He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time

10. Yeah, But Is It Country?

87 yeaH,buTISITcounTry? Modern country music has no relationship to rural or mountain life. It is the music of this Nation, of this country, the music of the people. You find no screech fiddles, no twangy guitars, no mournful nasal twangs in the modern Nashville sound of country music. —radio consultant, circa 1958 The Country Music Association (CMA) was formed in 1958 out of the remains of the Country Music Disc Jockeys Association and then and now serves as kind of a trade association for the business. Back in the early days, as Diane Pecknold reported in The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, the CMA saw the country audience as “the rural to urban white migrants from the South and Midwest who made up a significant portion of the newly affluent blue-collar middle class.” Hillbillies made good. In 1960, wrote Pecknold, the CMA mailed copies of a magazine article titled “Country Music: A Gold Mine for City Broadcasters ” to three hundred advertising executives. The article explained that the country audience “[was] not listeners who had been lured away from the pop audience, but country music fans who would not otherwise be reached by radio.” The CMA wanted to convince radio/ad executives that country music delivered a unique, hard-to-reach audience with money to spend. In American broadcasting that’s always a message with some traction. Apparently it took. In 1961, according to a CMA survey, there were only eighty-one stations playing country fulltime . Eight years later, there were over six hundred. The Nashville Sound would prove to have staying power despite “sticky sweet orchestral arrangements and mooing vocal 10 The Nashville Sound 88 choruses,” as Robert Palmer would put it in the New York Times decades later. Why? You know. It sold. And those who wanted to keep on driving those pink Cadillacs would soon adapt. Listen to Chet. “Somebody interviewing me once asked me, ‘What’s the Nashville Sound?,’” Atkins recalled in Nicholas Dawidoff’s book In the Country of Country. “I was stumbling for an answer and he got out some coins and shook them and he was right. People were in it to make a living.” “What we did was we tried to make hit records,” Chet continued . “We wanted to keep our job.” So was this selling out as some charged? Not if “selling out” means playing music you know is junk just to make a quick buck. “For guitarist Atkins, a self-styled ‘country gentleman’ with a taste for classical music, and pianist Bradley, a society bandleader,” wrote John Morthland in the Journal of Country Music, “this sound was a natural enough step in the evolution of the music.” “I was just making records I liked,” Chet told historian Robert Oermann. “It turned out the public liked them too.” So if Chet and them didn’t sell out, and rock ’n’ roll didn’t make Chet and them do it, then what was Chet and them’s motive? Whence cometh the violins from hell? What’s with the Nashville Sound? This time Chet and them’s rationale rings true. They were trying to make hit records. The old formulas didn’t work. They tried something new. When it sold, they copied each other. After the fact, somebody dubbed it the “Nashville Sound.” The label stuck. When asked, they blamed it on the evil rock ’n’ roll. All done. (I mean, no self-respecting country musician is ever going to admit to being done in by the likes of “Doggie in the Window.”) • • • And here in the twenty-first century, decades after the debut of the Nashville Sound, what are we to make of all this pop-influenced country music? Yeah, But Is It Country? 89 “My first favorite, of course, was Roy Acuff,” George told Sirius Radio deejay Charlie Monk in 2007. No surprise there. “And Eddy Arnold, of course, one of my favorites,” continued George. “He was way ahead of his time ’cause he had such a smooth, good voice.” Eddy Arnold? Didn’t Eddy Arnold abandon country music in the fifties? Don’t you have to make a choice: Eddy or Roy? Can you really pick both? Hello. If George Jones, Mister Authenticity, the curator of curators, includes Eddy in the country club—pun intended—what are we to do but get down off our hardcore country high horse and give ole Eddy...