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14 Country music had finally achieved the respectability and economicviability first suggested when the art form exploded commercially in the 19408. Country songs frequently found favor among the pop audience, and stars like Hank Snow and Johnny Cash seemed equally at home abroad as in front of American audiences. Increasing favor across all audiences—international and domestic, country and pop—bolstered country music s stature in the 19608, as did Nashville's status in the industry as a recording center on par with New York and Los Angeles. A remarkable growth of full-time country music radio stations also signaled the regard and popularity the music had earned; the Country Music Association counted 127 new country radio stations that took to the air from 1961to 1965. As the clamor for more and more recorded music to fuel this boom reached uproarious levels, a proliferation of publishing companies, agents, writers, and aspiring performers invaded Nashville. The Nashville studios hummed night and day, seven days a week, producing a variety of country music sounds—from the status quo of the Nashville Sound to styles influenced by Hank Williams or rock and roll. The record companies unceasingly rained product on the market. "You'd make a bunch of records," explained Chet Atkins, "and just throw them out and see what stuck to the wall. If you got one started at just one little place, you could spread it all over the country usually.That was the M.O. in those days." Eddy Arnolds international success helped draw attention to the Nashville scene, and his name was a fixture in the country-music works. In that his records performed so well in the country market, he shared a great deal with other Nashville stars like George Jones and Webb Pierce; and he also shared with country singers Johnny Cash and Roger Miller the ability to appeal to pop audiences. The similarities with most country perform213 214 Eddy Arnold: Pioneer of the Nashville Sound ers, though, ended there. Eddy Arnold's serious, sweetly arranged sound factored him out of the pack. With the success generated by "Make the World Go Away," "I Want to Go with You,"and other triumphs, Eddy Arnold broke away from mainstream country music. Yes, strings were more plentiful than ever before on country records, but rarely did producers or arrangers use them as extensively as Chet Atkins and Bill Walker did on Eddy's records.Although many have characterized the 19605 as the decade of the airy, urbane Nashville Sound, Buck Owens and many others performed and recorded in a more traditional vein through the '6os. The subject matter of Eddy's songs also distinguished him from his hitmaking country colleagues. His innocent expressions of hurt in the 1967 number one hits "Lonely Again" and "Turn the World Around" blushed next to other number one songs from that year: Loretta Lynn's "Don't Come Home A'Drinkin (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" or Marty Robbins's "Tonight Carmen," for example. Merle Haggard's themes of desperation in "Branded Man" and "The Fugitive" also seemed more at home with the traditional , Jimmie Rodgers/Hank Williams-inspired ideals of country music than Eddy's 1967outings. Eddy was unique in the country genre, placing country hits with a decidedly un-country style. He seemed without compatriots in sound on the Nashville scene—an anomaly. But if Eddy looked hard enough, he could see traces of himself in the work of a few youngsters around him. Seeds he had sown almost twenty years before as the Tennessee Plowboy had grown up in the attitudes of many hit makers of the 19608. Among them were George Hamilton IV,John D. Loudermilk, and Jim Ed Brown— not necessarilythe giants of country music in the 19608, but palpable forces nonetheless. In many respects, Hamilton, Loudermilk, and Brown are the "thinking man's" country musicians, men who on their respective journeys have thought to put their music in historical perspective. They have demanded that country music be regarded for its reflection, not parody, of American common people. In their youth, they admired Eddy Arnold's music for pure entertainment value, and, as they matured, came to respect Eddy's no-nonsense approach to his craft. GeorgeHamilton IV, who sang rock and roll in the 19505 and as a country singer hit big in 1963with "Abilene," first glimpsed Eddy's style at the Carolina Theater in Winston-Salem. "When I [18.219.22.169] Project MUSE (2024-04...
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