Folk Music and Modern Sound

Honky Tonk: The Music of the Southern Working Class

Honky Tonk: The Music of the Southern Working Class Bill Malone I left my home down on a rural route* And told my mom I'm going stepping out, To get the honky tonk blues. THE COUNTRY CHURCH, the county schoolhouse, the village barn dance, and the family parlor all occupy honored places in the history of country music as shaping forces in the evolution of the genre. All of them mirror the pastoral origins of country music, just as their continued emphasis in written accounts reflects a rural bias on the part of scholars. The honky tonk, on the other hand, which Hank Williams described in the above song, has been anything but pastoral, but it may have been the most powerful influence yet. Since antiquity a powerful interrelationship between drinking and musical entertainment has existed, and the tavern, or its equivalent, has always played an important role in the dissemination of music. But as a force for musical change in country music, its history properly begins in the thirties. It was then that the combined forces of prohibition repeal and increased commercialization and professionalization in the still new hillbilly music field led to the movementofmusicians into the taverns and beer joints where their music waswelcomed . When country music entered the honky tonks, its performing styles and its thematic content changed signifi119 120 P U R E C O U N T R Y cantly. Much of that story I have told elsewhere.2 My chief focus in this paper, however,will be on the years since World War II when the music of the honky tonk became, at least for a time, virtually the sound of country music, as well as the most valid expressionin song of the worldview of the Southern working class. If the thirties were important as years of nourishment, the war years were absolutely indispensable in both the maturation and popularization of honky tonk music. Like no other phenomenon before it, the war contributed to the weakening of the agricultural nexus and the subsequent migration of people into towns and industrial cities of the South, as well as into cities in the Midwest and on the West Coast. While rural civilians changed their locales and their occupations , their military sons and daughters moved to training camps both in and out of the South and to combat theatres around the world. For a people in transition, who werenow urban in residence but yet rural in style and outlook, the adjustment was often fraught with frustration and pain: housing was both inadequate and scarce;work wasplentiful but fraught with an unfamiliar regimentation; and family solidarity was weakened by a whole host of complex urban problems, not the least of which was the growing entry of women into the work force, and the increased availability of alternative role models for youth. In that time of stress people tended to seek security in that which was familiar. Women, for example, often sought the solace of religion (probably to a greater extent than men), and radio evangelists and charismatic tent revivalists found a large and enthusiastic audience among Southerners in the late 1940s. For men the pressures and frustrations of city life could be especially traumatic, and the threats to masculine supremacy, already strongly present in rural life, were made even more glaring in the newly adopted urban milieu. Many men, and their sons (but, it ishoped, not their daughters), sought to reaffirm their identities in asympathetic setting: over a bottle of beer in a honky tonk. Music of the Southern Working Class 121 The honky tonk3 was a man's world. Although women were sought there, it was not considered their domain, and those who entered were not respected. Men mightaccompany their wives or girlfriends to a dance, but the unattached "honky tonk angel" was both a lure and a threat. While she tempted, she also reminded one of that potential in allwomen, and was a premonition of the liberation that was soon to come. Men went to honky tonks for the widest variety of reasons , and as both casual and serious drinkers. Many who frequented honky tonks during the war years, whetherindustrial laborer or serviceman, were gripped by a sense of isolation— the loneliness that came from social displacement or from the physical separation from loved ones. The lonely drinker sought communion with the bottle, his companion on the nearby barstool, and the music of...