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Ralph Peer went to Victor with an offer no record man has made before or since: pay me a dollar a year, and let me keep the publishing. Victor took it. It looks like modesty and it was the opposite - publishing was where the money had always been, and Peer had worked out that the way to get rich in the record business was to own the songs rather than the sides. That is the deal underneath the Bristol sessions of 1927, and it is why Peer went looking for performers who wrote their own material instead of fiddlers playing tunes everybody already owned. The reason American law protects songwriters so fiercely in the first place traces back to Stephen Foster dying a pauper at thirty-eight - the foundational trauma of the American music business, and the thing every statute since has been bending over backwards to prevent happening again.
Host Nate Wilcox is joined by James Porter - Chicago writer, DJ and musician - to open CountryRoll, their run through Ken Burns’s “
series, in a conversation first recorded in 2021 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.
Burns’s lodestar here is Bill C. Malone, whose “Country Music U.S.A.” is the book the whole field still argues with, and the series takes his line: country is working-class music, a mix of labour songs, parlour ballads, fiddle tunes, Sunday hymns both Black and white, saloon music, barrio music and cowboy songs. James’s verdict is warmer than he expected to give. A lot of people went in braced for the worst, having found the jazz series skimmed a deep well - and there is always going to be somebody hollering that Burns forgot the one guy who had a hit on a truck-stop jukebox in 1962. But the case James makes is that the series is generous exactly where it matters most, on the Black musicians who were there from the start.
DeFord Bailey is the proof. The harmonica player was the most featured artist in the early history of the Grand Ole Opry, and audiences who tuned in out of curiosity came away startled by how much airtime the series gives him. The harder point sits underneath it: the musical miscegenation was real and the social equality was not. James is a devoted collector of old-time string band reissues and puts it plainly - you will be grooving along to a banjo riff and a guitar riff and then, out of nowhere, the lyric turns, and if you keep listening it gets worse. Both things are true at once, and the episode does not let either off the hook.
The two acts Burns builds the hour on are the obvious ones and, James argues, the right ones. The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers between them cover the whole industry: Peer, the portable recording rig, the publishing, the songs. Nate reaches for the Beatles-and-Stones comparison and James takes it, with the caveat that nobody knows what John Lennon would make of being the Carter Family in that equation.
What separates them is temperament. Rodgers was showbiz before he was famous - the man in the railroad cap and dirty denim was competing directly with Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo, which is not what the photographs lead you to expect. The Carter Family were the opposite, the first superstars entirely unspoiled by celebrity, reaching millions a week off border radio and never once becoming show people.
And then the omissions, which is where James gets exercised and where this episode earns its place in the run. Burns mentions Charlie Poole. He does not mention Gid Tanner, or the Skillet Lickers, or Riley Puckett - one of James’s favourites from the era and, he says, about the most gifted of them. Nor Vernon Dalhart, who was competing with the crooners and selling pop units, the Eddy Arnold of his day, with “The Prisoner’s Song.” The thread tying those names together is the one the series is least comfortable with: a great deal of what these people sang was not folk music at all. Track the repertoire and you find show tunes from the 1880s and 1890s - country, once again, being pop.
Also: the acetates that went straight to the radio before anybody thought to press them; what the labels meant by their “race” series and their “hillbilly” series, and who decided which was which; Eck Robertson’s 1922 fiddle sides that did not sell and Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1923 Atlanta record that did; Peer discovering Louis Armstrong later on; Ernest Stoneman’s royalty check as the thing that brought the rush to Bristol; and the Scots-Irish inheritance running under all of it.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* Fiddlin’ John Carson, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”
* DeFord Bailey, “Fox Chase”
* Jimmie Rodgers with Louis Armstrong, “Blue Yodel No. 9”
* Riley Puckett, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie”
This episode originally dropped in 2021.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
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