Bull Market in Corn

The dominant popular music of the U.S. today is hillbilly.

By last week the flood of camp-meetin' melody, which had been rising steadily in juke joints and on radio programs for over a year, was swamping Tin Pan Alley. Big names in the drawling art of country and cowboy balladry like Gene Autry, the Carter Family, Roy Acuff and Al Dexter were selling on disks as never before. Top-flight songsters like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were making their biggest smashes with hill billy tunes. A homely earful of the purest Texas corn, Al Dexter's Pistol Packin' Mama, had edged its way to first place among the nation's juke-box favorites.

Even many of Tin Pan Alley's bestsellers, such tunes as You'll Never Know, Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer, There's a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere, were fragrant with hillbilly spirit. All over the country were the Appalachian accents of the geetar and the country fiddle.

All this constituted the biggest revolution in U.S. popular musical taste since the "swing" craze began in the middle '30s. Public demand was shifting from Afro-American stomps and blues to a much simpler (and often monotonous) musical idiom that was old when nostalgic '49ers were singing Clementine. Hillbilly music is the direct descendant of the Scottish, Irish and English ballads that were brought to North America by the earliest white settlers. Preserved in the U.S.

backwoods by generations of hard-bitten country folk, the old hillbilly ballads are sometimes of rare melodic beauty. But most of them hew closely to a few homely, foursquare formulas. The songs get their quality, if any, from their words -- long narrative poems evolved by generations of backwoods minstrels.

Brakeman Rodgers. For years hillbilly music remained a branch of folklore to most urban Americans -- if they knew of it at all. But in 1921 a Kansas City-born folklore fan named Ralph Peer (then sales manager for Okeh Records) took a recording apparatus into the backwoods of Georgia and made some 300 disks. As an experiment, Okeh issued Peer's recordings, listing them in a special catalogue similar to those used for foreign language and "race" records. Within a few years Okeh's hillbilly list sold over a million disks--mostly below the Mason-Dixon line. Tin Pan Alley still paid no attention.

By 1927, attracted by Okeh's success, Victor decided to enter the field, unearthed in Bristol, Va. a former Southern Railway brakeman named Jimmie Rodgers. His quaintly drawling voice soon became the biggest thing in hillbilly minstrelsy.

What really started the corn sprouting on Broadway was a lugubrious tune by Louisiana's Jimmie Davis called It Makes No Difference Now. In the late '30s Decca's Recording Chief David Kapp heard this Texas hit and got it on wax. Within a few months record buyers were clamoring for Decca's later Bing Crosby version. Shrewd David Kapp barged wholesale into the hillbilly field, boomed local hits into national smashes by giving them successive recordings by bigger & bigger names. Thus, Crosby became the most popular singer of hillbilly as well as other popular music.

Al and Freddie. The rage has taken a good part of U.S. song writing out of the hands of Tin Pan Alley's veterans. Almost any simple soul might write hillbilly words and the composition of hillbilly music has always been regarded by Tin Pan Alley as a variety of unskilled labor, Chief among the newcomers are Texas-born Al Dexter (Pistol Packin' Mama), Indiana-born Freddie Rose (Low & Lonely, I'll Reap My Harvest in Heaven), the Carter Family of Bristol, Va. (I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes), Texas-born Bob Wills (New San Antonio Rose).

Shouting Baptist. The most spectacular of all is Jimmie Davis, who wrote the historic It Makes No Difference Now. A hard-boiled Louisiana politician, crack shot and ex-college professor, he last week declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor of his home state. Local politicos conceded that the recent author of such twangy hits as Nobody's Darlin' But Mine and You Are My Sunshine (the rage of England) had a good chance of winning the election as well as the nomination.

Rarely has a man's hobby so helped his profession. For a while, Jimmie warbled on "Hello, World" Henderson's Shreveport station KWKH. His political opponents seethed: "You can't fight Davis--how in the devil can you fight a song?" In a recent election for public service commissioner in the Third District of Louisiana, Davis beat Huey Long's record (for the same office) by polling over 57,000 votes--20,000 more than both his opponents combined.

A dapper, six-foot, sparely built "shouting Baptist," Jimmie Davis owns two redhill farms totaling 450 acres where he raises pecans and about 40 head of cattle. His wife is the touchstone by which Jimmie (who cannot read music) judges his songs. Says he: "When I have thought up a song, I run through it with my wife who's a graduate in piano from Centenary College. If she doesn't like it, it's going to be a smash hit."

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