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chapter Two Thought I Had Your Heart Forever Death, Detachment, and the Modernity of Early Country Music So I walked down to the local store and picked up all seven volumes of Fiddlin’ John Carson’s Complete Recorded Works (1923–34). And, yes, I listened—with my earbuds in—to 156 ballads, minstrel songs, reels, agrarian anthems, and rustic hymns. And like many others, I quickly learned that listening to the oft-proclaimed “Father of Country Music” can be a painful experience. His fiddle scratches back and forth across the strings like some rusty lathe blade, moving in seemingly random, often brutal motion . His voice is at once reedy, mealy, and sharp; most lines are choked and garbled, but then some warble off into strange, unsettling highs and others fall away into a listless hum. As a whole, his oeuvre is nothing less than exhausting; almost every note grates, each melody wanders, all harmony off, and still the music seems utterly monotonous. As Bob Coltman once wrote, “I hesitate to suggest this, but was he slightly deaf? I don’t mean that as a criticism; he was so good he shouldn’t sound any other way. But his treatments have the same ranting, wayward stubbornness you notice in musicians with slight hearing loss, and he’s not always in tune, so that his music has a sprained, disorienting quality.”1 And yet—like Coltman and many others—I couldn’t stop listening. Granted, styles and tastes change over time, and what may grate on conComentale_Text .indd 72 2/19/13 4:11 PM Thought I Had Your Heart Forever 73 temporary ears may have soothed listeners from another era. However, at least part of the allure of Carson’s music is the same today as it was back in the day: its very “disorientation”—its thrilling ability to seem both far and near, archaic and immediate, respectful and rebellious. Perhaps this racket derived from years of playing outdoors, in the heat and without amplification, where Carson would have had to raise a very loud hell in order to capture the attention of an audience. But it is hard not to imagine that there wasn’t something peculiar to the musician himself, some inner turmoil that pitted bow and fiddle against the very music they couldn’t stop playing. Or maybe something about his time and place, some regional panic that at once enflamed and twisted its own song. As the first country star with the first country hit, Carson’s fame rose in Atlanta, Georgia, where his trick fiddling drew newly displaced farmers working the mills and factories. Between gigs as a planter, railroad man, and moonshiner, he cultivated an act that was part nostalgia trip, part musical marvel, and part hillbilly comedy routine. For his earliest fans, it seems, this restless music conjured up both rural authenticity and its impossible other—bigcity flash—and so revealed something of their own struggles. Because, really, you can’t go back, and this chapter begins with the premise that country music nostalgia signals its own modernity. If Carson is the “Father of Country Music”—and, when it comes to country music, we’re all family—he was the first of many performers at the threshold of southern modernity, part of that rural vanguard that transformed local disaster into commercial success. Carson, Rodgers, Williams, Haggard, Lynn, and beyond—so many country singers tend to romanticize and ruin, betray as they mourn the already fallen homestead; they sing sadly, defiantly, gleefully of their beloved corner of the country as it fades from view. The power and allure of such music, however, rests not just in the opposition it establishes between rural life and modernity, but rather in its ability to accommodate one to the other. Indeed, if blues music provided a sense of presence and agency for the individual wracked by poverty , racism, and labor, country song explores similar possibilities for an entire region gripped by change. Country song translates the anxiety of its moment into sonic form and thus creates an alternative presence and consistency for listeners confronting their own implacable modernity. The following discussion links the experiences of dislocation and disorientation that, for many, defined modern rural life with the sonic detachment that frames some of the most significant performances of early country song. This detachment, this very anxious and painful uprooting, I’ll show, Comentale_Text.indd 73 2/19/13 4:11 PM [3.21.97.61] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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