White House to perform.

And Merle Haggard describes that experience as one of the worst in his life.

The people that he was performing for, including the president, didn't know his music, didn't like country music, and the only song that they responded to was Okie from Muskoki and Fight Inside of Me, the other backlash anthem.

As you've observed, there were musicians who kind of tried to straddle the line with more complicated songs that, in one way or another, kind of subverted the government's Cold War messaging.

That's right.

The person that I really home in on is a country music songwriter named Tom T.

Hall.

He himself was an Army veteran, had served in Germany back in the 1950s, then launched a country music songwriting career.

He wrote songs that we now hear as a jingoistic anthem like Hello Vietnam,

or what we're fighting for.

There's not a soldier in this foreign land who likes this war.

Oh mama, tell them what we're fighting for.

Then in 1971, Tom C.

Hall releases his song, Mama Bake a Pie, Daddy Kill a Chicken.

It's a story about a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran who's coming home from the war.

He starts out by saying, The people are staring at me as they wheel me down the ramp toward my plane.

The war is over for me.

I've forgotten everything except the pain.

In the chorus, you hear he's making a request for his homecoming meal.

Mama, bake a pie, daddy, kill a chicken.

Your son is coming home, 11:35 Wednesday night.

Your son is coming home 1135 Wednesday night.

Throughout this song, we hear the voice of this soldier and his interactions with his family and his acquaintances.

People are learning that he's disabled.

His drunk uncle makes this terrible suggestion about getting wooden legs.

His former girlfriend, who had been waiting for him, is now no longer interested in staying with him, that he is disabled.

So he is self-medicating with alcohol that he keeps under the blanket over his wheelchair.

I argue that Hall is using this to sort of cut through the debates about the Vietnam War, the debates about what is patriotism.

He's making people listen really to the consequences of war.

This phenomenon you're describing reminds me of Toby Keith's 2002 anthem, Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, The Angry American.

My daddy served in the army when he lost his right eye, but he flew a flag out in our yard to the day that he died.

He wanted my money.

Keith later felt pigeonholed.

He told Billboard that he didn't want to seem like this Captain America right-wing lunatic.

And I didn't know this, but he was actually a registered Democrat at the time that he wrote the song.

He did come to regret that, although it's obvious why he was pigeonholed as this Captain America, because courtesy of the red, white, and blue, the Angry America, you know, released in the wake of 9-11.

It's, we're going to get revenge, We're going to put a boot up your ass.

It's the American way.

Zero subtlety.

It comes across as this ballistic anthem about let's just go kill a bunch of people in revenge.

He wrote that as a sort of character study of the way he thought his father, who was a veteran, would react to the 9-11 attacks.

But we often confuse the singer for the song, particularly in country music where ideas about authenticity are so highly valued.

We could also acknowledge that Toby Keith wrote a song called The Ballad of Balad, which is about a recruiter who essentially suckers a high school dropout into joining the military.

And then, before he knows it, he's off fighting a war that he doesn't even understand what's going on.

I met an army

President Nixon ended the draft in 1973.

That signals the beginning of a shift in country music's relationship to the military.

By the 1980s, there's less of a need for the country music industry to sell its products to soldiers, service members, and they're using the military more to sell the idea of country music as a particularly patriotic genre to civilians.

To me, this is when the relationship between country music and the military becomes a bit more symbolic.

And I think that that's what really carries on into our current day.

For artists nowadays, if they want to garner more listeners, if they want to really tap into country music's culture, then they play to that sort of version of patriotism that was defined way back in the Cold War days.

Lee Greenwood is kind of the perfect example of that.

Lee Greenwood wrote God Bless the USA, Proud to Be an American, as a sort of wartime song in search of a war.

That's right.

In September 1983, a Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet Union.

It contained U.S.

citizens, and and Lee Greenwood assumed we were about to go to war.

And so he wrote this song out of this kind of impulse to write a song that would express his trepidation, but also his support for the troops with this impending war on the horizon, or so he thought.

And I'm bound to be an American, where at least I know I'm free.

But then nothing happens.

So he's stuck with this wartime song, this wartime anthem, and no conflict to support it.

But he releases it anyway in 1984.

And so it then becomes about just sort of a general patriotism that supports the military in a very traditional way

that harkens back to Cold War consensus days of the 50s and 60s, a kind of pre-Vietnam patriotism.

And that is ripe for the picking for Republican politicians.

People like Ronald Reagan adopt Lee Greenwood's song as his anthem.

He begins to inject the lyrics into his speeches.

And then George H.W.

Bush actually does deliver the war, Operation Desert Storm.

Of course, that is a very short-lived conflict, but Lee Greenwood nevertheless capitalizes on that and becomes a surrogate for the Bush administration and for the U.S.

Armed Forces overall with that song during the early 1990s.

He's going to reprise that after 9-11, but the first Iraq war is the one that really gives him the war that he was in search of back in 1983.

And in a way, former President Donald Trump has also capitalized on Lee Greenwood's legacy.

Yes.

So the God Bless the USA Bible is a Bible that Lee Greenwood is selling.

It contains the lyrics to the song.

It contains copies of our founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and then a King James version of the Bible.

Then, yeah, back in March of this year, people started sending me the commercials for God Bless the USA Bible with Lee Greenwood and Donald Trump lending his endorsement.

Partnering with my good friend Lee Greenwood, I encourage you to get this God Blessed USA Bible.

Let's make America pray again.

God bless you, and God bless the USA.

To talk about this move from a kind of utilitarian use of country music and recruitment campaigns to this more political and symbolic connection.

I think that's a prime example of what I'm talking about.

I noticed in your book, there's this tension between a kind of anti-big government ideology that many of us might associate with country music and the role that the big federal government played in helping popularize the genre.

Do you think that's an important part of the story of country music?

I do.

I grew up in a small town in North Alabama in the 1980s and 90s at a time when that kind of small government conservatism was sweeping the South.

This idea that government was the problem, big government needed to get out of their lives.

And at the same time, I was looking around and seeing people who drove an hour every day to work at Redstone Arsenal or to work at one of these engineering firms in Huntsville, Alabama.

They were essentially government employees by another name.

That federal money was just being filtered through a private contractor, even though they were building weaponry and software and this kind of thing for the defense state.

And so I think there's a kind of irony in that country music, so associated with conservatism, rightly or wrongly, so associated with the white South, rightly or wrongly, gets affiliated with that sort of small government politics and people's imaginations.

And what I hope to show is that the very industry that makes the music that so many people latch onto from those communities was actually also built in a way by big government spending during the Cold War.

Joseph Thompson is a history professor at Mississippi State University and author of the new book, Cold War Country.

Joseph, thank you very much.

Thank you, Micah.

Thanks for listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast.

Tune into the big show on Friday to hear hear about what's at stake if public radio stations lose their federal funding.

I'm Michael Loewinger.