Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California 9780520940000

Citation preview

ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

Music in America Imprint

Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others.

Proud to Be an Okie

american crossroads Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sánchez, and Dana Takagi 1. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, by José David Saldívar 2. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, by Neil Foley 3. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound, by Alexandra Harmon 4. Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, edited by George Mariscal 5. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992, by Rachel Buff 6. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, by Melani McAlister 7. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by Nayan Shah 8. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990, by Lon Kurashige 9. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture, by Shelley Streeby 10. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, by David R. Roediger 11. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, by Laura Briggs 12. meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, by Rosa Linda Fregoso 13. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, by Eric Avila 14. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Tiya Miles 15. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, by Herman S. Gray 16. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, by Paul Ortiz 17. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, by Alexandra Stern 18. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, by Josh Kun 19. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, by Laura Pulido 20. Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939, by Natalia Molina 21. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore 22. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California, by Peter La Chapelle 23. Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, by Adrian Burgos, Jr.

Proud to Be an Okie Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California

peter la chapelle

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Chapter 1 is a revised version of “At the Crossroads of Whiteness: AntiMigrant Activism, Eugenics, and Popular Culture in Depression-Era California,” which originally appeared in Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850–2000, edited by Scott E. Casper and Lucinda Long (Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee, 2001). A portion of chapter 4 appeared previously in “All That Glitters: Country Music, Taste, and the Politics of the Rhinestone ‘Nudie’ Suit,” Dress: The Annual Journal of the Costume Society of America 28 (2001): 3–12. Chapter 5 is a revised version of “ ‘Spade Doesn’t Look Exactly Starved’: Country Music and Negotiation of Women’s Domesticity in Cold War Los Angeles,” which originally appeared in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, edited by Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). The epigraph to chapter 1, the poem “My People,” by Woody Guthrie, is © Copyright 1965 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data La Chapelle, Peter. Proud to be an Okie : cultural politics, country music, and migration to Southern California / Peter La Chapelle. p. cm. — (American crossroads ; 22) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-520-24888-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-520-24889-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Country music—California—History and criticism. 2. Music— Political aspects. 3. Popular culture—California, Southern—History— 20th century. I. Title. ML3524.L25 2007 781.64209794—dc22 2006019222 Manufactured in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).

For Shirli, Asher, and my grandmother, Mary Jane In memory of Ronald England, United Steelworkers Local 586, Miami, Arizona, who taught me to pay attention to the politics of culture and labor and the amount of olive oil in a marinara

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

xi

part i. big city ways 1. At the Crossroads of Whiteness: Antimigrant Activism, Eugenics, and Popular Culture

21

2. Refugees: Woody Guthrie, “Lost Angeles,” and the Radicalization of Migrant Identity

45

3. Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens: Race, Gender, and the Eclectic Populism of Wartime Western Swing

76

part ii. rhinestones and ranch homes 4. Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier: Suburbanization, Whiteness, and the Unmaking of Okie Musical Ethnicity

113

5. Playing Second Fiddle No More? Country Music, Domesticity, and the Women’s Movement

159

6. Fightin’ Sides: “Okie from Muskogee,” Conservative Populism, and the Uses of Migrant Identity

180

Reprise: Dueling Populisms: The Okie Legacy in National and Regional Country Music Notes Selected Bibliography Index

208 223 313 329

Illustrations

figures 1. “Upon a bench in Halfwit Park,” drawing from California— Magazine of the Pacific, 1938

38

2. Woody Guthrie and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, ca. 1938

49

3. Santa Monica Ballroom, “Home of Spade Cooley,” 1940s

84

4. Spade Cooley with Chief Wah-Nee-Ota, 1953

89

5. Roy Rogers and Ronald Reagan at an anticommunist rally, Los Angeles, 1961

141

6. Nudie “the Rodeo Tailor” Cohn, 1970s

155

7. The Flying Burrito Brothers at Joshua Tree National Monument, 1969

199

8. Merle Haggard on the cover of Hemp Times, 1997

203

maps 1. Western swing dance halls and industrial sites in Los Angeles and environs, 1940s

103

2. Suburbanization of country music nightspots: Southern California, 1940s

118

3. Suburbanization of country music nightspots: Southern California, 1950 to 1970

120

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

When I was growing up in the mining country of Arizona, country music was like sunshine or air, taken to be almost part of the physical environment. It was what I remembered hearing over the AM radio as my father’s dented late-1950s pickup dipped and bounced along the dusty road that led to our remote rural home. It was what preceded and followed the Apache medicine men who chanted Sunday afternoons on another local station. As a teenager in the 1980s, I discovered and became enamored of other genres: punk, New Wave, urban pop, thrash, reggae, heavy metal, and hip-hop. Later, with some geographic and mental distance, I encountered country a second time. A recent college grad, I moved to Bakersfield, California, country music’s self-proclaimed West Coast capital. There, as a young journalist, I met and interviewed a few of the people who figure prominently in this book. In reporting on the local country music culture and its Dust Bowl heritage for the arts section, and writing about real estate for the business page, I started to realize that country was about more than rural life. It was about overcoming obstacles and making transitions. It was about social class. And it was about race. The black and Latino residents of East Bakersfield and the blue-collar whites of nearby Oildale, home of Trout’s, my favorite local country hangout, might have shared much in common economically, but they diverged in important ways. And country music was an important identity marker, a reminder of who was white. In my studies as a master’s student, I began to realize that my first two observations were nothing new. Reams of scholarship focused on the hardluck, hurt, and poverty themes in country music, but few researchers had looked into the role race has played in the genre. My own observations— that Bakersfield favorites such as Merle Haggard, and national legends such as Hank Williams Sr., had had early connections with black performers— xi

xii

/

Preface and Acknowledgments

suggested some of the complexity surrounding the roles of racial identity and race relations in country music culture. With this in mind, I have written this book not just as a history of Okie identity within country music but also as a study of urban identity politics, residential segregation, and ultimately, race. As with most academic works, this book is the product of a collective effort. I could not have finished this work without the many friends, teachers, colleagues, and family members who were generous with their time and effort. I am especially thankful to my graduate school advisor, Steven J. Ross, who patiently walked me through the process of writing this book first as a dissertation. Ross not only provided guidance and careful editing but also has been an extremely encouraging and generous writing coach. Ross’s history of popular culture seminar, the seedbed in which this project first took root, provided me with the background to begin to explore many of the issues examined in this book. As a dissertation advisor, he devoted hours to meticulously appraising various drafts. Charles McGovern, my sponsor during the year I spent as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is another important influence. McGovern not only is a storehouse of knowledge about the history of consumption and popular music in America but also has been extremely helpful in pointing me to crucial materials, brainstorming about revisions, and generally helping me bring this book to print. Jeff Place of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, my sponsor during a shorter predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian, was equally helpful, assisting me with his keen understanding of American roots music tradition and a near encyclopedic knowledge of the recording world. Throughout my graduate career at the University of Southern California, I encountered several memorable teachers who assisted me in my efforts. Generous with his knowledge, time, and even his personal book and record collection, Terry Seip proved to be the mentor about which students in larger, more impersonal programs only dream. George J. Sánchez, the professor who instructed me in more graduate seminars than any other teacher, helped me begin to figure out how the history of Los Angeles and issues of race and identity would fit into my work. An exemplary teacher and scholar, David E. James of the Critical Studies Program, opened the field of Los Angeles cultural studies to me and encouraged me to be more cognizant of the role Hollywood has played in country music culture. I also thank Mary Francis and Jacqueline Volin, my editors at University of California Press, as well as Scott E. Casper, Lucinda Long, Kristine McCusker, Diane Pecknold, and Linda Welters, who offered suggestions on articles

Preface and Acknowledgments

/ xiii

stemming from this research; my ever-patient master’s thesis advisor, Margaret Rose, who prompted me to ask questions about identity and gender; and Devra Weber, who provided important feedback on migrant culture while chairing a panel at which I presented an early paper. I have also been lucky to have supportive and thoughtful colleagues at Wilson College, as well as the friendship of their equally thoughtful and gracious partners. My thanks to Enid Burrows, Marianne Cutler, Mary Hendrickson, Larry Shillock, David and Ellen True, and Lisa Woolley. I owe a special debt to Michael Cornelius and Joe Garcia, who extended what seemed to be a running invitation for get-togethers at their home, and Bob Dickson and Lori Krantz, who helped tremendously during the final stages of this book by lending a hand when my wife and I were overwhelmed with a new baby and an unexpected move. I am also extremely fortunate to have been involved in two study groups. One, a dissertation group that included Anne Choi, Daniel O’Keefe, and Aaron “Bu” Teahoen, and Chris West, helped me immensely in the formative stages of my project. I also owe much to a longer-lived group that initially met to discuss issues of culture and social justice raised by Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Calling ourselves the “Gramsci group,” or jokingly the “G-8” because our membership numbered eight, we formed a close-knit interdisciplinary community of thought and debate that enriched my approach to personal and academic pursuits. G-8 members Cynthia Cranford, Wendy DeBoer, Russell Horning, Alan Minsky, Scott Polisky, Steve Sidawi, and Rob Wilton patiently put up with my references to folk and country music in our discussions on the wider nature of political discourse in American life. I also thank the scores of librarians, archivists, and others who assisted me in my research, and the foundations and institutions that made research for this dissertation easier and more enjoyable. I am deeply grateful to Amy Davis and Steve Weiss at the Southern Folklife Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Dace Taube at USC Special Collections; Rebecca Sharpless and Becky Shulda at the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University; Amy Danelian, Jorge Arevalo, Hillel Arnold, and Nora Guthrie of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives in New York; Marva Felchlin and Leah Arroyo of the Autry National Center in Los Angeles; Sarah Cooper and Mary Tyler at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research; Lauren Bufferd and Alan Stoker at the Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame; and LaWanda Youngblood at Wilson College’s John Stewart Memorial Library. Thanks as well to Lois Banner, Ed Cray, Manuel Cuevas,

xiv

/ Preface and Acknowledgments

Maxine Dempsey, Chris Dickson, Jim Foglesong, John Gilmore, Jim Halsey, Gerald Haslam, Harry Hay, Sally Helvenston, Fred Hoeptner, Bonita Hurd, Mark Jackson, Buck Wayne Johnston, Katy K., Michael Klein, Guy Logsdon, Terence McBride, Ken Nelson, Becky Nicolaides, Cathi M. Parson, Don Pierce, Bob Pinson, Ronnie Pugh, Oliver Rink, Lynn Sacco, Sharon Sekhon, Thomas Sims, Lauren Sklaroff, Sally Stein, Hank Thompson, Wesley and Marilyn Tuttle, Donald J. Waldie, Jim Welch, and the host of others who have assisted me in this project. I reserve special gratitude for the country music fans who took the time to respond to the announcement I placed in various periodicals. I also offer thanks to the Smithsonian Institution; the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation; Wilson College; the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences; the Costume Society of America; the Historical Society of Southern California; the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University; the USC Department of History; and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, all of which provided funding to make this project possible. A Getty Research Institute–sponsored dissertation workshop titled “Conceptualizing Los Angeles” was also helpful in the early stages of this project. My deepest appreciation is reserved for Shirli Brautbar, my wife, for her tireless encouragement, understanding, and editing. Without her, this project could never have been completed, and I owe her my eternal gratitude. Shirli’s strength and compassion were the highlight of each day, even when the words wouldn’t come or the candle seemed to burn perpetually at both ends. Our infant son, Asher, came along late in the process but has been an inspiration, listening wide-eyed to Papa’s strange shrill collection of folk records and putting up with the times when Dad had to devote his energies to book revisions. I also owe a heartfelt thanks to my parents, Gary and Elinor La Chapelle, my in-laws Dr. Nachman and Ronit Brautbar, and my siblings, Anne Marie and Daniel, for offering countless forms of support during this process. Any errors or faults inherent in this book are the sole responsibility of the author and do not reflect upon any of the people named here.

Introduction

Sometimes the germs of a new social movement are found in the most unusual of places. Los Angeles in the late 1930s was one of those places. Twice a day on radio station KFVD, singer-guitarist Woody Guthrie joined vocalist Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman for a program that featured “old-time hill country songs.” Both transplants from the Dust Bowl, a region of the southern Great Plains that had sent hundreds of thousands of displaced “Okies” to California, the two started out by singing nostalgically about their home states. Before long, they began criticizing the Los Angeles Police Department for its harassment of Dust Bowlers at the California state line. Advertising headache pills and appropriating music and mannerisms from national country music acts such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, the Woody and Lefty Lou show soon was netting more than a thousand fan letters a month, more than any other program KFVD carried.1 Although the show proved a moderate commercial success, Guthrie began to stretch the program’s format in new and uncharted directions. Aligning himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, he introduced social commentary into his largely commercial “hillbilly” repertoire and began to use his radio post to criticize racists, the wealthy, foreign and domestic fascists, and the corruption that pervaded machine politics in Los Angeles. He later wrote that he hoped to politicize his working-class listeners “no matter what tongue or color.”2 Guthrie’s primary cause, however, was the plight of his fellow migrants, whom he called “Dust Bowl refugees” in an effort to stress their kinship with other persecuted groups fleeing the Third Reich and Fascist Spain.3 Remade by his experience in California, the onetime country music artist went on to become a founding architect of the American protest-music movement and an inspiration to progressiveleaning artists Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Bruce Springsteen and self-styled 1

2

/ Introduction

“revolution singers” such as Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, and Ani DiFranco.4 Thirty years later, in 1971, it sounded like a revolution of another kind was about to take place. Thousands of boisterous fans packed the Anaheim Convention Center Arena in the heart of conservative suburban Orange County to hear country music superstar Merle Haggard. Haggard sang other favorites, but many had come expressly to hear him wrap his rich deep baritone around “Okie from Muskogee,” a song that later hung metaphorically around his neck as accolade and albatross.5 Although Haggard’s personal politics would prove far more complicated than was usually acknowledged, the song—which features the signature line “I’m proud to be an Okie”—appeared to many observers to be a mean-spirited slap directed at antiwar activists, marijuana smokers, student activists, the counterculture, and even inner-city teens. Haggard had received a similar reception when he first played “Okie” in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium in 1969. The audience erupted with a roar of hand claps between each verse, signaling its line-by-line approval of each sentiment expressed in the song.6 Caught up in the fervor, one musical copycat offered his assessment in a local fan magazine: “The nation wasn’t made great by unwashed lazy hippies, cry-baby welfarism or racial minorities begging for a handout.”7 Despite the gulf that appeared to separate them politically, Haggard and Guthrie actually had much in common. Surviving personal papers suggest that, though Guthrie found the term Okie too painful to employ in the 1930s, he, like Haggard, used his time in the spotlight to avow a sense of pride in his family’s Oklahoma origins. Like Guthrie, Haggard projected a stark, decidedly working-class candor on stage, becoming known for voicing distrust of authority figures and documenting the lives of the neglected and the poor. For Crissman, Guthrie’s radio partner during the 1930s, the semblance extended even to physical features. Interviewed in 1999, she said that something about Haggard—his songwriting, his sound, maybe even his slim frame—reminded her of Woody.8 Haggard, on the other hand, appeared unaware of the Guthrie legacy until after “Okie from Muskogee” made him a millionaire. “Without knowing it he had embraced and enriched the legacy of Woody Guthrie,” Rolling Stone magazine commented in an interview with Haggard in 1969.9 But such comparisons render partial and ahistorical the understandings of the past. Haggard was no Guthrie, and Guthrie was no Haggard. By 1969, Haggard’s star hung high on the hard country horizon, while Guthrie was two years deceased, his hospitalizations and long, torturous fade from public appearance only faintly offset by Dylan’s and others’ claims of succes-

Introduction / 3 sion. Even had Guthrie not succumbed to Huntington’s disease, his unamplified “hootenanny” guitar, his Greenwich Village activism, and his later fame as an urban folk icon would have made him seem alien to the Shrine Auditorium audience. Haggard would have appeared equally odd to KFVD audiences with his casual use of the once verboten term Okie, his nostalgic paeans to the Great Depression, and his stage nicknames such as “the Hag” and “Country Jazz Messiah.” Rather than evidence for the likeness or dissimilarity of their personalities, Guthrie’s programming and Haggard’s audiences serve better as mileposts that show how much the political culture of Los Angeles country music had changed between the late 1930s and the early 1970s. Guthrie’s left-wing activism on KFVD and the seemingly right-wing audiences that gathered for “Okie from Muskogee” dramatize just how forceful this political and cultural transformation could sometimes be. But it is the period between these two events that should concern us most—for it allows us to explore the causes behind the slow but unprecedented rightward turn in the politics and rhetoric of a white, blue-collar, country-music-listening America. These middle years between Guthrie and Haggard help explain the rise of a populist conservative political hegemony in late twentieth century—a movement that the conservative strategist Richard A. Viguerie lionizes as a “political revolution that has transformed America” and that the leftleaning critic Thomas Frank bemoans as “a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.”10 This book follows the history of country music culture in Southern California from the height of the Dust Bowl migration in the mid-1930s to the relocation of key components of the local country music industry to Nashville in the early 1970s. It shares an argument common in several recent histories of the white American working class: that the producer-based and citizenship-oriented New Deal liberalism that had captured the attention of millions of working-class voters in the 1930s and 1940s ultimately gave way to a more conservative and less egalitarian property-based political culture in the post–World War II era. Historians in this school argue that home ownership and other forms of consumerism have steered white working-class voters away from the legacy of the New Deal and reoriented them toward a more conservative and racially divisive politics. Building on the pioneering work of Kenneth T. Jackson, scholars such as Jill Quadagno, George Lipsitz, and Thomas J. Sugrue focus on how white flight, discriminatory federal housing policies, well-intentioned but divisive federal welfare and workplace policies, and other real estate and planning practices drove this political realignment.11 Lynn Spigel, Susan Douglas, and Lizabeth

4

/ Introduction

Cohen have revised such arguments to portray suburban forms of consumption, media, and home ownership as a more mixed bag—one that promoted social conservatism and residential segregation but also offered opportunities around which disempowered constituencies, especially women, could mobilize.12 My study of Okie culture in Southern California suggests that, while suburban home-ownership practices and other forms of consumption were important in transforming the white working class, the consumer practices associated with popular culture, especially country music—with its focus on the communication of messages, myths, ideologies, and even identities— provided at times an even more powerful impetus for renegotiating New Deal political and class identities. Here I align myself with those who argue that new forms of popular-culture consumption played an essential role in reining in an earlier identity that emphasized outcast sympathies, labor activism, and a philanthropic civic liberalism in favor of a new ideology that touted upward social mobility, assertions of migrants’ whiteness, and segregated suburban home ownership as crucial components of “the American Dream.”13 Popular culture’s role in this rightward transformation is complicated, involving interplay between those popular arts that helped support the conservative turn, those arts that merely attempted to reflect “reality,” and those that resisted these trends. Nevertheless, major transformations within popular culture were important not only in reaching viewers and listeners’ subconscious but also in laying some of the groundwork for the populist Reagan-era conservatism that came to dominate national politics in the late twentieth century. Indeed, an analysis of struggles over pop culture representations and cultural dissemination does much to explain how we get from Guthrie’s inclusive, left-wing working-class epiphany to “Okie from Muskogee”’s seeming right-wing jeremiad of exclusion. The connection between the consumption of popular culture and the emergence of conservative postwar ideologies was especially strong in the case of Southern California’s Okie-dominated country music culture. Although the Okie migration introduced foodways and new revivalistic strains of Protestantism to California, the influx made some of its most significant impacts in the realm of popular culture.14 Okie country music played a central role in the production of new kinds of Okie identity, helping to shape the ways migrants would express themselves politically. Capitalizing on their popularity in Southern California, migrant performers landed spots on local radio and appeared in dance halls, concerts, Hollywood films, and eventually on television. Enjoying a level of access to mass media

Introduction / 5 denied to other migrants, musicians and performers acted as a sort of vanguard of the migration by presenting the earliest self-depictions of migrants, advocating on migrants’ behalf and providing models for fellow migrants to follow.15 For the most part, these earliest country music representations sustained a working-class liberalism that helped tie Okie political aspirations to those who sought to open the playing field to the poor and others by emphasizing the liberal-populist rhetoric and tendencies of the New Deal. But in the postwar era, this connection began to unravel. A new conservative ideology that hailed segregated suburban lifestyles and aroused the resentment of working-class whites supplanted the aesthetic old guard. This drastically altered the cultural landscape of Okie music but never entirely erased the L.A. scene’s potential for challenging the new conservative thrust, especially in regard to gender roles, youth lifestyles, and opposition to the Vietnam war. Indeed, as Spigel and Douglas have shown, and as my work attests, suburban culture provided spaces for new kinds of protest that would have been unthinkable in an earlier age. In arguing that L.A.’s Okie music culture made room for protest, I align myself with scholars such as Eric Raymond Avila and Lizabeth Cohen, who independently contend that the consumption of popular culture “provided a venue for both the construction and contestation of suburban whiteness.”16 I part, however, with Avila and Cohen’s optimism about the extent and impact of the contestation possible. Avila, for instance, argues that, though Disneyland’s engineering of social space, the construction of Dodger Stadium in place of a historic Mexican American neighborhood, and the sexual and racial imagery of film noir stifled democratic impulses within regional culture, the same sites of consumption could provide room for struggles and discourses that ran contrary to their original intent.17 Cohen takes this argument a step further, arguing that disempowered groups actually used these new spaces of consumption to stake claims for rights, privileges, and freedoms.18 My research, however, has led me to a more guarded assessment. On the one hand, I concede that Okie country-music culture remained something of a contested ground. Indeed, its moorings in a populist rhetorical style nearly ensured some level of critical or left-of-center contestation of the existing order. On the other hand, I cannot overlook the fact that the erasure of certain older sites of cultural production, such as KFVD’s civic-minded mixed-format radio programming and the 1940s dance hall culture, forever altered and limited the range of possibilities for those seeking to launch challenges. Coupled with other factors, the disappearance of these older fo-

6

/ Introduction

rums ultimately pushed regional country-music culture into conservative new patterns of consumption and production. This is not to say that new challenges were made impossible, but the obstacles faced by those who would raise these challenges became increasingly insurmountable.

okie country music: the rise and fall of an eclectic liberal populism This book begins with one of the largest internal migrations in American history, an exodus that was first etched into the American imagination by John Steinbeck’s iconic depictions in The Grapes of Wrath, but has continued to pulse through countless mythic expressions of American national identity.19 Between 1935 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of newcomers traveled to Southern California from the southern plains, a region initially defined by topographers as the Dust Bowl but encompassing much of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri. Called “Okies” or “Oakies” because of the early predominance of migrant Oklahomans, these newcomers emigrated to California to escape joblessness, ecological devastation, and financial disasters at home.20 These migrants swelled the ranks of Los Angeles’s blue-collar workforce, becoming in effect part of the urban proletariat that the visiting German émigrés and left-wing intellectuals of the influential Frankfurt School had sought to uplift back in Europe but ironically failed to acknowledge as they took refuge from the Nazis in Southern California. Frankfurt scholars such as Theodor Adorno, already recognized as an important critic of popular culture, turned their focus instead on the degradation of the arts and the banality of the region’s culture industry, forecasting a bleak future for blue collar America.21 But the Dust Bowlers continued to come. During the Depression and World War II, Okies filed into the area’s aircraft and shipbuilding factories, helping to industrialize Los Angeles, a city once branded a cultural and economic backwater. In the 1950s and 1960s, they joined the legions of working- and middle-class suburbanites who fanned out into neighboring towns, converting orange and almond orchards into a fivecounty megalopolis that urbanists now tout as a model for understanding the complex cities anticipated for the future.22 Promoters concocted several names to describe the tapestry of pop tunes, African American–influenced compositions, minstrel songs, and public domain European-origin ballads that migrants brought with them from the southern plains. But in conjunction with developments on a national level,

Introduction / 7 country music became the name that stuck. Although erstwhile country performers such as the Crocket Family, the Beverly Hill Billies, and Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock had already been active in radio and recording in California before the Dust Bowl migrants arrived, the musical genre and elements of recording and broadcasting dramatically expanded as a result of the Depression-era influx, allowing Los Angeles to begin to rival other urban regions as a potential national capital of country music.23 Okie performers and fans dominated Los Angeles’s country music to such an extent that they began to use their positions to become important shapers of a migrant self-identity. Country music, along with working-class-focused forms such as jazz, blues, corridos, Latin dance, and immigrant European music, changed the very foundations of cultural and economic life in the city, creating a local variation of what Michael Denning has called “the laboring of American culture.”24 My discussion of Okie identity and country music politics is divided into two chronologically arranged parts. Part 1 highlights the change that migrants and their music underwent as Okie music culture was transplanted from the smaller cities, towns, and farms of the southern plains to a new urban setting. As Marc Landy of the Appalachian Oral History Project aptly puts it, “The country has moved to the city, culturally as well as physically. Country music is city music.”25 Taking note of Landy’s observation, and borrowing my part title, “Big City Ways,” from an early Woody Guthrie recording I uncovered while researching this book, I emphasize in this part the extent to which the “ways” of urban migration helped remake the cultural politics of country music and of the Okies in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, I seek in part 1 to complicate the widely held notion that migrants adhered to a rural-bound and static ideology of “plain-folk Americanism” that promoted social conservatism, gender chauvinism, a cult of toughness, and a sometimes hostile reaction to racial and ethnic minorities, all of which helped “southernize” Golden State political culture. The migration historian James N. Gregory is by far the most eloquent exponent of this thesis, and his work has influenced the writing of the California historians Lisa McGirr and Becky Nicolaides, but the origins of the thesis originate in the rural sociology of the 1930s and early 1940s.26 Studying Dust Bowler encampments in the California countryside, researchers such as Walter Goldschmidt and Stuart M. Jamieson argued that migrants displayed a parochialism, rugged individualism, and social conservatism.27 Although much of what we know about the migration’s socioeconomic effect on rural migrants stems from these accounts, rural sociology’s contributions are fraught with problems when applied to the cultural mental-

8

/ Introduction

ité of urban migrants. Not only did rural sociologists tend to portray migrants as passive potential relief clients as a way of eliciting public sympathy and to neglect the fact that rural transients were often fundamentally different from migrants who ended up in urban locations, but they also failed to realize that city dwellers had access to political newspapers, alternative radio programming, industrial union campaigns, and other cultural events largely unavailable in California’s conservative grower-dominated Central and Imperial valleys.28 Though presenting an earlier and rather metaphysical vision of Okie political mobilization, Steinbeck’s far-reaching fictional depictions of the migrant Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, only furthered rural sociologists’ supposition that the migration was composed of an unsophisticated, tradition-bound, rural yeomanry of a “shrill ferocious religiosity” unwillingly uprooted from its ancestral soil.29 This “southernization” or “plain-folk Americanism” thesis has not gone uncriticized even by its foremost champion. Critiquing and building on the rural sociology model, Gregory correctly identified differences between urban and rural migrants and began to throw at least a little light on the different cultural formations originating in the city. Gregory has noted, too, that outposts of liberalism and populism appeared even in the countryside.30 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has also pointed out that some migrants were heirs to a radical Populist and Socialist tradition that did not necessarily die out when they arrived in California.31 My work, however, suggests we must move the discussion along further. Using country music culture as a case study, I find that, among urban migrants, plain-folk Americanism is the outcome of a process in which a potentially progressive and erstwhile urban subculture of Okie “outsiders” tries to fit in by reconfiguring its inclusive populist leanings and its more or less magnanimous expressions of patriotism into a new animal. It becomes a plain folk of racially conservative white suburban home owners embracing an “Americanism” that involves elements of the jingoism and xenophobia that Gregory and others have observed. Part 1 begins by considering not just how migrants changed California but also how migrants were changed by their contact with California and Los Angeles. In the first few years after the exodus began, Okies were subject to a well-organized media scapegoating campaign that portrayed migrants as threatening folk devils. Media attacks not only stirred up moral panic about Okie intentions but also persuaded California authorities and legislators to pursue restrictive and discriminatory measures, all themes I explore in chapter 1. This inadvertently led some migrants—especially those whose stars

Introduction / 9 were rising in the Los Angeles music and radio industries—to create counterimages by singing, talking, and writing about the members of the Dust Bowl migration as a coherent and praiseworthy group. Okieness, for these artists, began to approximate something akin to an ethnicity or subculture, prompting the local country music scene to develop a cultural politics of its own. While in no way all-encompassing, an eclectic, liberal brand of economic populism—linked to an urban producerist ideology and the political framework of the New Deal—appears to have been the main culturalpolitical trend within Okie country music culture during the 1930s and 1940s. On one level, this meant that certain performers spoke to migrants’ traditional Democratic affinities and sometimes dire economic situation to promote reform-oriented and social democratic aspects of the New Deal. On another level, this meant that Okie country music had begun to adopt a broadly defined, newly urbanized form of producerism that extolled producers, those who worked for a living, while reserving its rancor for the idle rich, greedy or unscrupulous capitalists, and other profiteers. Producerism, in this formulation, could embrace women and minority workers but was especially concerned with those worked with their hands. These producers were the hallowed “people” of the New Deal’s populist economic rhetoric. While scholars have criticized the New Deal for placating white workers with a modicum of economic security while leaving the rigid color line of the South untouched, Okie country music producerism, like some strains of New Deal progressivism, occasionally attempted to open doors for women as well as racial and cultural minorities.32 Woody Guthrie, whose absence from the recent country music canon, which I assess in chapter 2, was perhaps most representative of this group. Guthrie used the semicelebrity status he cultivated on his radio program first as a stepping-stone to commercial country music success, and then as a bully pulpit and sounding board for New Deal reforms, industrial unionism, and some forms of racial and economic egalitarianism. Although popular during his two-year stint on local radio, Guthrie and his Depression-era activism went only so far. By the 1940s, country music had come to tout a less producerist and more eclectic brand of populism that emphasized a more inclusive sense of who or what an Okie was. Cultural borrowings and musical syncretism proliferated during wartime as local performers perfected their own version of western swing, a jazz-influenced country performance style originating in Texas and Oklahoma. Western swing culture at least tacitly embraced the ethnic and racial diversity of Los Angeles and more publicly embraced several Native American and Mexican American Okie performers. It also allowed migrants to test gender bound-

10

/ Introduction

aries, dabble in African American, Latino, and immigrant musical traditions, and figuratively reshape themselves into worldly cosmopolitans and urban sophisticates, the Okie hepcats and rhythm kings I examine in chapter 3. Consumer practices were an important part of this process. In the 1930s and 1940s, consumption of Okie country music (often by Okies themselves) could involve listening to Guthrie’s live programs as they were broadcast from a civic-oriented local radio station or attending performances at dance halls that featured minority performers and encouraged audience participation, especially from women, who became an active planners and managers of events in the era. The relatively loose organizational structures of live radio and ballroom performances gave performers room to experiment with the more liberal threads of the New Deal and even some degree of racial egalitarianism. Part 2 of this volume examines the rightward turn in Okie country music, charting how a new political culture came to supplant country’s earlier eclectic culture of liberal New Deal populism. Older, more craftlike forms of disseminating music, such as live radio and dance hall performances, gave way to new, more conspicuous consumer practices that applauded social mobility, emphasized passive forms of spectatorship, and encouraged local country stars to adopt noncontroversial or apolitical public personas. Here I differ with the periodization of recent scholarship, which tends to point to the end of World War II as the beginning of a new conservative era. Okie musicians and fans—perhaps maintaining a more cohesive sense of working-class community because of their experience in California as scapegoats—appear to have not made this transformation until after the mid-1950s and the beginning of the rock-and-roll era. By the 1960s, however, large portions of migrant musical culture had shifted toward a cultural populism of conservatism and suburban consumerism that was rooted firmly in defense of middle-class values and the area’s military-industrial complex. This new conservative populism proved hostile to the New Deal–Great Society legacy and was cool toward Civil Rights, feminism, and the student movement. The “people” it hailed were hardworking white suburban home owners seeking to protect property values and assets and to distance themselves from “liberal elites,” minorities, and the poor. Pressure to fit in, I argue in chapter 4, was an important impetus for this rightward turn. Consumers, sponsors, and musical producers strived in the mid- to late 1950s to rehabilitate local country music’s hayseed image and disassociate the genre from the Depression-era anti-Okie campaign and its lingering stigma by downplaying working-class and Okie identity, discouraging liberal-populist political dissent, and stressing how elements of the

Introduction / 11 music culture could convey social status. Country broadcasters meanwhile clamped down on commentary of any kind, leaving country programming noticeably bereft of discussions of politics and civic affairs. While this muzzled some performers, it also provided room for a small group of wealthy, well-connected performers—especially some of the 1930s cinematic singing cowboys—to come to the forefront and present themselves as antielitist spokesmen for a new, conservative cultural populism. This, however, went only so far. Although the gender politics of local country music did move in conservative directions, especially within some segments of fan culture, new women auteurs also began playing significant and often underacknowledged roles in challenging the constrictions that women faced in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter 5 explores the complex interplay between the progressive messages offered by these female Okie stars and the general gender conservatism of locally produced country music fan magazines. Local country music, of course, was never entirely dominated by the politics of the Right, and indeed, by Merle Haggard’s era new strains of political thought had begun to influence performers and fans. In chapter 6, in an attempt to highlight this complexity, I examine the phenomenon surrounding a single hit song, Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” exploring its polarizing effect on country music politics and its contribution to reviving Okie identification and Okie pride in Southern California. Rather than attempting to tease out Haggard’s intent in writing this song, as some inquiries have, I instead focus on the reactions of audiences, showing the competing ways listeners and musicians have interpreted and used this enigmatic Vietnam War–era song. Whether parodied, infused with irony, or taken at face value, the song—written in the wake of the 1965 Watts insurrection—highlighted old and new tensions in American society, especially anxieties about race relations and the role that race would play in future musical articulations of Okie identity in country music.

reassessing the cultural politics of country music By focusing on the ways in which mass consumption, Okie culture, and politics intersect, this book’s account of country music history runs contrary to the dominant retellings of the country music past. Indeed, the most prominent and publicly accessible histories suggest that, despite being steeped in the culture of the American working class, country musicians and

12

/ Introduction

performers have had few inklings about how to confront the injustices that permeated their lives, much less an understanding of how dramatically the political organizations cobbled together by working men and women altered the course of American life in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century.33 Even astute accounts such as Country Music, U.S.A., Bill C. Malone’s wellknown and by-now classic 1968 history, consistently paint working-class protest, or for that matter politics of any stripe, as highly unusual or episodic. Although acknowledging in more recent works the existence of a widely varying brand of populism, Malone continues to forewarn against trying to link country music to “any specific political agenda”: “Assaying the songs that comprise the current repertoire of country music, or which constitute its folk inheritance, one can marshal evidence to prove almost any point of view,” Malone wrote in 2002.34 Others contend that, if country music evidenced any inclination toward social commentary and protest, this quickly dissipated. Richard A. Peterson, for instance, in his influential 1997 work on the country music sound and image, argues that battles over authenticity largely supplanted skirmishes over traditional politics.35 This underestimation of the genre’s cultural politics extends even to public history and museums. Despite increased attention to the hardscrabble lives of leading performers and the genre’s multicultural and multiracial origins, Nashville’s pantheon-like Country Music Hall of Fame still neglects the politically focused Woody Guthrie among its inductees and did not include The Grand Ole Opry’s seminal black performer DeFord Bailey until 2005.36 Indeed, relying solely on these predominant public retellings of the country music past, one might conclude, as Peterson did in an early work, that country music culture is a bastion of political and class unconsciousness—that its narratives revel in “a fatalistic state in which people bemoan their fate, yet accept it.”37 Some academic researchers, publishing in academic forums further from the public eye, have resisted this effort to equate country music with fatalism and have made an effort to reclaim a populist political legacy. This “people’s politics” extends from early performers’ attempts to champion the actual Populist Party at the turn of the twentieth century38 to more recent expressions of political dissent, which range from Johnny Paycheck’s union activism after the release of his 1977 hit “Take This Job and Shove It”39 to the personalist feminism of artists ranging from Patsy Montana, Dolly Parton, and Reba McIntire to Trisha Yearwood, the Dixie Chicks, and Shania Twain.40 Foremost among these scholars are Jock Mackay and Tex Sample, who see long strains of rural and blue-collar producerism running through

Introduction / 13 the country and roots music cultures. In an early essay, Mackay notes that country fans share the same socioeconomic interstices as populist movements, that similar tensions between people’s power and redneck conservatism exist in both, and that both populism and country music share a common vision of an ideal society.41 Sample, on the other hand, argues that country music displays a “traditional populist anarchism” focused on rejecting the official world and beating the system. He contends that “a populist anarchism of a traditional sort wants to be free from the institutional entrapments of a modern world. He or she wants to be left the hell alone. They do not trust the free individualism of the laissez-faire conservatives because they know it serves the rich, but neither do they support the freedoms and rights of the American Civil Liberties Union because they know basically it is the reserve of intellectuals and elites.”42 While Sample is correct to argue that a strong anti-institutionalism lies under the surface of country music lyricism, this anti-institutionalism has often run in directions that scuttle the binary that he presents. During the heyday of the cold war, some Southern California performers lauded laissez-faire capitalism as a form of anti-institutional opposition to the welfare state, while, to take a recent example, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks now serves as a literal poster model for the anti-institutional intellectualism of the ACLU.43 Here I align myself with Michael Kazin, who argues that American political figures and movements often adopt a populist rhetorical style that has proved malleable enough to champion a multitude of causes: some left, some right, and some that defy categorization.44 As a musical genre that generally stresses the import of wordplay and whose vocalists generally strive to make lyrics discernable, country music presents the potential to be a highly suitable platform for populist rhetoric. Here, researchers must proceed with caution. Despite the potential for a veritable thirty-one flavors of country music populism, acts of a distorted and disturbing variety have often overshadowed more progressive examples in prominent histories: Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan independently sponsoring fiddle contests to bolster their racist and anti-Semitic views,45 Marty Robbins taunting beleaguered Civil Rights freedom riders,46 Hank Snow touting the 1968 presidential campaign of arch-segregationist George Wallace,47 and, more recently, Charlie Daniels disseminating ugly remarks about Middle Easterners in song.48 While these episodes are an important part of country music’s populist legacy, they have never completely encapsulated the genre’s political thrust. Offered as representative, or in some circumstances presented without proper historical context, their vis-

14

/ Introduction

ibility has perpetuated an ugly myth that country music performers and audiences are either devoid of politics or swayed by the unthinking populism of right-wing reaction. This ahistoricism is not limited to country music histories but also is found in assessments of the genre throughout American culture. One country radio programmer asserted in 2003 that country is “more on the right than on the left, and it’s always been that way.” And even perceptive critics such as Chet Flippo, author of well-received country music biographies and CMT.com editorial director, have insisted that country music fans “are largely conservative and patriotic—as is well known.”49 Recent media discussions of the Dixie Chicks controversy have helped reinforce the perception that country music and its listeners have always been devoid or intolerant of liberal strains of populism. When, in proper populist style, the Chicks’ Dallas-based lead singer, Natalie Maines, expressed her shame at sharing the state of Texas with George W. Bush and, by implication, criticized the administration’s internationally unpopular decision to invade Iraq, she attracted a maelstrom of abuse far exceeding anything lobbed at several male film industry activist-artists who were, if anything, more explicit in their condemnations of Bush and the war. Responding with a populism of their own, normally sedate “family-oriented” country music broadcasters aired venomous accusations, the radio conglomerate Cumulus Media banned the Chicks from all forty-two of its country stations for a month, and, in one Louisiana town, Chicks CDs were laid out to be stomped by children and then run over and smashed with a tractor.50 The conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham even made the Chicks a centerpiece of a best-selling attack book with a title eerily reminiscent of an earlier generation of John Birch Society screeds against creeping socialism and secretive internationalist cabals: Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America.51 And the journalist who reported Maines’s remark, an antiwar music critic from London’s Guardian newspaper, thought he was doing the Chicks a favor.52 Although rightist commentators such as Ingraham propose a gag order that suggests that populist protest is unnatural in country music, mainstream media scholars and thinkers on the Left historically draw from a theoretical tradition that has offered no better assessment of country music’s political potential. Hunkering down in Los Angeles after an escape from the Nazis, Theodor Adorno, the leading voice in the Frankfurt school’s influential critique of mass culture, mocked politicized young Americans’ penchant for unschooled rural musicians, arguing that their typical phonograph collection featured such kitsch as “the Lincoln-cantata of some stalwart spirit

Introduction / 15 deeply concerned with railway stations, together with the duly marvelledat Oklahoma folklore and a few noisy jazz records that make you feel at once collective, audacious, and comfortable.”53 Although the tendency to belittle popular jazz would become a signature indulgence in Adorno’s writings, his sarcastic phrasing of “duly marvelled-at Oklahoma folklore,” most likely a reference to Guthrie’s 1940 Dust Bowl Ballads album, surely set him up as a critic of the folk and country idiom. If anything, Adorno’s distaste grew stronger over time. In the early 1960s, after he had returned to an academic post in Germany, he was still complaining that country music was nothing more than “synthetic cowboy and hillbilly music” that paradoxically sold well in regions “where cowboys and hillbillies really are living.”54 In assessing country music as an inauthentic voice divorced from the political and social realities of its listeners, Nashville’s whitewashed touristfriendly preservationism, Adorno’s mandarin elitism, and Ingraham’s prickly partisanship all tend to overlook country music’s rich history of involvement in working-class life and political protest. Such approaches furthermore have ignored the ways that corporate recording and broadcasting strategies either kept country apolitical and inoffensive or, at times, encouraged the feisty conservatism of blood, flag, and property that Flippo and others see as timeless and innate. Politically minded country music artists— even those whose careers took a primarily commercial turn—have not always, as Ingraham might wish, shut up and sang, nor have they necessarily always contorted reality, mired themselves in fatalism, or promoted inauthentic and disingenuous messages to an unwary public. Issues ranging from the history of industry-artist relations to controversies surrounding innovation, message, style, and audience have, in fact, been inextricably enmeshed with questions about cultural and political power. One might dismiss country music scholars’ dogged insistence that the genre is largely apolitical as an overreaction to those who would paint country music as a depository of reactionism or as a rearguard measure against attempts by some scholars to find resistance lurking in every pop music phenomenon, but its legacy is real enough. By downplaying politics, much of the country music research field has strangely and almost Whiggishly paired itself with the formal musicology that still reigns in many music schools, a tradition that tends to celebrate high culture, barely acknowledges commercial country music as a form of music at all, and reduces the study of music to what Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill call an interpretation of “a transcendent language of individual self-expression, above concerns of economy, polity, and society.”55

16

/ Introduction

As an antidote to this narrowness and elitism, Leyshon, Matless, and Revill recommend new inquiries into the relationships between music and areas such as power, demography, industry struggles, political culture, gender and sexual identities, visionary artist-auteurs, audiences, and social geographies—in short, the very stuff of contemporary cultural studies.56 In this task, country music research often falls short. Despite sharing an enthusiasm with cultural studies researchers for probing genres deemed unacceptable by “serious” musicologists, country music’s scholastic mainstream often neglects to tap cultural studies techniques that might prove useful in understanding the music’s relationship with culture and politics.57 By ignoring important strains of cultural studies and dismissing the political tendencies of country music culture as either episodic or fleeting, our most public retellings of country music’s past have produced an incomplete historical account that neglects some of the overall trends within the cultural politics of country music. In their informative 1995 work on the subject, Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon argue that the cultural politics of any given field are those attributes that “fundamentally determine the meanings of social practices and, moreover, which groups and individuals have the power to define these meanings.” By neglecting such concerns, much of the current writing on country music fails to acknowledge •

that seemingly innocuous everyday elements of country music culture such as recordings, broadcasts, concerts, fan magazines, and even memorabilia are often laden with political and social meaning,

•

that there is an element of political struggle involved in deciding which performers’ artistic visions and views are heard and which are silenced,

•

and that all of these elements play an important role in informing, shaping the identities of, and rousing audiences, who in turn create their own cultural practices.

While it would be absurd to argue that any single cabal of politically minded artists, industry figures, or fans has successfully hijacked an entire musical genre to promote a specific political agenda, it would be equally absurd to argue that commercial country music is a blank slate, that it is devoid of a cultural politics that may swing in any given era toward one set of ideas (about social class, gender, politics, etc.) or another.58 Indeed, it is no longer sufficient for researchers to point out the complexities and then throw up their arms and declare that evidence can be mar-

Introduction / 17 shaled to support any point of view. General trends are not only identifiable by researchers using historical and cultural studies techniques and genre and textual analyses, but they also can be tracked by scholars willing to immerse themselves in enough research on geographically specific country music audiences and subcultures. Researchers, in fact, can begin to give shape to the cultural politics of any one given music scene by exploring oral history, fan magazines, and music-related advertising and publicity efforts, and by examining the histories of nightclubs, fan club culture, recording and industry practices, and other aspects of country music’s social milieu—as I have attempted to do in this volume. Tracked and analyzed by competent researchers, shards of evidence can be assembled to form the building blocks of a new argument-driven history of country music culture that is not only concerned with cultural politics but also aware of how such politics may manifest themselves differently in different periods and geographic locations. Although Proud to Be an Okie is largely a cultural history of music and its sociopolitical consequences, my subject—country music in Southern California—and my interest in the influence that urbanization has had on migrants, impel me to also be cognizant of how migrant performers and fans have interacted with the city. In my attempts to decipher migrants’ musicotextual responses to Los Angeles as an urban space, I have often relied upon the theoretical work of the French philosopher Henri LeFebvre, who stresses that workers’ leisure sites can be as illuminating to social scientists as their workplaces. Especially compelling is LeFebvre’s conception of “differential spaces,” those glimpses and interpretations of the urban landscape that run counter to “absolute” constructions of space offered by the ruling economic and social elite. I point out the spatial dimensions of publicity materials and song lyrics, as well as the relationships between actual physical spaces and mental locales involved in resisting or accommodating the dominant, uncritical boosterist image of Southern California as a paradise of orange groves and blithe white citizens.59 That said, I begin this book with two caveats. First, as a scholar of mass communications and the history of twentieth-century working-class culture, I am not a trained musicologist. This does not mean that I neglect musical performance and composition in my assessment. Indeed I have made an effort to stress discussion of musical styles in my explorations of Okie country-music culture. And second, although I occasionally address material related to what has become known as “the Bakersfield sound,” and in my final chapter I discuss the emergence of Bakersfield performers as a leading force in California country in the 1960s, my main focus is the country

18

/ Introduction

music culture of the greater Los Angeles region. As the LA Weekly critic Jonny Whiteside has suggested, a Los Angeles “sound” not only predated but also influenced the much-touted Bakersfield sound.60 Readers interested in a more complete study of the Bakersfield phenomenon should look to other sources. While several performers mentioned in this book were well known in their time, and some such as Guthrie and Haggard continue to attract followings, many of the individuals who helped create the decidedly Okie country-music culture of Southern California are no longer recognized by audiences today. Although Nashville now dominates national memories of the country music past, the influence of these forgotten California Okie performers lingers on in country music, haunting leading performers such as Dwight Yoakam. Though a college-educated transplant to Los Angeles, Yoakam endured an impoverished childhood in Ohio and Kentucky, experiences that helped cultivate his later affinity for the thematic hardships often expressed in the Okie music tradition: “There was always a question about whether we would be able to maintain our level of existence. It’s given me an uneasiness about security—about the world. You hear that in country music. The cultural ethnicity of country music is the Grapes of Wrath culture.”61 It is perhaps a testament, then, to the unknown fans and performers that the Okie experience continues to resonate so powerfully within country music today.

pa rt i

Big City Ways

1

At the Crossroads of Whiteness Antimigrant Activism, Eugenics, and Popular Culture My people are not quaint They’re not colorful They ain’t odd nor funny nor picturesque. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It makes me sore to hear or to see or to read How you big long haired writers Whack away at my people Chew and cut and saw away at my people Trying to make like you are their savior Or their way shower Or their finder, Or their discoverer, Like Balboa, like Colombo . . . . . . . . . . setting your maps and your charts and your pens, And stumbling onto my people Like they was some sort of a new piece of land Sticking up out of an old body of water. woody guthrie, “My People”

If Dwight Yoakam is correct in insisting that the cultural ethnicity of country music is the “Grapes of Wrath culture,” then we must begin by considering how that “ethnicity” came into being. In some respects, Okie country music emerged on a sour note in the mid- to late 1930s: a time of privation, worrisome migration, and intense media scapegoating in California. Although much of this book is concerned with the images and sounds that migrant musical performers created, this chapter focuses on the images that others produced to malign the migrants. So relentless were these attacks, in fact, that migrants’ social status began to founder, leaving many to assume a class position so low it appeared racialized or otherwise unsuited for “white” citizens. Recoiling from these attacks, migrant performers did what musicians around the world have done in times of ethnic or cultural perse21

22

/ Big City Ways

cution. They weathered the barbs and fashioned personalized responses— the prideful, sorrowful, angry, joyous, and sometimes rebellious songs that would come to characterize much of the Okie music repertoire. Looking back today through the lenses of the film directors John Ford and Pare Lorentz, the Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange, and our own nostalgia, it is easy to see the Okies as an oppressed lot, the dutiful displaced citizen-farmers of Steinbeck or Ford’s Grapes of Wrath, the victimized stalwarts of Lorentz’s Plow That Broke the Plains, or the hardened Madonna-heroines, like that of Lange’s iconic, incessantly reproduced photograph “Migrant Mother.” Indeed, with Ford, Lange, and Steinbeck as our chief chroniclers, it is difficult to even imagine that the poor Okies of the late 1930s and early 1940s might stir up hatred, much less an antimigrant campaign. Not so at the time, particularly for “native” white Californians, who were likely to speak of the migrants as a plague, often employing the same hysterical sort of rhetoric that sometimes surrounds discussions of Mexican immigrants today. Doomsdayism and hyperbole abounded. “No greater invasion by the destitute has ever been recorded in the history of mankind,” Thomas W. McManus, high chieftain of the anti-Okie movement in California, warned readers of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1940. “It has overwhelmed us; they will soon control the political destiny of California. We must stop this migration or surrender to chaos and ruin.”1 Historians, in fact, have long puzzled over the amount of animosity that native white Californians leveled at the more than 350,000 migrants who entered the state during the 1930s. Dust Bowl migrants were, after all, mostly native-born American citizens of European ancestry and of Protestant faith. Traveling from drought-ravaged Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, the economic migrants of the Depression formed a legion of what would have been celebrated in an earlier age as sturdy pioneers or “pathfinders of civilization.”2 Instead they were threatened, ridiculed, exploited, shunned, and encouraged to return to their native states. In the eyes of native white Californians, poor whites from the Ozark and Ouachita mountains, the southern plains, and the prairie Southwest had transformed from model frontiersmen into unwanted Others. Scholars have traditionally explained the hostility of white Protestant Californians toward white Protestant migrants as a product of tension over the local distribution of relief. Migrants, according to this view, were overloading county and municipal welfare systems and therefore were subject to criticism and political contention.3 An examination of the prevailing de-

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 23

pictions of “the migrant problem,” as well as the actual track record of antimigrant activism, however, indicates that negative representations of migrants and poor whites were as potent, if not more so, in provoking antimigrant sentiment. Although arguments that migrants misused relief did raise alarm, native Californians were also inundated with stereotypical images and reminders that members of the migration from the southern plains were “white trash” and Tobacco Road–like misfits—economic and hereditary inferiors who engaged in uncontrolled reproduction, lacked a proper work ethic, and destabilized functional structures of political and social control. Native white Californians learned to revile the Dust Bowlers much as they had earlier “learned” that people of Asian, African, Mexican, and Native American ancestry posed a threat to civilized society.4 The result of this onslaught was a rather remarkable circumstance in the history of American prejudice: a group of ostensibly white citizens became so stigmatized that its members became fodder for the kind of race talk and eugenic baiting normally reserved for racial minorities or immigrants.5 This race talk took the form of a major political and media campaign that drew from phenotypic and behavioral stereotypes to racialize migrant bodies and actions. As a system imbued with “scientific” authority, eugenics—the effort to beget well-born, or “eu-genic,” children as opposed to poorly born, hereditarily deficient offspring—was also an important part of this equation. Eugenics and race talk allowed native white Californians to create myths that downgraded the status of white Dust Bowlers to such an extent that migrants were subjected to forms of harassment typically faced by racial minority groups. Migrants, in fact, began to assume a liminally white status that clashed with existing mythologies of whiteness celebrated by Los Angeles and Southern California elites.6 These mythical regimes of whiteness—known variously as the “Mission myth,” the “Nordic outpost” argument, and the “seaport of Iowa” legend—were a set of fictional stories that sought to make the region more attractive to middle-class newcomers by emphasizing the white heritage of Los Angeles. The Mission myth did this by highlighting the white Spanish roots of the former Mexican city, while later Nordic and seaport-of-Iowa myths emphasized the lily-white “Aryan” complexions, midwestern roots, and western European origins of the region’s later American settlers.7 A complex set of beliefs often based on notions of social hierarchy, whiteness mythologies of the 1930s found Dust Bowlers to be an indigestible population of poor or displaced persons, leaving migrants at the periphery, the most liminal edge of white status in “Anglo-Saxon” Los An-

24

/ Big City Ways

geles. Although migrants were never forced to forfeit the right to vote, for a time they confronted obstacles typically faced by racial and cultural minorities, including police harassment, vigilante attacks, discrimination in public relief, and legal and extralegal restriction on movement across borders.8 My suggestion that white Californians saw Dust Bowlers as liminally white builds on a body of work that examines racial hierarchies and whiteness in the United States. Responding to W. E. B. DuBois’s and Frantz Fanon’s calls for an exploration into how and with what results a people comes to define itself as white, scholars of whiteness such as David Roediger, Karen Brodkin, and Matthew Frye Jacobson have rejected racial essentialism, the notion that race operates as a fixed biological characteristic independent of cultural and political variables. Instead, they have shown how racial categories—especially white or Caucasian classifications—have served as fluid, socially constructed identity markers that can change over time and place. Much of their work has focused on how the Irish or eastern and southern European immigrants exchanged a low-status, ethnic, “not yet white” existence for the privileged condition of assimilation, higher status, and “whiteness.”9 Dust Bowl migrants similarly saw their whiteness fluctuate, but rather than trading upward, as had Jews or the Irish, they regressed in social and phenotypic standing. Before the migration, the 43 percent of migrants who had had farm occupations, and the 46 percent with blue-collar experiences, could subscribe to what Roediger has called a “white workerism,” or what Neil Foley has phrased as “white agrarianism,” widely held notions of white superiority that gave would-be migrants real advantages over people of color at home, a region still deeply segregated.10 After the drought and exodus of the mid-1930s, native Californians described and treated migrants as a pariah-like substratum of liminal whites. Although this metamorphosis was uneven, generally mitigated by migrants’ occupations and economic backgrounds, it often had an impact that superseded individual class positions, linking Okies as an entire ethnoregional group with a shared set of seemingly racial character flaws. The duration of this racialization, however, should not be exaggerated. The most vehement forms of scapegoating began to wane after the outbreak of World War II, when demand for migrant labor peaked and migrants achieved some measure of economic stability. That the Okies oscillated within a spectrum of whiteness—proving themselves pronouncedly white in their home states, liminally white in

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 25

California, then acceptably white again after the war—further undermines universal essentialistic approaches to the history of race. Whereas the victims of racial categorization have typically been racial minorities, the cultural fictions surrounding the idea of whiteness can turn on their owners by providing elites with a weapon to scapegoat lower-status white groups who traditionally profited from such classifications. Such oscillations also challenge Frederick Jackson Turner’s model of socioeconomic development, which has been correctly expunged from recent histories of people of color in the West, but which remains an important element in discussions about westward-bound European-Americans. That descendants of Turner’s celebrated white frontiersmen could be subject to a collapse in ethnosocial status as they traveled along Route 66 suggests something that Turner failed to predict: that the westering process could actually debase the social standing of the very people it was supposed to uplift.

building the wall: antimigrant attitudes and the legacy of racial scapegoating So flagrant was Depression-era Okie baiting that even visiting Europeans began to take note. Blaise Cendrars, a French filmmaker and journalist imbued with a certain Tocquevillean knack for commentary on life in the United States, traveled through California in the mid-1930s and took to satirizing the nativist mood. The piece he penned, which found its way into the newspaper Paris-Soir, suggested that Okies were nothing less than barbarians in the eyes of the Southern Californians: “Can the hillbillies from the interior be kept from coming to seek their fortunes in . . . Hollywood? When will they build their Chinese wall?”11 Workmen never broke ground on a “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” of course, but Cendrars’s imaginative phrasing does raise important questions: How did the figurative wall between one group of white Protestants and another become so formidable that one was temporary excluded from fair passage from one U.S. state to another? And if this campaign was so powerful, where did its support come from? California’s turbulent history of racial and ethnic scapegoating offers some answers. Here it is worth considering antimigrantism as an organized political movement. Political anti-Okie activism was unable to choke off the flow of migrants, but it proved an overwhelming success in making the Dust Bowl migrant the social threat of the moment. Although nowhere near as

26

/ Big City Ways

brutal or as protracted, white Californian reaction to the Dust Bowl exodus corresponded with, and in some ways mimicked, earlier demonization of racial minorities in legal code and public discourse. Racial demonization in fact was the harsh flip side of the California Dream, a long and shadowy legacy of twisted logic in which a Yahi Indian could be displayed in a museum highlighting his “savagery” after previous generations of white Californians had systematically hunted and slain all his kin.12 Though vitally important to the economy, immigrant Chinese workers similarly faced mob violence and an Exclusion Act, frequently decried as a “Yellow Peril” that endangered white jobs, democracy, and public health.13 Alternately portrayed as compliant peons and violent aggressors, those of Mexican ancestry were also thrall to this inverse dream, being relieved of much of their hereditary land in the 1860s, restricted at the border in the 1920s, and even illegally repatriated to Mexico in the early 1930s.14 White California could prove similarly nightmarish to African Americans, who faced restrictive housing covenants, accusations of criminality, and rounds of Ku Klux Klan and police brutality.15 Demonization of the Okies, in fact, seemed a logical extension of earlier forms of racial ostracism. Faced with a comparatively small black population, restricted Asian immigration, and the forgone repatriation of hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, that California selected the Okies for vilification does not seem surprising. Journalistic accounts of the migration, furthermore, emphasized that, within the labor structure, white migrants were “filling in” for earlier vilified Mexican or Asian workers, with these reports often suggesting the shared undesirability of the Okies and earlier groups whose threat had now been neutralized. Country Gentleman, a nationally prominent farm magazine, for instance, began a July 1938 article by comparing the Morenos, an impoverished Mexican family of “fruit tramps” being repatriated by train to Mexico, with their replacements, the bottomrung Williams family of Arkansas. Although Mexican workers and their Okie replacements shared some flaws, such as having too many children, they offered trade-offs in other areas. The outgoing Mexicans, the article warned, had been “easily aroused emotionally,” while Okies and Arkies were lazy and just plain filthy, tossing “garbage and rubbish outside the kitchen door” and defecating through “a hole in the floor to avoid going outdoors to toilet facilities.”16 Surprisingly, Okies actually fared worse in many journalistic comparisons, which often waxed nostalgic about departing minority workers’ purported skill, humility, and servility. The Moreno-Williams piece, for instance, argued that Okies lacked Mexican workers’ “instinctive touch” for

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 27

finding ripe fruit, and that Okies were absolutely barbaric in their treatment of their own homes: “Wood is provided for the chopping on most of the ranches, but the migrants tear out partitions between rooms, and even the floors, for firewood—something no Mexican family ever did.”17 Another article challenged the very citizenship of the Okies, arguing that migrants knew less about “Americanism” than “the foreigners who come to live in our community”: “Our migrants from the cotton lands have been Americans always, and many generations of ancestors before them, but they have never understood what America means.”18 Nevertheless while earlier racial minorities had faced outright loss of rights, deportation, or even annihilation, the Okies were subject to challenges and marginalization within a spectrum of whiteness that periodically stripped them of specific privileges of citizenship rather than marking them as completely expendable. Still, something about the language and actions of the anti-Okie movement seemed to resonate with earlier, racially motivated campaigns.19 Much as Mexicans had been portrayed as “illiterate, diseased, [and] pauperized,” and Asians as “swarms of . . . barbarous invaders,”20 newspaper and magazine columns maligned Okies with such terminology as “white trash,” “pauper labor,” “misfits,” “marginal people,” and “irresponsible wandering hordes.”21 And like the San Francisco workers who joined impromptu “anticoolie committees” or the middle-class Angelenos who made up the Keep West Slauson White campaign,22 anti-Okie businessmen, members of the American Legion, and growers formed ad hoc organizations that hoped to reroute the stream of newcomers.23 Even brutality and border constrictions became common in some instances. In rural areas, law officers, vigilantes, and trained quasi-fascist paramilitaries periodically blockaded rural roadways, quashed strikes, and assaulted Okie meetings and encampments.24 Dismissive of even the U.S. Constitution, Los Angeles police chief James Edgar Davis sent city police officers to the California-Arizona border to stop the flow of migrants for several months in 1936.25 Such efforts eventually culminated in discriminatory legislation and officially sponsored force. First among these was the passage of an anti-Okie amendment to the Welfare and Institutions Code of California in 1937, which punished with six months’ imprisonment anyone assisting in the transport of migrants who fit a new, very loose definition of “indigent.”26 Later that year, Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputies forcibly evacuated and burned to the ground a migrant encampment in the Rio Hondo wash.27 In 1938, more than one hundred thousand individual Californians and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors signed an anti-Okie petition that

28

/ Big City Ways

urged Congress to discontinue the migrant housing programs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Spearheaded by the state’s leading antimigrant group, the California Citizens’ Association (CCA), the petition and its endorsements were presented before Congress in January 1939 by the state’s longtime Republican senator Hiram W. Johnson.28 Even as late as 1942, migrants working at defense plants in Burbank and Glendale were subjected to systematic police harassment, including the unwarranted ticketing of their automobiles.29 The anti-Okie movement’s Thomas McManus, who would become secretary and leading spokesman of the CCA, was particularly adept at creating the climate of hostility that led to these attacks, and his verbal assaults often cut with a racial edge. Hyperbolically conjuring up an image of the migrants that accentuated their purported ruralness, backwardness, and cultural barbarity, McManus warned radio and newspaper audiences of a decline in educational and moral standards as well as local relief funds. Migrants not only threatened the very foundations of civilization, he claimed, evoking a long tradition of alarmist and racist disaster literature, but also stemmed from the “impoverished submarginal stratum of the east Texas cotton belt and from southeast Missouri and Northeast Arkansas,” forming a class nearly impossible to educate and uplift.30 Soon newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, and Alfred Harrell’s Bakersfield Californian were using pejorative CCA-coined metaphors that attributed insectlike characteristics to migrants.31 Such attacks particularly recalled the scapegoating of Asian immigrants in California: “hordes of indigents” or “migrant hordes” had “swarmed into the state,” newspapers reporting about the Dust Bowlers warned.32 Whether the local press cautioned the public about the “chaos and ruin” that McManus warned of in 1940 or the “anarchy and ruin” that antiChinese activists had hoped to avert in 1869, only the cultures and complexions of the scapegoats had changed.33 Before long, racialized ostracism wasn’t simply the forte of McManus but a statewide phenomenon. Occasionally this racialization involved journalistic assaults on actual minorities among the migrants, such as 1938 magazine attack on “a mass migration of seventy-five Negroes from Oklahoma” living “on relief” in central California.34 More often, ordinary Californians lumped white migrants together with people of other races in their diatribes and day-to-day practices. While newspaper characterizations of migrants as hordes or swarms invoked the specter of “Yellow Peril” alarmism, one Bakersfield movie theater equally discriminated against blacks and white Dust Bowlers by segregating both from the general white

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 29

moviegoing population, posting a sign that read: “Negroes and Okies Upstairs.”35 The sociologist Stuart M. Jamieson noticed that ethnographic-like epithets formerly applied “only to other races” were being applied to white migrants with great frequency by the early 1940s. “‘Okies,’ ‘Arkies’ and ‘Texicans’ have taken the place of ‘Chinks,’ ‘Japs’ and ‘Dagos’ in rural terminology,” he wrote. Though used differently in an earlier historical context, the term Texican, a combination of Texan and the presumably mestizo identifier Mexican, suggests that white Californians believed the poor white migrants of the Lone Star State to be of mixed or indeterminate racial identity.36 The author and progressive political activist Carey McWilliams even commented that Madera County residents referred to themselves as “White-Americans,” implying that the Okies were outsiders and “aliens.”37

progressivism in retrograde: the new middle class and political anti-okie activism Though antimigrant activists drew impetus from a long legacy of racial ostracism, the peculiar class dynamics of the state also help explain the successes of antimigrantism as an organized political movement. Often overlooked by historians who focus on support that the movement gained from big business and labor, the real backbone of the movement was a group of ideologically driven white-collar workers, what C. Wright Mills identifies as the “new middle classes.” Make no mistake: big business was involved. Companies ranging from Standard Oil of California to Levi Strauss and Company and agribusiness trade groups, particularly the fascistically inclined Associated Farmers of California, contributed generously. But sources from the era suggest that, when big business sided against the migrants, it did so out of self-interest: large companies and growers either feared that the federal camps the government provided for migrants were conduits for trade unionism, while oil companies simply wished to spite the migrantsympathizing Governor Culbert L. Olson for his efforts to prohibit offshore drilling.38 Echoing earlier xenophobic acts by organized labor, important affiliates of the American Federation of Labor tended to support the CCA’s anti-Okie 1939 resolution, fearing Okies posed unfair competition for jobs. But labor was internally divided about the measure, and its support tended to involve largely symbolic gestures. The national labor federation’s overarching California State Federation of Labor and the Central Labor Council of Los Angeles ratified the CCA resolution, but significant segments, such as the Cen-

30

/ Big City Ways

tral Labor Council of Bakersfield, objected to any connection with antimigrantism.39 The newer and smaller Congress of Industrial Organizations was also conspicuously absent from CCA endorsements, and some labor leaders in that federation were openly hostile.40 The new middle class, on the other hand, formed the rank and file of antimigrant activism, proving to be the real power behind anti-Okie successes. Distinct from the petit bourgeois–like old middle class of shopkeepers, artisans, and small-business proprietors, the new middle class, as defined by Mills and other sociologists, was a group composed of salaried professionals, upwardly mobile managers, and other middle-income white-collar workers.41 A ceaseless focus of speculation among political commentators, many new-middle-class Californians had clashed with the state’s ancien régime of rich developers and powerful industrialists during a period of “good government” Progressive reform in the years between 1910 and 1929.42 New middle-class prominence on the political scene only increased during the Depression. By the time the Dust Bowlers arrived in the mid1930s, the proportion of Californians in white-collar occupational groups had risen above the national level, making up nearly 43 percent of the state’s total employed workforce.43 The new middle-class penchant for liberal, civic-oriented reform, however, ran short. The lack of a large working class and highly developed industrial core in cities such as Los Angeles, Mike Davis has noted, meant that “the Depression was foregrounded and amplified in the middle classes,” producing a politics that observers argue leaned toward demagoguery.44 Frightened by the economic instability, and by subsequent uprisings of labor and the unemployed, many formerly Progressive middle-class leaders and constituencies reneged on their reformism in the early 1930s and began to cement “law and order” alliances with the old elite.45 Although some longtime Progressives such as Simon J. Lubin and J. Frank Burke continued to fight for social reforms under the auspices of the New Deal, many, such as Hiram Johnson, veered toward the xenophobic Right.46 At center stage in the antimigrant campaign, the CCA proved to be an important vehicle for reactionism within the new middle class. Formed in 1938 for the ostensible purpose of preventing Okies from depleting publicrelief rolls, the CCA appealed to the new middle class with a program that included several Progressive-sounding goals, such as using experts and technocrats to solve social problems, working to prevent disease, and safeguarding the rights of labor. According to the CCA’s stationery, the group was “organized for the protection of home labor, industry and property, for

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 31

the preservation of public health and for the advancement of the common welfare of the state.”47 Its leading proponent in Washington was none other than Senator Hiram Johnson, the state’s must celebrated partisan of Progressive reformism and new middle-class political concerns.48 That the new middle class made up the rank and file of anti-Okie activism was especially evident among the 220 individual organizations that endorsed the CCA’s anti-Okie petition. While the largest single cohort of group signees was 34 American Legion posts, more than half of the groups who signed on were either white-collar-oriented service clubs—primarily Lions, Kiwanis, and Soroptimists—or business and professional organizations, primarily Business and Professional Women’s Clubs but also some real-estate-agent and insurance associations. Groups representing potentially more upper-class participants, such as chambers of commerce, represented a mere 14 percent, and domains of the working class such as trade unions only made up about 10 percent.49 Indeed, legionnaires and whitecollar groups combined made up two-thirds of the total, suggesting the new middle class’s growing enchantment with the jingoism, anticommunism, and archconservatism that historians argue the 1930s-era American Legion represented.50 Anecdotal evidence about specific white-collar groups further suggests a link between antimigrantism and new-middle-class politics. The Los Angeles Rotary Club, a bastion of the region’s aspiring new-middle-class business and civic leaders, joined the antimigrant crusade early on by praising police chief Davis’s border blockade.51 Social and medical professionals and real estate agents—whether as individuals or as organizations—were also well represented by the late 1930s.52 Ultimately these middle-income professionals easily outnumbered the CCA’s original blue-chip coterie of wealthy growers, oil men, and anti–New Deal financial interests. Big money alone could not have mustered the hundred thousand signatures collected. Nor could it account for the hundreds of organization members, homemakers, and petition-gathering YMCA youths who made the crusade possible.53 Emblematic of the turnabout within Progressivism and its new obsession with the supposed machinations of “others”—whether Okies, foreigners, or radicals—was the CCA’s leading spokesman, McManus himself. A highranking legionnaire and a Bakersfield insurance man, McManus started off in local politics a pro-labor, antitrust, Republican progressive, an avid supporter of California’s high priest of progressivism, Hiram Johnson. By the mid-1930s, however, McManus’s political views were increasingly shaped

32

/ Big City Ways

by xenophobia, a distaste for internationalism, and an ardent anticommunism. Before taking on the Okies, McManus not only served as chairman of the American Legion’s Americanization Committee, which favored a national system of registering all aliens, but also led the group’s red-baiting National Americanism Commission. McManus in fact had such a congenial relationship with Johnson as a result of his isolationism, anticommunism, and anti-Okie activism that he personally brought the conservative solon the hundred thousand antimigrant signatures in late 1938.54 With McManus at the communications helm, the CCA engineered sophisticated publicity-generating techniques. Personal appearances of CCA officials at organization meetings, a tactic often utilized, encouraged petition signers, but the pressure group was particularly innovative in its use of mass media. Already an experienced orator who had delivered anticommunist radio broadcasts throughout the state, McManus relied on preexisting relationships with Hearst and Alfred Harrell to help publicize his organization’s views.55 Unlike the captains of industry, white-collar professionals had little immediate economic incentive to get involved. For the most part, the new middle class would not benefit financially from harsh border policies and the dismantling of the FSA, other than perhaps receiving some tax reduction in the distant future. Economic explanations, furthermore, do not account for the persistence of antimigrant discrimination in the first few years of World War II, a period when unemployment declined significantly, or account for the lingering remnants of anti-Okie and anti-poor-white prejudice that survived in Southern California decades after the exodus. Instead, popular support for antimigrant activism was, like McManus’s individual support, largely ideological. By this, I do not mean that antimigrant ideas sprang from some ephemeral sphere removed from everyday existence. Rather, antimigrant ideology originated in the real, material upheavals of the epoch and was made especially pressing by the psychological toll of ten years of depression. White-collar anxieties about future material circumstances, when combined with a statewide xenophobic tradition of racialized scapegoating, proved a fertile soil in which antimigrant ideology could take root. A proliferation of negative images of poor whites in the media gave proponents of anti-Okie ideology the necessary encouragement to expand a small movement into a larger campaign. Antimigrant ideologies achieved such a level of success in gripping the “minds of masses” that these ideologies in turn began to act as a “material force.” As the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci contended contemporaneously in his own ponderings on

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 33

the rise of European fascism, “‘Popular beliefs’ and similar ideas are themselves material forces.”56 Here it might be useful to rely on personal recollections of the Depression that suggest that the fear of falling into poverty may have also been an important catalyst for ethnic and cultural scapegoating. The sometimes desperate circumstances of the Dust Bowl migrants perhaps became a mirror in which social-climbing professionals, businesspeople, and higher income white-collar workers could glimpse the uncertainty of their own futures. Antimigrant activists from this new middle class likely distanced themselves from migrants by accentuating their difference from Okies and by associating migrants with depravity and a racialized Otherness. Like the thousands of Cincinnatians who denied catastrophe by wearing buttons that read “I’m sold on America. I won’t talk Depression,” the Californian new middle class, many of them transplanted Midwesterners themselves, may have attacked migrants to deny kinship with the Okies—and therefore with the migrants’ perceived economic peril.57

a separate breed: eugenics, okies, and common thought By the mid-1930s, the media was already producing cartloads of negative portraits of generic poor whites, many of which drew from pseudoscientific eugenic theories about the degeneracy of rural whites. Combined with the state educational curriculum and popularly disseminated “scientific” literature, these portrayals helped spread anti-Okie attitudes to an even larger audience by bolstering stereotypical images of generic white trash and providing regionally specific material from which antimigrant activists could draw. Such stereotypes not only had pervaded regional consciousness before migrants arrived but also continued to provoke condescension into the 1940s. Eugenics played an important role in informing media demonizations, helping to turn migrant roustabouts and farmworkers and their families into the late 1930s’ leading folk devils. Derived from Greek, the term eugenics was coined by Sir Francis Galton, an English mathematician, trained physician, and cousin of Charles Darwin. In the 1860s, Galton had argued that ancestors of superior achievement and reputation tended to produce superior descendants, whereas those of poor hereditary stock tended to produce inferior offspring. Any preexisting factors related to success, such as

34

/ Big City Ways

economic privilege, social capital, and societal standing, were ignored or dismissed. By the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics had become a small but influential movement in England and the United States.58 Although Galton encouraged a “positive eugenics” program of procreation among the purportedly well born, eugenics work in the United States in the early twentieth century focused on the “negative eugenics” agenda of keeping the unfit, or cacogenic (literally, “poorly born”), from reproducing.59 At times, American eugenicists determined that this meant prohibiting racial miscegenation, sterilizing the mentally and physically disabled, and, in its most radical formulation, undertaking a program of racial or ethnic cleansing.60 Although American racial minorities proved to be eugenics’ most beleaguered targets, much research also focused on the problem of poor whites.61 Important to eugenicists were several family studies, most prominently Richard L. Dugdale’s The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877) and Henry Herbert Goddard’s The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1913), each of which reached a large popular audience. Such texts consistently portrayed “old stock,” American-born, rural poor whites as prone to sexual immorality, drunkenness, criminality, insanity, and feeblemindedness.62 The favored targets for forced eugenic sterilization were immigrant and minority women, but according to the historian Nicole Hahn Rafter, the authors of the Juke, Kallikak, and several lesser-known studies created an “ideologically charged mythology” that implied the hereditary inferiority of rural poor whites as well.63 Californians learned of eugenics in high school courses, which reinforced notions that poor whites were nothing more than “white trash”—a phrase repeated frequently in the Los Angeles Times and in other periodicals’ depictions of migrants.64 By 1938, the “lessons” of the Juke and Kallikak studies, as well as other principles of eugenics and poor-white degeneracy, were consistently mentioned in textbooks for home management, biology, and sociology at all three of the high schools in Long Beach. Students were instructed that “certain types of mental defectives may transmit their defects to their children; sterilization is one method for the prevention of the reproduction of more defectives; and marriage with good stock is more apt to result in a happy home than is marriage with poor stock.” Concepts of “eugenics and heredity” were regularly introduced into classroom discussions on “the family, crime, poverty, and insanity.”65 Eugenic thought proved acceptable partly because the region, already

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 35

known for its unorthodox sanitariums and medico-scientific experimenters, had developed an international reputation for eugenics research and racialized science.66 As early as the turn of the century, Abbott Kinney, founder of Venice, California, had promoted eugenic marriage as the means of producing “better children.”67 By the onset of the Depression, the very centers of power in Los Angeles had entered the fray. When citrus tycoon and philanthropist Ezra S. Gosney established the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena in 1928 to promote eugenic sterilization of the developmentally disabled, two dozen prominent Californians joined his effort, including distinguished professors, business and religious leaders, and the president of the Los Angeles Times.68 University of Southern California’s second president, physician Joseph Pomeroy Widney, similarly promoted Los Angeles as a center for health, eugenic birth, and “Aryan” supremacy.69 Eventually even the state began to experiment with eugenics. By the onset of the Depression, eugenics mania so gripped the state legislature that California had sterilized more than five thousand “feeble-minded” men and women in state institutions. This was four times as many as had been sterilized in the rest of the world, eugenics proponents bragged, and later served as inspiration for the eugenics programs of the Nazis. Within another decade, proponents claimed that California had sterilized nearly twelve thousand total. Gosney revealed the class bias of these operations in his 1937 admission that “the largest numbers of fathers (of those sterilized) are day laborers.”70 Although some scientific authorities and Catholic clergy began to challenge the claims made for eugenics, it continued to garner respectability in California well into the late 1930s. Experts such as Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan; the professor of philosophy F. C. S. Schiller of the University of Southern California; and Paul Popenoe, author and founder of the Los Angeles–based Institute of Family Relations, touted eugenic solutions as a panacea for societal ills.71 Eugenics’ focus on poor whites, and the claims that rural isolation and poverty were hallmarks of hereditary inferiority, helped fuel the antimigrant movement in California. Following eugenic reasoning, antimigrant writers fixated on migrants’ purportedly hardscrabble origins and bleak rural backgrounds—this despite the fact that migrants on average were only slightly less educated than other new residents, that nearly 80 percent of migrants originated in metropolitan areas and small towns, and that almost as many blue-collar workers as farmers moved.72 Alice Reichard, a schoolteacher writing under a pseudonym for the Country Gentleman in 1940, argued ruralness had left Okies an inheritance of social and hereditary defi-

36

/ Big City Ways

ciency: “Coming from the sharecropper cotton lands of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Southern Missouri, many of them never had a chance. . . . Their only heritage is generations of privation.”73 Gretchen Couch, a graduate student affiliated with the prominent sociologist and eugenics promoter Emory Bogardus of the University of Southern California, made similar claims in a study of welfare services at schools in Glendale. “The ‘dust bowl’ family not only comes to California needing material aid, but considerable correction of low standard ideas regarding the care, training, and education of its children. These children, often retarded, need interpretation to the school that they may secure remedial help there.”74 Like eugenicists, antimigrant activists also debated the purported climactic causes of Okie degeneracy, wondering if something about their environment had led this “Old American stock” astray. The editors of the Examiner blamed the conditions in the southern plains for migrant decline, calling Dust Bowlers “marginal people” as well as “misfits, failures, the lowest strata of citizenship in the lowest strata of American states.” Others argued that conditions in California had taken a toll on the migrants. A Kern County health inspector, Dr. Joseph K. Smith, told the Times that long exposure to shantytown Hoovervilles in California dulled migrants’ intellects and made their bodies “gaunt and tough.”75 Much eugenic thought, particularly that of the movement’s radical wing, promoted the myths of white supremacy and argued that the conditions of rural poor whites suggested that their racial origins were not white alone. “One doctor spoke of them as a separate breed,” wrote the sociologist Walter Goldschmidt in an important study of migrants arriving in Wasco, California.76 Oklahomans were especially suspect after certain authors pointed to possible racial miscegenation, because of white Oklahomans’ proximity to large settlements of Native Americans. Several eugenic studies attributed hereditary “defectiveness” to “mongrelization” between a rural “old stock” white and “a half breed,” “a negro,” “an Indian Squaw,” or “a mulatto.”77 Madison Grant, an American eugenicist who later drew international notoriety when identified as Hitler’s favorite author, cast aspersions on white Oklahomans in the widely read 1918 edition of The Passing of the Great Race. Grant noted the region’s reputation for mixed marriages between “Nordic” whites and Americans Indians, which inevitably produced “a population of race bastards in which the lower type preponderates.”78 Prominent Californians such as Jordan, Popenoe, and Bogardus gave credence to such theories by sitting on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society in the 1930s, alongside Grant and other paranoid racists such as

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 37

Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color against White WorldSupremacy (1920).79 Eugenic thought appears to have made an impact in debates about the migrants, encouraging critics to describe migrants as possessing phenotypes different from those of other whites. Like the East Coast nativists who described Italian complexions as “swarthy” and the brows of eastern Europeans as “heavy,” Californians saw migrants as physically different from themselves, characterizing migrants’ skin as “bronzed,” their bodies as “lanky,” and their heads as “small.”80 One farm magazine even recommended sorting migrant workers physiologically by state of origin, arguing that the legs of Oklahomans, Texans, and Kansans were too long “for stooping in the vegetable patches,” while “most of the Arkansans can do it, being shorter of stature.”81 Antimigrant writers and activists also invoked eugenicists’ concerns about poor whites’ rates of reproduction. Still publishing in the late 1930s, Dugdale, for instance, raised eyebrows when he estimated that the twelve hundred descendants of a poor white man from the Revolutionary War era filled county jails and had cost more than $1 million in social services. Antimigrant lore similarly fixated on migrant rates of reproduction and the burden they would place on local welfare systems. Loring A. Schuler claimed Okies were “always, with almost monotonous regularity, adding to the population,” and a high school principal writing for Country Gentleman argued that, in her community, “the migrants go right on having babies— often at the rate of one about every eighteen months—despite their complete dependence upon public relief.”82 Eugenic arguments that poor whites acted childlike and evaded work often appeared in antimigrant literature. A headline in California—Magazine of the Pacific declared the migrants were “California’s Adult Children” because of their purported laziness, irresponsibility, reliance on relief, and penchant for wasting wages on movies, new cars, and liquor (figure 1).83 Calling the Okies a “primitive people,” another California expert, writing in the Los Angeles Times, accused migrants of infantile behavior: “You can’t force them to bathe or eat vegetables.”84 One California police officer even combined stereotypes about migrants’ purported sloth with eugenic assertions that poor whites were prone to crime. Migrants, he said, were a “shiftless stock and inclined to petty thievery and shirking of work.”85 Though not enacted, eugenic-influenced solutions proved important in migration policy debates. Eugenics proponents on the extreme end, such as the Madera County Health director Lee A. Stone, argued that migrants

38

/ Big City Ways

figure 1. Regional media emphasized that Dust Bowlers were not just lazy but also mentally degenerate and impractically radical. This drawing by Davis F. Schwartz accompanied lyrics spoofing the political ambitions and intelligence of Arkansas migrants in the October 1938 issue of California—Magazine of the Pacific with the caption “Upon a bench in Halfwit Park they sit from morn till nearly dark.” Courtesy of the Institute of Governmental Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Reprinted with permission from the California Chamber of Commerce.

should be made unable to reproduce. “If you came down to me,” he told a Congressional committee, “I would say, sterilize the whole bunch of them.” Stone later told a reporter that the migrants were a result of an unpremeditated phenomena that had permitted the unfit to reproduce faster than the fit. “Many of these people have inbred for years,” he said.86 Other health professionals sought remedies slightly more humane than sterilization. Gladys de Lancey Smith, a Los Angeles representative of the Birth Control Research Bureau of New York, argued in the Los Angeles Times in 1938 that the only solution to the influx of migrants was a sustained Malthusian program of birth control. Neither suggestion was implemented by policy makers, but the fact that such opinions reached thousands in print and warranted serious legislative consideration indicates the extent to which such theories were examined by the social and civic elite.87 Antimigrant activists’ success in using eugenic stereotyping is best illustrated by the fact that reformers sympathetic to migrants, and the migrants themselves, began framing their defenses of the Okies in the language of natural selection and racial science. In his impassioned 1938

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 39

pamphlet about white rural migrants, John Steinbeck espoused guaranteeing migrants access to relief programs and civil liberties by stressing their superb “stock.” The very title of the pamphlet, “Their Blood Is Strong,” suggests a eugenic evaluation of migrant worthiness. The text inside argues that Dust Bowlers were “not migrants by nature” as Mexican, Chinese, and Filipino farmworkers purportedly were. Moreover, they were of “English, German and Scandinavian descent,” nationalities that racial eugenicists usually characterized as superior and Nordic. They, Steinbeck concluded, “are of the best American stock, intelligent, resourceful, and if given a chance socially responsible.”88 Pseudoscientific thinking also influenced the migrants’ perceptions of themselves. Like Steinbeck, “Mother” Sue Sanders, a poor white transplant from Texas who became wealthy speculating in oil, defended migrants by emphasizing the healthiness of their stock, comparing Okies to the hearty plain cattle that had outwitted and outlived her mother’s “blue-blooded Jersey” cow: “I will take the common herd every time,” Sanders wrote in her 1939 autobiography Our Common Herd. “I don’t mind saying I’m one of them in breed and in fact.” Sanders’s arguments invoked eugenic reasoning but turned it on its head by suggesting that poor whites were in fact hereditarily superior to higher class whites, a train of thought that later would occasionally find its way into Okie music culture.89

tobacco road moves west: wretches and radicals in the popular arts Popular-culture depictions of poor whites amplified the assertions of eugenics, reinforcing certain ideas about the purported degeneracy of the Okies, especially migrant women and recently registered migrant voters. The photo magazine, a literary form that since its inception had been marketed to the middle class, proved a significant forum for antimigrant debate. Michael Denning argues that the middle-brow photo magazines of Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire often reflected a certain progressive political tendency that arose as young left-leaning contributors brushed up against the staid corporate liberalism of its ownership.90 Photo magazines could also be used to support reactionary or xenophobic politics, as they were in the anti-Okie campaign. Two photo magazines, in particular, propagated anti-Okie sentiment: the California Chamber of Commerce’s picturesque, boosterist monthly, California—Magazine of the Pacific, and the color-illustrated Country Gentleman, a national publication

40

/ Big City Ways

geared to rural readers by the Curtis Publishing Company, producers of the Saturday Evening Post.91 Whereas newspapers ran articles and an occasional photograph that disparaged migrants, the formats of California and Country Gentleman allowed editors to present a barrage of images in a single issue. Often pairing their own inflammatory text with pictures shot by FSA photographers sympathetic to the Okies’ plight or by staff photographers who mimicked the FSA style, antimigrant magazines used the New Deal’s own photo-documentation to stigmatize Dust Bowlers and disgrace the FSA. In a full-page spread appearing in Country Gentleman, for example, an editor argued that communities had been “invaded by an unusually large number of highly irresponsible migrant families.” The accompanying photographs, all “courtesy” of the FSA, include close-ups of a migrant child playing in the dirt, other children riding unsafely behind the rear spare tire of a car, a woman escaping the sun under a primitive canvas tent structure, and a wide-angle shot of men loitering near furniture-loaded jalopies.92 Artistic and literary representations of impoverished white southerners also served as sourcebooks to antimigrant commentators delineating the ways in which Californians would view the migration. Such images held so much power because they prompted Californians to confuse geographically distinct Dust Bowlers with the ignorant, threadbare southern tenant farmers who appeared regularly in the popular arts. Although such stereotypes dated back to William Byrd II’s 1728 characterizations of Carolina’s “lubbers,” never before the 1930s had poor-white hobgoblins appeared in the national culture in such numbers or with such vehemence. New York publishers, Hollywood directors, Broadway producers, and national newspaper syndicates created hundreds of images that insisted on poor southern whites’ yokel backgrounds. By the end of the Depression, an average city dweller did not have to stroll far to find Al Capp’s witless Yokums, William Faulkner’s ignorant Bundrens, and Erskine Caldwell’s reprehensible Jeeters in print, on stage, on screen, or at the local newsstand. Many, if not most, of these caricaturizations participated in the Juke-Kallikak project of selecting poor whites and, by extension, Okies as less-than-adequate Others.93 Gender played a significant role in anti-Okie caricatures, which were often poorly drawn imitations of the fictional poor white women found in national culture. Addressing an audience already familiar with the image of the single white male fruit tramp or hobo, a figure that often held a degree of romanticism for California audiences, antimigrant activists and writers fixated on what they believed to be a new phenomenon: the poor, white female migrant.94 To some degree, this new focus was justified by the numbers. Between 1930 and 1940, the number of itinerant women farm labor-

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 41

ers in California nearly doubled, while the number of male farmworkers actually declined by 7 percent. Even more telling, those women and children who did not earn their own wages but worked as farm laborers as part of a family wage structure rose by 85 percent. The specter of women and whole families eking out a living as stoop laborers and camping along roadways and in city washes no doubt provoked the fears of elites and middle-class citizens that something in the social fabric was deeply amiss.95 Pop culture depictions of poor white women in national culture contributed to middle-class apprehension by emphasizing purported fissures in traditional gender identities. Caricatures by comic strip artist Al Capp and novelists William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell helped fuel a belief in Okie Otherness by emphasizing the aberrant gender attributes, body characteristics, and sexual practices of poor whites and hillbillies. Whereas early depictions of poor white women had stressed their American Indian–like roles as hardworking dirt-farming squaws left behind by leisure-seeking hunterwarrior husbands, depictions of impoverished rural women of the 1930s focused less on their participation in the division of labor and more on their physicality and sexuality. Three new modes of portrayal predominated: mannish women who abandoned middle-class standards of beauty, such as Al Capp’s gruff, pipe-smoking Mammy Yokum; diseased and dying matriarchs whose bodies acted as metaphors for the plight of poor whites, such as Faulkner’s Addie Bundren, and promiscuous sexually aggressive strumpets such as Caldwell’s Sister Bessie.96 While Capp’s Li’l Abner strip gave prominent play to Mammy Yokum, its gaunt, comically masculine hillbilly matriarch, antimigrant reporters similarly fixated on migrant women’s appearances, using adjectives such as tough and gaunt to suggest that Okie women had long abandoned any pretense of feminine grace.97 Photojournalism furthered this conceit by selecting images of migrant women in the most unflattering positions: shoeless, posed near garbage, hunched over piles of dirty laundry, or carrying dirty children and babies. Of the thirty-one photographs that accompanied antimigrant stories in the Times, San Francisco Chronicle, California—Magazine of the Pacific, and Country Gentleman between 1937 and 1940, shots of female migrants, almost always disheveled, outnumbered pictures of male migrants by more than four to one.98 Typical was a Chronicle article that described one migrant as a “gaunt woman, a dirty infant at her breast.” The accompanying photograph, captioned “Study in squalor,” showed a woman of forty standing amid a pile of laundry and trash.99 William Faulkner’s portrayal of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying (1930) also contributed to the antimigrant arsenal. In it, Bundren’s diseased body

42

/ Big City Ways

finally expires, only to be carried to a faraway burial, the corpse’s smell worsening as Addie’s lazy husband procrastinates along the way.100 Critics of the Okies similarly circulated unfounded rumors that migrants spread contagion, much as earlier Californians had concluded that the Chinese spread disease. “Farming communities dread their approach,” opined the Los Angeles Examiner. “They constitute disease and crime centers.”101 Faulkner’s model of a bizarre funeral journey resonates too with the plot of what would become the master narrative of Okie migration. The Joad family’s decision to conceal Grandma’s death to get past the California border guards in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is more than reminiscent of As I Lay Dying—not only in its depiction of a desperate journey but also in its use of the stiffened matriarch’s body as a plot device and certificate of passage. While Steinbeck hoped to stir middle-class sympathy, migrants nevertheless resented his depictions of the funereal border crossing and the lifegiving breast that the young Rose of Sharon offers a sickly elderly man in the novel’s conclusion—both symbolic desecrations of the poor white female body.102 A contemporary of Faulkner, the Georgia-born novelist Erskine Caldwell also emphasized the promiscuous poor white woman’s body in his depictions of Sister Bessie, a highly lecherous lay preacher, in his famous 1932 novel, Tobacco Road. Caldwell based the character in part on one of the subjects studied by his father, a minister who published eugenic tracts on the ills of poor whites in Georgia.103 Thanks to the success of Tobacco Road and its subsequent theatrical and motion-picture adaptations, Caldwell’s eugenics-inspired white-trash jezebels were the immediate reference points many middle-class Californians evoked when encountering Dust Bowlers. The antimigrant journalist Loring A. Schuler, for instance, mentioned the theatrical version of Caldwell’s opus in an article on the Okies in California—Magazine of the Pacific: “Tobacco Road has come to California. I thought that play, with its poverty and filth, was a gross exaggeration— until the same kind of folks landed here among us.” Californians persisted in emphasizing what the historian Kevin Starr calls “the Tobacco Road canard” in popular depictions as a way of painting Dust Bowlers as sexually deviant, either fuming about the overdeveloped sexuality of Okie adolescents, as one rural community leader did, or insisting upon their penchant for incest, as did Dr. Lee A. Stone of Madera.104 One depiction, a literary “grotesque” reminiscent of Caldwell’s, hailed from the very region in which many California-bound migrants originated. The White Scourge, a historical novel by the Texas eugenics enthusiast and college dean Edward Everett Davis, advocated sterilization, arguing that the

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

/ 43

limited minds of poor whites left them susceptible to an impractical socialism and allowed them to be duped by anarchists, Communists, and corrupt politicians. Most poor whites, one of Davis’s characters reasoned, barely had “sense enough to breed an’ vote the Democratic ticket.”105 Californians expressed similar beliefs, even arguing that the migration itself was a Democratic ploy to make sure that the once-Republican stronghold tipped toward a registered Democratic majority during the next presidential year. “Looks to me,” argued one businessman, “as if someone, somewhere, was packing our relief rolls and our voting lists with white trash. Most of them come from safely Democratic states; in spite of the summer’s registration, California is still to be classed as doubtful. Add two and two under those conditions and you don’t get merely four—you get 1940.” In reality, many migrants did vote Democratic, but the numbers of registered Democrats in California had already become close to those of registered Republicans by 1932, long before the bulk of migrants arrived.106 Hollywood offered its own images of naïve Okies being gulled by impractical radicals. In 1934, Louis B. Mayer, president of Metro-GoldwynMayer and chairman of the state Republican Party, covertly produced California Election News #1 and #2, a widely distributed set of fake newsreels that featured carefully chosen and scripted actors posing as average citizens discussing their thoughts about the upcoming state election in a “man on the street” interview style. Particularly prominent were a slovenly fruit picker and a rambling, toothless elderly man, both with southern plains accents, who expressed great enthusiasm for, but little actual knowledge of, the left-leaning relief programs and economic policies of the Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Upton Sinclair.107 Before the newsreels’ screenings, Sinclair, a prominent author and well-known former Socialist, appeared to be leading in the polls.108 Although newly registered migrant voters nearly gave Sinclair a victory, his Republican opponent, Frank Merriam, defeated him partly because of the films’ success in portraying Sinclair supporters as reckless radicals and ignorant Okies.109 Antimigrant activists similarly argued that radicals would bamboozle gullible, recently registered migrants into helping to pass one of the two contentious state “Ham and Eggs” initiatives, which promised pensions for the elderly and food scrip for the poor. In their analyses of the measures, which were defeated once in 1938 and then again in 1939, opponents repeatedly targeted migrants as the initiatives’ key supporters, often exaggerating migrants’ mannerisms and lust for the dole and their naïveté as political thinkers. California—Magazine of the Pacific parodied the migrant voice in a song titled “A Dream in Crackpot Corners,” which associated not

44

/ Big City Ways

only the migrants but their music with a socially parasitic backwoods mentality: Well, the first thing I’ll do when this plan is law Is to bring out my kinfolks from old Arkansaw [sic]. They’ve lived all their lives on plain corn pone and pork But it’s ham and eggs now and they won’t have to work.110

For Californians, depictions of migrants as crackpots reinforced eugenic fictions that migrants were partial to a gut-level radicalism and half-baked political schemes. California’s remaking of migrant music, however, only underscored the impact that migrants’ musical tastes and traditional Democratic Party allegiances were beginning to make on the state’s own cultural life. Faced with this harsh welcome, Okies responded with defenses that would have a major impact on migrant culture, migrant music making, and the history of West Coast country music. Put down themselves, some subscribed to an ideology of Okie white-Americanism that insisted upon the “whiteness” of Okie stock and argued that this entitled migrants to a higher standard of treatment than that offered to ethnic and racial minorities already established in California.111 Others embraced the liminal whiteness that beset them, seeing in it a chance to turn outrage into a productive civic populism, and marginalization into an excuse for testing cultural interaction and even political alliances with other marginal ethnic, cultural, and racial groups. For nearly a decade and a half, this second strain of eclectic liberal populism dominated Okie music culture, only giving way in the 1950s, when a new cultural politics came to the fore. Though doomed to grow fainter in subsequent decades, liberal-populist country music paradoxically shone brightest when the scapegoating was most intense, evidenced particularly by one young Okie who broadcast live “hillbilly” music from a radio station in Los Angeles. Indulging thoughtfully in the sort of populist radicalism of which his fellow migrants were often accused, the young Okie singer began to toy with this idea that migrants could defend themselves by building solidarity with other ethnic, cultural, and racial groups. By exploring such arrangements, Woody Guthrie offered one of the earliest and most compelling self-portrayals of Okie identity to emerge in the region’s growing mass media.

2

Refugees Woody Guthrie, “Lost Angeles,” and the Radicalization of Migrant Identity

Conjuring up an image that seemed to revel in every squalid detail, Kenneth Crist’s May 1939 report on Okie trailer camps for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine was typical “migrant horde” slander. The “trailerites” who resided in these camps on the outskirts of the city, Crist argued, were “loafers,” “career men in relief,” and pinball-playing “relief chiselers.” Their trailer homes were “virtual hovels where sanitation flirts with the legal margin.” Worse yet was “the police problem” posed by the even poorer “jungle camps” of shacks and old tents in county river bottoms. These camps were periodically “cleaned out” by sheriff’s deputies, something Crist agreed was expeditious and necessary.1 As an antimigrant diatribe, Crist’s collection of claims was rather commonplace—yet another attack on those abhorrent Okies. The difference was that this time a migrant read the piece and stepped forward to set the record straight. Woody Guthrie, a “hillbilly” singer-songwriter on local radio, publically unleashed a volley of furious remarks at Crist that extended for months. Writing in the next several editions of the Communist Party newspaper the People’s World, and then in his radio songbook, On a Slow Train through California, Guthrie dismissively identified Crist as “Kenneth somebody” and argued that the migrants Crist maligned were honest people who only desired a “chanct to work an’ earn our livin’.”2 So deep was Guthrie’s wrath that he later devoted a whole section of a pro–Ham and Eggs pamphlet to Crist, accusing the writer of fabricating interviews (“he must of made it up, cause it wasent no more the Oklahoma lingo than it was Mexican”) and berating him for burying details about the camp razings. Crist, the young KFVD performer argued, failed to report “how th Sheriff’s Posse cleared out th Jungles, set fire to the makeshift houses, raised hell on th little children—and drove th Shack Dewellers out of th river bottom— 45

46

/ Big City Ways

away from their scrawny houses of old tin cans, card board boxes, coffee lids, tobaccer cans, filthy rugs, sickenin beds, lousy toe sack drapes, an ungodly cookin utensils,” which Crist had taken such pangs to depict. “No Kenneth—I’m a gonna tell you what they’re after—then you’ll know just 4 times as mutch as you did when you come out of college,” Guthrie retorted. “What these people want is a job—they want to pitch in an work an do there part to keep america the best nation on th globe . . . the rich crowd that you write for are concentratin their minds mostly on how to git thru life without a worken.”3 More than simply a defense, Guthrie’s lengthy and multimedia critique of the Times magazine piece was decidedly political, linking country music and the Dust Bowl “ethnicity” with a celebrated liberal cause (Ham and Eggs), a dose of working-class Americanism, and a populism that reviled callous journalists and the idle rich. Yet for all of Guthrie’s vitriol, and for all his efforts to tout the Ham and Eggs initiatives over the air, Guthrie’s politicking on radio station KFVD seems to have added little to scholarly understanding of the migration and the music genre from which Guthrie emerged. Although Guthrie continues to inspire reams of music scholarship, cultural assessments, and biographical and popular writing, historians of the Dust Bowl migration have largely ignored the Oklahoma migrant’s liberalpopulist Los Angeles broadcasts, emphasizing instead the culture of rural Okies, whom they argue largely acquiesced to the repressive, growerdominated power structure of the California countryside.4 Country music historians and cultural historians, too, have tended to overlook Guthrie or to dismiss his ties to commercial country music, arguing ahistorically that this early repertoire was more in line with pristine folk tradition or the urban folk movement that he later left an imprint on.5 In fact, any dichotomy between “folk” and “country” would have appeared artificial in the 1930s. As Richard A. Peterson has pointed out, folk and country were used interchangeably in the popular and trade press until Senator Joseph R. McCarthy erected a permanent partition between the two by tainting the “folk” singers the Weavers as Communist sympathizers in the 1950s.6 If Guthrie’s radio program itself has been given short shrift, some researchers have been even more negligent in emphasizing the gender dynamics of the show, often omitting the fact that Guthrie collaborated with and was greatly influenced by his costar, Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, a country vocalist of considerable skill in her own right.7 With some notable exceptions, popular views of the Guthrie legacy suf-

Refugees / 47 fer from the artificial dualisms and oversimplified mythologizing that often plague discussions of figures of national political import.8 This has been especially true among the Folk Left, which, in its efforts to canonize Guthrie as America’s hard-traveling troubadour, has tended to downplay assertions that Guthrie ever engaged in explicitly commercial performances. Folklorist Alan Lomax and musical popularizer Pete Seeger, both of whom met Guthrie after he had permanently left Los Angeles, have repeatedly vouched for Guthrie’s authenticity as a folk balladeer and exalted in his “disparaging attitude toward the hit parade” in an effort to raise Guthrie to venerable public status.9 While this has succeeded in making the American public more aware of Guthrie’s legacy, it has also fostered distortions by reducing his complicated personal history to a garden-variety conversion fable: one in which a devotee of authentic folk culture evolves into a determined singer-social activist. An unfortunate offshoot of the efforts to mythicize is the tendency of even respectable academics to reduce Guthrie’s life and career to absolutisms, ranging from leftish saintliness and romantic rebelliousness to profit-minded opportunism and unremorseful Stalinism.10 Absent from these analyses is the recognition that Guthrie and Crissman were involved in explicitly commercial broadcasting at KFVD, and that in the late 1930s, commercial radio, at least on the local level, was still an unevenly standardized form of mass communication that allowed a significant amount of political and populist discourse. True, by the mid-1930s, commercial broadcasters on the national level had wrested much of the public bandwidth away from educators and reformers, effecting a transformation that reinforced the power of sponsors and networks, weakened the voices of labor and political activists, and moved radio toward what the media scholar Robert W. McChesney has called “the ideological consolidation of the status quo.”11 But in particular locales, regional radio and local country music programming allowed performers such as Guthrie and Crissman to shape content, talk defiantly, and even foment political dissent while simultaneously challenging listeners to become more involved in political affairs.12 Studies that dismiss the existence of a radical or populist country music politics in 1930s radio often also overlook the pivotal role that urban migration has played in the historical and thematic development of commercial country music, especially the varieties produced by Dust Bowl migrants in California. Los Angeles was not only where Guthrie, perhaps the most overtly political of American music icons, first became politicized but also where he wrote most of the Dust Bowl ballads that would later bring him

48

/ Big City Ways

international fame. While Guthrie’s career may be an extraordinary case, cities such as Los Angeles provided access to political and cultural outlets that changed migrants in ways the California countryside could not. Guthrie and Crissman’s time on KFVD also suggests a need to reevaluate issues of reception and the balance of power between the country music industry and the artist. Although a few studies of the “old-time” and “hillbilly” music of the 1930s situate artists and audiences as dynamic agents, most recent scholarship concentrates on how other factors, such as technological innovations, industry standardization, prominent impresarios, and impersonal economic forces, have driven important cultural change.13 Impersonal business factors could and did shape country music into a conservative social force at times, but, as Guthrie and Crissman’s story suggests, there remained a substantial space in which performers and listeners could independently shape and relay messages of considerable power.

woody and lefty lou in los angeles: old-time hill country at the center of your dial When Guthrie and Crissman first started broadcasting over KFVD in 1937, they were shocked at the amount of fan mail they received. In their first month together on Woody and Lefty Lou, nearly five hundred fan letters poured into the station. So fond were some listeners that they began to write to the singing duo as though they were kin, extending invitations to home-cooked chicken dinners and imagining the unpaired performers as a happily married couple complete with children. By 1938, the duo was receiving an average of nearly a thousand letters a month—some twenty thousand letters over the course of Guthrie’s KFVD career. “Woody received more mail than anyone else at the station,” remembered a fellow broadcaster.14 Such enthusiasm would propel Guthrie and Crissman through an eventful thirteen months on KFVD (figure 2). Although Crissman soon left broadcasting, Guthrie’s early radio exposure led to a solo year on KFVD as the pro-labor, pro–Ham and Eggs persona “Woody, the Lone Wolf” and his later employment in New York as a national singer-performer on CBS radio network programs such as Back Where I Come From, Cavalcade of America, and Model Tobacco’s Pipe Smoking Time. After these early radio jobs, Guthrie would launch a performing, recording, and activism career that would make him one of the most well-known and revered political singers in the history of American music.15

Refugees / 49

figure 2. Popular with new arrivals from the Dust Bowl region, Woody Guthrie (right) and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman pose behind a KFVD sign with their instruments, Los Angeles, ca. 1938. Courtesy of the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives.

Although neither Guthrie nor Crissman fit the classic definition of a Dust Bowl migrant, because the families of neither had lost a farm to drought or soil erosion, they were fairly representative of the migrant stream: they came from middle- to lower-middle-income backgrounds, they had fallen into the ranks of the working poor, and they sought to better themselves in California.16 Named after the twenty-fifth president, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in eastern Oklahoma, the son of a small-town politician and landowner. During Woody’s early childhood years, the Guthrie family was firmly in the stratum of the middle class. The Guthries’ fortune swiftly changed. The overall impact of the Depression on the Oklahoma economy, and a series of tragedies in his immediate family, forced Woody to live alone in a shack for part of his teenage years. Guthrie married, but by his midtwenties was having difficulty supporting his growing family and had taken a series of low-paid jobs, first as a grocery stocker, then as a sign painter, and finally as a root-beer-stand clerk. Unemployed again in 1937, Guthrie left his family in their simple house in the red-light district of Pampa, Texas, and headed for California in pursuit of the “American Dream”—a more comfortable and secure life. “He was going to go to California and make something better for us,” his wife, Mary, remembered.17

50

/ Big City Ways

Born in western Missouri, Maxine Crissman too had seen her family’s fortunes falter. In 1932, while she was still in high school, her father had sold the family’s hotel and farm and moved to Glendale, California, to start a restaurant. That venture soon failed, leaving the Crissmans in financial straits. Maxine was employed as a garment worker when she finally joined Guthrie on the air in 1937, himself recently fired from a dishwashing job. Crissman held her radio and dressmaking jobs simultaneously for a while, finally quitting after she was assured a twenty-dollar-a-week salary at KFVD—a significant four dollars more per week than she made as a garment worker.18 Finding stable work in California had proved more difficult than either Guthrie or Crissman had imagined it would be, and Los Angeles was not what they expected either. A far-flung, semirural, semi-industrialized megalopolis, the city was teeming with poverty and was swept up in the greatest wave of labor conflict in its 150-year history. The Depression had left thousands without homes or jobs in the early part of the decade and, during the recession of 1937–1938, threatened to further increase the ranks of the poor. Embittered by paltry wages and emboldened by an aggressive new organizing style and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, thousands of workers swelled the ranks of the American Federation of Labor and the more militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). There they openly defied the conservative, antiunion Merchant and Manufacturers Association, which had once unequivocally dominated workermanagement relations in the city. Between 1936 and 1939, more than 250 strikes, involving in excess of forty-five thousand employees, erupted in Greater Los Angeles. Streetcar operators halted their cars in a massive citywide work stoppage, hundreds of aircraft workers waged sit-down strikes, and unemployed Works Progress Administration workers were for the first time organizing themselves.19 Employers and elites within the Merchant and Manufacturers Association responded in the newspapers, denouncing protests as “a revolution.” They replaced strikers with poorer, less-skilled recruits and used hired thugs and the Los Angeles Police Department’s antiunion, anticommunist “Red Squad” to beat demonstrators and spray them with tear gas.20 Fascist organizations such as the Silver Shirts, the National Army of America, and the Hollywood Hussers, a group that included antimigrant police chief James Davis, were also beginning to take root.21 “Groups and organizations, some worthy, some sinister, began to take form,” the journalists Luther Whiteman and Samuel L. Lewis noted. “A great fermentation was beginning again in California.”22

Refugees / 51 In the midst of this turmoil, Dust Bowl migrants arrived en masse. More than ninety-six thousand Dust Bowlers moved to Greater Los Angeles between 1935 and 1940, contributing to a nearly 22 percent rise in total residency for that decade.23 Large numbers congregated in edge cities such as Bell Gardens, El Monte, and Lynwood, working-class suburbs on the outskirts of the tire- and auto-parts-manufacturing “industrial triangle” of southeastern Los Angeles. There they lived in tents, trailers, and makeshift dwellings on small lots purchased in the hope of eventually building a permanent home. A small but lucky group of migrants in El Monte took advantage of the federal Subsistence Homestead program’s single-unit housing. Skilled and semiskilled blue-collar migrants moved to apartments and rental homes in low-income areas of middle-class towns such as Santa Monica, Burbank, and Glendale to be closer to factory jobs in aircraft manufacturing. Oil workers moved to areas such as Long Beach and Signal Hill.24 Poorer male migrants found lodging in the single-person-occupancy hotels of Bunker Hill, while at least one group of poor migrant women lived downtown near jobs as taxidancers at a hall that catered to Filipino men. The least fortunate Dust Bowlers inhabited the washes, the skid rows on Fifth Street and Hollywood Boulevard, and the semirural, underdeveloped, unincorporated areas between cities or on the outskirts of the composite Southern California megalopolis.25 Such diversity in geography and employment opportunity created a climate where Dust Bowl migrants ultimately found themselves among both strikers and “scab” replacement workers.26 Broadcasting over this topographically and economically diverse expanse, Guthrie and Crissman played an important role in the histories of local radio and migrant identity. KFVD, the radio station that transmitted Woody and Lefty Lou, was a small, independently owned thousand-watt station that carried a smorgasbord of programming. Owned by J. Frank Burke and managed in part by his son J. Frank Burke Jr., the station featured religious broadcasters, news programs, a Spanish language morning show, a Jewish Classical Hour, and several hillbilly and western music shows. The station also broadcast poetry and dramas, but its central focus was political programming, especially the elder Burke’s own liberal news commentary on his five-day-a-week Editor of the Air program. Although KFVD’s “Center of Your Dial” transmissions were weaker than those of the six other stations in the area, including the twin fifty-thousand-watt powerhouses KFI and KNX, the station’s signal was strong enough to reach a radius of one hundred miles. At night, when signals carried farther, Woody and Lefty Lou was reportedly heard by listeners as far away as Canada, Hawaii, and West Virginia.27

52

/ Big City Ways

The Woody and Lefty Lou show became a permanent part of the KFVD lineup as the first real hillbilly and western music craze swept Los Angeles. KFI and KECA broadcast the nationally syndicated National Barn Dance based in Chicago, but most stations featured live local talent, aware of the low cost of hillbilly musicians and the demand among earlier midwestern transplants and recently arrived Dust Bowlers. KNX hosted radio personality Peter Porter’s popular and long-lived Hollywood Barn Dance. Other hillbilly and western acts included the Sons of the Pioneers on KFWB, the Beverly Hill Billies on KMPC, Stuart Hamblen and His Lucky Stars on KFVD, and the Cowtown Boys on KIEV. Some bands, such as the Beverly Hill Billies and the Sons of the Pioneers, which featured a young Roy Rogers at one point, went on to national recognition. So far-reaching was the hillbilly craze that, according to Crissman, it was difficult to find a single fifteen-minute slot in a day without at least one station serving up cowboy or country.28 Guthrie and Crissman, in fact, “inherited” Woody and Lefty Lou as a result of an earlier KFVD program starring Guthrie and his first cousin Leon “Oklahoma Jack” Guthrie. That program, The Oklahoma and Woody Show, generally featured Jack’s renditions of cowboy ballads made popular by Gene Autry and Ken Maynard, but Jack abandoned it when he realized the demanding, unpaid schedule was making it impossible to support his family.29 Woody, who was often relegated to backup harmonica and percussion on his cousin’s show, remained on the air after Jack left and convinced Crissman, a neighbor, to accompany him. Rather than cowboy ballads, the two sang the folksier commercial and public-domain songs popularized by the Carter Family, a Virginia act that had become a national radio attraction in the 1920s. The duo dubbed the new program Woody and Lefty Lou because Guthrie had nicknamed Crissman “Lefty Lou from old Mizoo” on account of her left-handedness and her origins in Missouri. “Lou” had not been associated with Crissman at all but simply fit Guthrie’s rhyme scheme and sense of humor.30 Many early country performers used unpaid radio work to advertise their paid performances, but Guthrie and Crissman found that Frank Burke Jr. was willing to pay them twenty dollars a week. This put their earnings well above the median weekly wage of a farmworker or unskilled laborer and just under the median average income for the blue-collar employees the U.S. Census Bureau deemed as “operatives and kindred workers.”31 The Burkes were so happy with Crissman and Guthrie’s work that they eventually increased the Woody and Lefty Lou airtime to three times a day, five

Refugees / 53 days a week, and began to use the program’s mail as a means of testing consumer reaction to certain products the station advertised.32 With the better voice of the two, Crissman was the duo’s lead vocalist, but the two were fond of a brother-sister duet style that gave their act a sweetly harmonious, almost androgynous, sound, Crissman’s later reports suggest. Guthrie—who acted as the program’s host, musical accompanist, and secondary vocalist—later described Crissman as having a “quick ear” and a “low-pitched, boyish way of singing.” Crissman defined Guthrie’s voice as “the most saddest high tenor.” Guthrie played guitar, mandolin, banjo, and mouth harp and often regaled his listeners with jokes and folksy tall tales. Crissman occasionally backed Guthrie on guitar. With Crissman singing lead in her lower-pitched voice and Guthrie singing harmony with his higher-pitched male voice, they produced an eccentrically infectious sound that Crissman later described as their “crossnote trademark.”33

every trick and device: commercial hillbilly radio as civic space Guthrie and Crissman’s stint on KFVD suggests that, rather than being a font for conservatism and unbending tradition, commercial hillbilly music could provide room for liberal-populist political commentary and even radical social critique. Especially important for the duo’s development and Guthrie’s later on-the-air political agitating was the structure of broadcasting at KFVD. Although the station was a commercial enterprise, its owner’s politics and its liberal advertising policies allowed Crissman and Guthrie to use their program to sing about migrant abuses. Guthrie later used this structure to advocate certain causes and introduce political commentary in his songs. Although often neglected in Los Angeles’s political history, KFVD played a crucial role in the development of what Mike Davis has called the “the labor-reformist popular front in California,” a coalition that tenuously allied liberals, leftists, and trade unionists behind New Deal legislation and municipal reform. While wealthier, more powerful stations such as KECA and KFI could be counted on to represent business interests by airing the state Chamber of Commerce’s March of Progress, and William Randolph Hearst’s KEHE tended to reflect the conservative views of its owner, the programs on smaller stations like KFVD frequently criticized the status quo and the area’s business leaders. Although the elder Burke allowed the right-

54

/ Big City Ways

wing radio evangelist Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler a Sunday morning slot in the name of free speech, KFVD’s political programming was overwhelmingly liberal, leftist, or populist in nature. Regular programming during the late 1930s included Cooperation on the Air, the official program of what remained of Upton Sinclair’s left-wing End Poverty In California (EPIC) bloc within the Democratic Party; the Non-Partisan League of California, created by the local chapter of the pro-CIO citizens’ group; as well as individual political commentary programs by Clifford E. Clinton, the famous civic reformer and cafeteria owner; and Robert Noble, a former EPICite, pension advocate, and third-party activist. Burke even allotted time to the late Huey Long’s populist supporters and The People’s World, a Communist Party news program.34 J. Frank Burke’s programming choices reflected his personal politics. In many ways, Burke was a typical early-twentieth-century Progressive who, like at least some of his political cohort, sought the more extensive labor rights and governmental welfare programs favored by the social democratic wing of the New Deal. Abandoned by an alcoholic father, Burke was active in the Ohio Prohibition Party through the second decade of the twentieth century, eventually saving enough money to purchase a small nut-and-bolt factory. Amassing $350,000 as result of wartime demand, he moved to California and bought Orange County’s Santa Ana Daily Register, using its pages to lash out at the starvation wages paid to area farmworkers and providing legal aid to a man jailed for distributing antifascist publications labeled communistic. Soon after, Burke threw his support behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sold the Register, which would become the Orange County Register, and bought KFVD in Los Angeles. Although he officially supported the centrist Progressive candidate in the 1934 gubernatorial election, he donated money covertly and generously to socialist Upton Sinclair.35 By 1937, Burke was a committed activist on the burgeoning left wing of the state Democratic Party, balancing official duties with his personal beliefs. Novelist John Fante noted that he was an impassioned and occasionally grandiloquent speaker. But Burke’s politics were sufficiently respectable for him to serve as vice chairman of the state party’s central committee and be considered for appointment as state party chairman in 1938. Acting as Southern California campaign advisor for the New Deal gubernatorial candidate Culbert L. Olson, Burke used his Editor of the Air program and Light: The Democratic Leader, a new political newspaper he started, to help Olson win the governor’s seat that same year. Burke, however, also maintained his emotional ties to prohibitionism as well as connections to vari-

Refugees / 55 ous progressive causes outside the official Democratic platform. He campaigned, for instance, for the migrant-supported Ham and Eggs pension plan, a measure considered anathema to many party regulars.36 Even though Burke’s political background suggests an affinity for oppositional politics and the Okie cause, he still demanded a degree of professionalism and competency from his radio performers. Nostalgic commentators have argued that pre–World War II radio station managers frequently allowed untrained performers on their hillbilly programs, but Guthrie and Crissman’s experience suggest the contrary. KFVD officials granted the singing duo control of their program based on the fact that both had a sufficient degree of musical training, including some semiprofessional and professional experience, and they were in place to take over a program largely pioneered by a former costar. Crissman read music, had had voice training in high school, had picked up the saxophone, and had performed at fairs, churches, and schools as a teenager. Guthrie had performed with a professional medicine show, in which he sang and performed comedy to help sell a patent medicine, had been involved in several bands, and had even appeared briefly on small-town radio in Pampa.37 KFVD officials left Guthrie and Crissman relatively free to develop their own style and gave them an even greater degree of freedom in developing their show’s content. Often their shows were unscripted, and at times, their attempts bordered on the amateurish. Several listeners wrote in to complain when the pair became overly fond of putting not-so-talented relatives on as guest performers. “Your charm lies in your individuality,” wrote Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Couch. “When you have other than you two, it’s just a hillbilly act.” More successful with audiences were Guthrie’s efforts to interject humor, tall tales, and his own “words of wisdom” into the broadcasts.38 The two-tiered structure of advertising for musical programs at KFVD reinforced the freedom Guthrie and Crissman enjoyed on the air and assured the sort of climate that allowed Guthrie’s liberal-populist leanings to flourish. Sustaining sponsors of Woody and Lefty Lou such as the Victor Clothing Company and Sal-Ro-Cin Headache Pills came and went frequently, but station officials guaranteed Guthrie and Crissman their twenty-dollar weekly salary. Commercials for these sponsors were performed by station announcers, not the musical performers, and the sponsors appear to have had little control over the program’s content. Guthrie and Crissman did, however, occasionally solicit smaller advertisers on the air, usually in return for some bartered gift. They, for instance, plugged a specific rodeo in return for tickets to see the rodeo, and mentioned a specific market in return for free groceries. “We advertised places of business, Car

56

/ Big City Ways

Lots, Markets, (etc), in exchange for a few dollars worth of household necessities each week,” Guthrie wrote of these second-tier sponsors. While necessity or want might require them to plug certain sponsors, they did this at their own discretion. “They (the station officials) didn’t care what we did,” Crissman recalled.39 The relative freedom at KFVD stood in stark contrast to a short interlude when Crissman and Guthrie left the station to perform for the fiftythousand-watt Tijuana superstation XELO, one of a string of broadcasting units placed on the Mexican border in the 1920s and 1930s to evade radio spectrum regulations but still reach American consumers.40 Coaxed into joining XELO with promises of more money, Guthrie and Crissman were quickly put off by the right of censorship granted to a sponsoring patentmedicine company and the bombastic and often unscrupulous advertisements it ran for its Peruna Tonic cure-all and its Kolorbak hair dye. Guthrie chaffed at “the blue pencil lines drawn across the several censored verses of each song,” claiming that they were “as blue as the blood vessels in the hand of company’s agent.” Crissman was more upset at the way the agent bullied her to get Guthrie to succumb to the agent’s direction, as well as his use of loud advertising pitches she felt repelled listeners. Three weeks later the duo quit and returned to KFVD.41 Despite their distaste for the hypercommercialism at XELO, it cannot be stressed enough that the two were engaged in overtly commercial radio making at KFVD. Although Guthrie had rejected commercial cowboy performers as “cowboy clothes peddlers” who offered escapist fare, the hillbilly and “river, mountain, and gospel” music that he and Crissman played stemmed from its own set of commercial sources.42 Woody and Lefty Lou, in fact, appears to have been more indebted to printed broadsides, Tin Pan Alley, old blackface minstrelsy songs, and the burgeoning hillbilly music recording industry than to public-domain folk ballads. It may be possible to deduce the extent to which Guthrie, the pair’s singular composer, borrowed from commercial sources by examining the 272 individual surviving songs from the period at KFVD that have been stored in the pair’s commercially available song folio, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection (of) Old Time Hill Country Songs (1937), and two personal songbook sets now archived at the Library of Congress and the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives in New York. Of the 155 songs whose origins can be firmly verified, more than three-fifths, or 62 percent, were songs whose tunes or lyrics, or both, had been previously recorded commercially or printed as commercial sheet music.43 Among these were several Tin Pan Alley songs such as “After the Brawl,”

Refugees / 57 a clever rewrite of Charles K. Harris’s 1892 hit “After the Ball,” which had sold over a million copies in sheet music, as well as numbers, such as “Old Dan Tucker,” that had been passed down from the blackface minstrelsy tradition, probably unbeknownst to the pair. But most of these commercially printed or recorded songs originated from the repertoires or studio sessions of 1920s- and 1930s-era commercial hillbilly artists such as Vernon Dalhart, the Delmore Brothers, Jimmie Rodgers, and Otto Gray’s Oklahoma Cowboy Band. The Carter Family, perhaps the most respected paragons of traditional music on commercial radio in the 1930s, were by far the greatest source. Not only did Guthrie and Crissman perform more than a dozen Carter hymns and ballads on their program, but Guthrie repeatedly paired Carter Family tunes with lyrics he wrote.44 Guthrie and Crissman’s KFVD repertoire demonstrates just how tenuous the distinctions were by the 1930s between “folklore,” that vestige of a supposedly pristine preindustrial culture, and “poplore,” a term Archie Green has applied to folklike material and traditions “spawned by mass media.”45 While some Woody and Lefty Lou songs were folksy-sounding products of the recording industry, others actually began as Anglo or African American folk songs, but had likely been passed to the pair commercially, through song folios, radio broadcasts, and recordings of the Carter Family. Only 14 percent were bona fide public domain ballads that do not appear to have been commercially recorded by 1937, songs that Guthrie or Crissman likely heard from old-timers, relatives, or other folk performers. Finally, 24 percent were songs that Guthrie appears to have written himself—itself significant in that Guthrie later bemoaned the waning of nonprofessional singing and championed an inclusive do-it-yourself approach to music making and politics.46 Though never enriching themselves at KFVD, Guthrie and Crissman employed audience-building strategies that were as akin to Madison Avenue as they were to the homemade hand-me-downs that delighted later folk enthusiasts. Soon after the program began, listeners were invited to send in a dime for a sample of Sal-Ro-Cin and an illustrated song sheet of a topical ballad Guthrie wrote. Much like other hillbilly and popular-music musicians of the era, Guthrie and Crissman supplemented their income by using the airwaves to sell songbooks such as the professionally printed 1937 folio Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection: Old Time Hill Country Songs, whose title included the built-in promotional slogan Being Sung for Ages, Still Going Strong, and the mimeographed 1939 songbook On a Slow Train through California. The pair also held promotional contests for listeners, giving away prizes to the audience member who picked up their sig-

58

/ Big City Ways

nal from the farthest away or to the listener who sent in the “wildest cyclone story,” “best miracle story,” or “best tall tale.” Often Guthrie would send winning listeners his self-made oil paintings of California missions. Guthrie even went so far as to have his newborn son’s name chosen by listener fiat, although his wife, Mary, put her foot down, throwing over the winning “Will Rogers Guthrie” for “Bill Rogers Guthrie.”47 While some of this promotionalism was homespun, this didn’t dampen the duo’s larger ambitions, especially when a telegram arrived asking them to appear on the important National Barn Dance aired by the Chicago radio station WLS. Inexplicably, and despite their initial excitement, the pair never pursued the offer.48 After Crissman left KFVD and Guthrie began offering more politically engaged fare, Guthrie brought this promotionalism to his activist pursuits. Long before media executives began speaking of “synergy,” Guthrie plugged his radio program in the humor columns and cartoons he produced, sometimes simultaneously, for four local liberal or radical newspapers— Light, California Progressive Leader, the Hollywood Tribune, and the People’s World—while concurrently using his radio program to advertise his newspaper endeavors.49 Guthrie, in fact, appears to have believed that marrying the promotional techniques of advertising and show business with the organizing methods of trade unions and political coalitions could be a powerful strategy for reaching an audience. He later invoked a pantheon of promotional impresarios when describing strategies for generating support for farmworkers and Hollywood unions at several unpaid concerts in 1939: “We used every trick and device of the trades of salesmen, show men, P. T. Barnum’s, Flo Zeigfelds, Jimmie Rodgers, and every twist of the nipple that filled California’s dry and native soul with a fighting kind, a more personal, human, kind of folk song, folk dance, folk yell.” Guthrie’s background in commercial hillbilly programming and its advertising structure became, in a sense, an important asset in his attempts to find a larger audience for his left-wing reformism. His only caveat at the time was that “fonograft records” should not replace live musicians at “saloons and radeo stations,” a stance in no way criticizing the commercialization of live programming. True, Guthrie later turned against what he saw as “the Monopoly on Music,” paradoxically at about the same time that he was recording Dust Bowl Ballads for the giant RCA Victor corporation in New Jersey. But as a performer at KFVD, Guthrie, like his boss J. Frank Burke, saw no problem with infusing his left-of-center politics with promotionalism at KFVD. Nor did he see a problem with infusing his promotionalism with liberalpopulism.50

Refugees / 59

defiant refugees: listenership, populism, and the migrant image Given latitude by station managers, Guthrie and Crissman experimented with the content of Woody and Lefty Lou, reaching out to homesick and working-class listeners and developing an early and politically cogent counterimage of the Dust Bowl migrant that often promoted leftist and populist political causes. Crissman used her time on KFVD to pursue a quieter personal politics of standing up for the underdog, while Guthrie began to attach himself publicly and sometimes even dangerously to political causes.51 Studies of radio demographics from the era suggest that programs such as Woody and Left Lou were particularly popular with lower income and working-class listeners. A 1939 survey of Washington, D.C., audiences found that “lower income” radio listeners were more than twice as likely to enjoy “hill-billy music” as “higher income” respondents, while a 1936– 1938 study found that listeners from homes with annual incomes of two thousand to three thousand dollars were more than three times as likely to tune in to the National Barn Dance program as those earning five thousand dollars or more a year.52 Not only did working-class listeners tend to be more plentiful, but, some researchers even argued, the amount of radio listening increased as one traveled down the economic scale.53 Though no survey appears to have polled Southern California Dust Bowl migrants, anecdotal evidence suggests that migrants were an important part of the local hillbilly craze. Researcher Charles B. Spaulding found an avid listenership in the working-class haunts of Bell Gardens, a community in southeast Los Angeles with a significant Okie population. “Everyone has a radio,” Spaulding wrote in 1939. “And most people reported using it a great deal.” Among the most popular programs listed by Spaulding’s interviewees were those featuring dance bands and cowboy music.54 Although it is difficult to reconstruct the details about the Woody and Lefty Lou audience because of the loss of many fan letters, surviving evidence suggests that much of the duo’s mail came from working-class listeners, Dust Bowlers, and women. Of some eighty-one names and addresses on a 1939 handscript inventory of incoming fan mail, more than a quarter of the letter writers either resided in areas of heavy migrant settlement such as South Gate, Lynwood, and Downey, or used nicknames and pseudonyms such as “Tex” or “Oklahoma Cowgirl” that suggested they originated in the greater Dust Bowl region. More than 60 percent of the same letter writers gave first names or titles such as “Miss” or “Mrs.” that identify them as women.55 Others sources seem to confirm these demographics. The Holly-

60

/ Big City Ways

wood Tribune, for instance, reported that Guthrie’s fan mail came from mostly “Okies and Arkies,” and fellow KFVD broadcaster Ed Robbin remembered that write-in listeners were mostly blue-collar workers and the unemployed: “The people who listened to him were the people he sang about, his own people, the Okies.” Crissman’s own recollection in 1999 was that writers of fan letters included many women and spanned a range of occupations, including those of blue-collar groups such as miners, sailors, and ranch workers.56 Drawing on their knowledge of the show’s audience, their own social dislocation, and their backgrounds as migrants, Crissman and Guthrie began talking and singing in ways that suggested they and their listeners formed an “imagined community,” scholar Benedict Anderson’s term for deep, horizontal comradeship of people who imagine sharing some meaningful form of communion.57 Offering a sense of familiarity and a mental respite from the Depression, Crissman and Guthrie invited the troubled and down-andout to briefly suspend their skepticism and believe that they were valued members of a stable, cohesive community of listeners. During their broadcasts, they spoke of their audiences as “family” or intimate and informal “friends.” They read the names of letter writers over the air, and often responded to song requests with a musical number. In one surviving program script, Guthrie encouraged the fiction of familiarity by challenging listeners to imagine his and Crissman’s physical attributes as their voices traveled over the ether, and by suggesting that he and Crissman were engaged in the same imaginative process: “The first night you aint got nuthin to do, set down and write us and let us know how you’re gettin along. We like to hear from you. We call you our Unseen Friend. But of course we got a picher of you sorta in our minds—jest like you got one about us.” Fans, in turn, reciprocated the fiction of intimacy by writing in about their personal troubles, asking for airtime to perform, or inviting the pair to visit their homes. When Guthrie talked facetiously about how “raggedy” his clothes were over the air, Crissman remembered, some poor soul sent a package of shirts for him to wear. Such devotion was not unusual among Los Angeles hillbilly audiences in the 1930s. Charlie Quirk, a member of the Beverly Hill Billies broadcasting on KMPC, recalled that one of his band mates made “the mistake of mentioning on the air that his old cabin burned down.” The next day, enough lumber, furniture, and household goods for several houses had been brought in by listeners and piled up in the KMPC parking lot.58 In emphasizing a shared sense of community with a far-flung body of listeners, Crissman and Guthrie were following accepted practices for establishing a large and profitable radio audience. “Time and time again out-

Refugees / 61 standing authorities on radio programming have told us that the achievement of a personalized relationship between performer and audience is the greatest secret of program success,” advised the 1938 trade guide How to Build the Radio Audience. On the level of national political culture, FDR, with his presidential Fireside Chats, was a particularly skilled master of the tactic. Although present-day cynics might scoff at their proclaimed altruism, Guthrie and Crissman repeatedly stressed in subsequent writings and interviews that they felt a real sense of communion with audiences. Crissman readily admitted to an interviewer some thirty years later that personal touches assured that letters would come in. And letters meant the program would be maintained by the station and sponsors. But she also confided in 1968 that she and Guthrie really felt a part of many of their listeners’ lives, no matter how indirectly. In 1999, she again used the word family to describe her and Guthrie’s relationship with the audience. “They were our friends,” she recalled.59 Cognizant of listeners’ lower income backgrounds, the pair composed several songs that chronicled the plight of the lonely and the poor. Their theme song, a six-stanza ditty that introduced and ended their program, took special notice of the “sad and lonely,” inviting them to “hitch your bay mare to your buggy” and bring “your folks and chilluns” to “come see Woody and Lefty Lou.” Woody and Lefty Lou also began linking itself with a populist producer ethic that glorified hardworking rural people and singled out urban money handlers for scorn. One track on the only known recording made of Guthrie at KFVD, a four-song air check forgotten for decades until I uncovered it while conducting research for this chapter, warned that overly naïve transplants were apt to be deceived by “the mortgage company” and “the finance man” into accumulating costly and long-lasting debt. Such themes appeared in numerous songbook numbers from the era as well, including “Dollar Now and a Dollar When We Meet,” “Better Stay in the Livery Barn,” and “A Dollar Ninety Seven.”60 Receiving fan mail from writers such as “Tex” and “Oklahoma Cowgirl,” Guthrie and Crissman soon introduced material about the migration itself, offering one of the earliest self-depictions of migrant identity in the mass media. Crissman and Guthrie’s first snapshots of migrants were often comic or romanticized portraits of the pre–Dust Bowl plains. “Sometimes when we’re drivin’ to the radio station I get awful homesick,” wrote Crissman in one prepared radio text. “Dodgin’ busses, street cars and dumptrucks makes me think how quiet and peaceful my hometown is, except when someone aint shootin’ at somebody else. . . . I’m not forgettin’ the band concerts every Thursday night either, with the home town band goin’ to town and

62

/ Big City Ways

the Ladies Aid Society throwing a big ice cream supper.” These early depictions of Dust Bowl life spoke to migrants’ wistfulness and attracted a few letters from long-distance listeners in the southern plains. Guthrie and Crissman soon began singing about the hardships westbound migrants endured. “Dust Bowl Blues,” for instance, joked about how “thousands” of feet of dust buried one farmer’s tractor and, later, his sweetheart.61 More popular was 1937’s “Do-Re-Mi,” a song that inaugurated Woody and Lefty Lou’s move into overtly political themes and portrayed Dust Bowlers as landowning middle-class transients victimized by a malevolent border-obstructing bureaucratic order. “Do-Re-Mi,” a composition that Guthrie recorded on the early KFVD air check and would later include on his nationally renowned Dust Bowl Ballads album, cautioned would-be migrants about selling off the farm, arguing that California was no “garden of Eden” but a place that devoured anyone who lacked the “do”—the dough, or money—in the song’s “do-re-mi.”62 Although gently gibing southern plains migrants about their naïveté, “Do-Re-Mi” had a more prickly side that was aimed at Californians, especially antimigrant officeholders and Los Angeles Police Department border guards who tried to bar migrants from entering and who barked out statistics—“You’re number 14,000 for today!”—that reduced migrants to an impersonal number among the multitudes. Guthrie’s and Crissman’s experiences with the Los Angeles Police Department’s “foreign legion” were, however, vicarious. Crissman arrived long before the blockade was set up. Guthrie entered California a year after the checkpoint had been dismantled, and he most likely read of the blockade in the newspaper. But Guthrie and Crissman’s willingness to challenge authorities and the police in song put them on a track toward more politicized offerings.63 The changing political inclinations of Woody and Lefty Lou even began to be reflected in the pair’s use of hillbilly, the term Guthrie and Crissman used to describe their program, broadcast personas, and musical style. On the surface, defining oneself and one’s music as hillbilly might appear to reinforce stereotypes that Dust Bowlers were dull-witted and culturally backward. But like others who have remade bigoted epithets into affectionate or rebellious in-group names, Guthrie and Crissman exhibited pride in being hillbillies, depicting hillbillies—and by extension migrants—as unpretentious community-oriented people who revered family and lent a hand to the less fortunate.64 So-called migrant laziness, for instance, was recast into an unhurried, reflective approach to good literature and a preference for a saner, slower-paced lifestyle. The twelfth-century Persian poet and thinker Omar Khayyám was a hillbilly, Guthrie wrote somewhat facetiously, be-

Refugees / 63 cause he appreciated the beauty and relaxation of hearing one’s lover sing after a long afternoon picnic under a shade tree. The idea that hillbillies and migrants were prone to Li’l Abner–like feuding could also be reworked, as when Guthrie jested in the People’s World that migrants might be willing to trade cornbread and sweet milk for firearms should exploitive California moneymen and developers show up at the annual Oklahoma picnic in Los Angeles.65 Although images of victimized small farm owners and defiant migranthillbillies remained in Guthrie’s stories, he began to formulate depictions of more desperate migrants after Crissman left the program in 1938. These new images, which became a mainstay of his solo Woody, the Lone Wolf program, emerged from some investigative reporting Guthrie did for Light at the request of J. Frank Burke. Touring California and Arizona as the pro–New Deal paper’s “special hobo correspondent,” Guthrie observed the plight of the poorest migrants, those forced to travel on foot or by hopping freights. In one article, Guthrie argued that railroad guards and police harassed the “starvation armies of wandering workers” by callously ordering stowaway passengers off boxcars in the middle of the scorching Mojave Desert in late summer. “I saw one bunch—two married couples, two soldiers, and two others—on the outskirts of Needles [California] head into the oven of the desert on their way home,” he wrote. Other migrants feared being arrested for idleness or vagrancy because local authorities marched them “almost chain gang style to the bean patch to work without pay.”66 Changed by the experience, Guthrie not only talked about their plight on the radio but also began to write about them in his “Cornbread Philosophy” and “Woody Sez” columns in local liberal and radical newspapers, using humor and a not-too-transparent emulation of the left-leaning Oklahoma humorist Will Rogers to counter negative stereotypes and publicize the bleakness of the migrant life.67 Guthrie soon translated these experiences into songs such as “Ain’t Got a Cent,” and “Dustbowl Refugees” that featured full-fledged impoverished economic “refugees.”68 Unlike the middling farmer-migrants of “Do-ReMi,” members of this new crop of migrants were simply “wandering workers,” fieldhands lacking land or money even before departing the southern plains. While Guthrie and Crissman’s earlier depictions of migrants incorporated light jabs at authorities and law enforcement, these later songs presented worker-refugees confronting life-threatening injustices and more readily bemoaning their exploitation, suggesting a people so fed up that outright rebellion was likely. The narrator of “Ain’t Got a Cent,” for instance, regretted ever getting on Route 66 because wages were so low in Cal-

64

/ Big City Ways

ifornia he could not shelter or feed his family. Guthrie underscored such thinking in his “Woody Sez” columns by harping on the “the Rapes of Graft” (a play on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) inflicted on migrants by California institutions and employers, by pointing out that “the refugees are homeless and the finance men are glad of it,” and by developing the beginnings of refugee-focused pride: “The dustier you are the finer you’re polished.”69 Even Guthrie’s comedy began to take on a new weightiness. He continued to use humor to assail migrant stereotypes, but he also occasionally joked that migrants were prepared to take defensive action. Often bubbling under the surface of these portrayals was pure vitriol, as when Guthrie used “Woody Sez” to warn “bankers and real estate dealers” to avoid the Oklahoma picnic lest they become the target of gunfire. On the air, Guthrie reinforced the image of migrants as embattled but pugnacious refugees by singing “bad man” ballads. Some painted laudatory portraits of actual Oklahoma outlaws, such as “Pretty Boy Floyd,” who Guthrie transformed into a Robin Hood–style character who stole from the rich to pay off poor farmers’ mortgages. Others were melodramatic, featuring fictional workingclass heroes taking revenge on wealthy adversaries. In “Reno Blues (Philadelphia Lawyer),” for instance, a modest cowhand guns down an upper-crust East Coast attorney for attempting to steal his “Hollywood maid.”70 No matter how much Guthrie glamorized his bad men, his rebel-bandit streak only went so far. He later wrote that he had not wanted to see “a bloody revolution” come to Los Angeles, but that he did hope the workers and the poor would be allowed to eat from the tables of the rich and drink from their great “underground cities” of expensive wines and liquors. Guthrie was more a propagandist for an evolutionary populist reform than he was an insurrectionary collectivist, and much of his writing sought to simply raise living standards for the poor and the working class. “Until you workin’ folks all get together to beat Wall Street,” he wrote in one column, “the Bean will be the subject of popularity.”71 Although Guthrie’s brand of populism was generally more reformist than revolutionary, resistant and dissident Dust Bowlers so dominated Guthrie’s media depictions of the migration that, by 1939, the word refugee had replaced hillbilly and farmer as the moniker of choice. The historian Michael Denning has explored Guthrie’s later discomfort with the term refugee, but Guthrie showed little hesitation to use it while broadcasting in Los Angeles, often linking his “Dust Bowl refugee” status with the leftwing causes célèbres in which he was involved. Not only did he place the ef-

Refugees / 65 fusive ballad “Dust Bowl Refugee” on page one of his radio songbook from the era, but he also flooded his newspaper columns with the word refugee, arguing in his inaugural column in the Hollywood Tribune that “dustbowel refugese” and “drowth bowel refugeses” shared a common purpose with “political refugese” and “Spanish refugies.” The Depression and fascism in Europe made “purty near everbody . . . a refugie,” he insisted.72 Indeed, influenced by ethnic and political refugees from Hitler’s Europe and Franco’s Spain, Guthrie in his songs and writings began to associate refugee Dust Bowlers with larger, more politically focused struggles with fascism such as the Spanish Civil War and anti-Nazi resistance. By outlining how others shared migrants’ status as refugees and informing readers and listeners about these other conflicts, Guthrie worked to mobilize migrants and other audience listeners as supporters of the antifascist Left. His own connections with Spanish republicanism appear to have been reinforced by having met refugee Spanish radicals and returning veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, a unit comprised of leftist pro-Loyalist American volunteers who had fought Franco’s troops in Spain. Likely prompted by J. Frank Burke or another friend at the pro-republican newspaper California Progressive Leader, Guthrie even raised money for Loyalist Spanish émigrés by performing at a benefit in the Hollywood Hills.73 Though close to the Loyalist cause, Guthrie was even better connected with the antifascist Jewish émigrés and Jewish-American leftists who anguished over the fate of European Jewry. A former Yiddish theater actress, for instance, let cash-poor Guthrie live several months rent-free in a Burbank apartment, occasionally regaling him with her anti-Hitler poetry. A closer friendship, however, emerged between Guthrie and Ed Robbin, an American Jew and Communist Party member whose People’s World broadcast aired after Woody, the Lone Wolf. A journalist who had worked at a Jerusalem newspaper and even lived on a kibbutz, Robbin not only kept Woody abreast of news concerning Jews in the Middle East and Europe but also counseled him on how the American Left could resist homegrown fascism. Guthrie never joined the party but, with Robbin’s support, he began writing for the Communist Party’s West and East Coast papers and hiring himself out for party-related events.74 Guthrie’s preference for refugee over designations such as Okie or Dust Bowler was also informed by his aspirations for migrant political culture.75 For migrants, refugee lacked the painful associations that surrounded Okie, a term that was still somewhat equivalent to a racial epithet in Depressionera California.76 Refugee also appealed more to the in-group affinities of migrants, because Guthrie hinted in his writing, however inaccurately, that he

66

/ Big City Ways

had been the first to use it in this context. This stood in stark contrast to seeming outsider-derived terms such as Okie, likely coined by a California newsman surveying migrant license plates, and Dust Bowl migrant, an impersonal-sounding topographical term preferred by academics and government interlopers.77 More important for Guthrie, refugee emphasized that migrants’ poverty was no fault of their own: migrants were innocent refugees, the downtrodden “people” of the New Deal or the Popular Front seeking subsistence-oriented “asylum” in California. In this sense, the term became a tool for emphasizing a natural connection between southern plains migrants and liberal-populist protest. By linking migrant-refugees with clever hillbillies, antifascist Spanish guerillas and exiles, and dissident diasporic Jews, Guthrie’s phrasing also accentuated a type of alienness that demanded collective political action, recasting the media’s liminally white “migrant hordes” into a thoughtful colorful group of “white ethnics” suited to building liberal- and left-populist political alliances to defend themselves and their citizenship. Although some migrants touted their racial purity and whiteness to counter nativist barbs, Guthrie use of refugee suggests he had come to terms with migrants’ liminally white status, finding in it an opportunity to forge a symbolic alliance between southern plains migrants, southern and eastern European immigrants, and particularly Jews, groups who had historically been considered “off-white” or “not quite white” within American ethnic and racial hierarchies.78 Resigned to playing the role of the liminally white exile hillbilly singer, Guthrie began to use his radio program and newspaper columns to toy with the idea that stigmatized migrants could defend themselves by building a class-based solidarity with racial and cultural minorities. His attitudes, however, were an evolving matter. When he first arrived, Guthrie penned and circulated among friends a bigoted “news story” and drawing that lampooned black beachgoers as primitives, and once performed “Run, Nigger, Run,” the old racist standby by Uncle Dave Macon, on KFVD, but his feelings began to change after a young college-educated African American man wrote to complain about the song. Guthrie apologized and did not play it again.79 Later, after apparently absorbing the racial egalitarianism preached by some quarters of the California Left, Guthrie became an advocate for racial tolerance by speaking out against Jim Crow restrictions, writing and performing antilynching songs, and, in the People’s World, defending black jazz against modernist critics.80 So enthralled with black culture was Guthrie that he later romanticized its effects on workers regardless of race and ethnicity. “When working people sing their songs, their songs of protest

Refugees / 67 and survival, hard hitting songs of hard work and hard times, and then their fighting union songs,” he wrote in one column, “you’re going to find the Blues creeping into them, and from the Blues, Boogie.”81 Guthrie reportedly had been influenced musically by African American performers in his hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, but his “talking blues” musical style was mostly likely derived from listening to Robert Lunn, a white Grand Ole Opry performer who patterned his music after that of black performers.82 Guthrie’s newfound tolerance began to extend to other groups as well. While early Woody and Lefty Lou broadcasts had featured a dismissive and slightly orientalist ditty that Guthrie penned about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, his later writings emphasized how he and a Manchurian neighbor purportedly shared a common refugee status. He later even claimed to have defended Japanese Americans from hate-filled G.I.s when he returned to wartime Los Angeles.83 Although Guthrie’s repertoire of Mexican songs at KFVD appears to have been no more than a few sappy parodies of “Allá in el Rancho Grande,” he sang proudly of Oklahoma being “the land of the great Osage, Chickasa, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole” and even employed a few Creek phrases in another KFVD song. While Guthrie was probably not of Native American descent as many fellow migrants were, he idolized the quarter-Cherokee Will Rogers and later wrote a song in memory of the late political humorist.84 By finding common cause and cultural links with Spanish immigrants, Jews, Asians, African Americans, and Native Americans, Woody and Lefty Lou and Woody, the Lone Wolf challenged dominant interpretations that insisted hillbilly music was a purely Anglo-Saxon form. The influential country music personality Lambdin Kay, for instance, claimed in Rural Radio in 1938 that white hillbilly music was “the only folk music America has,” arguing that Native Americans contributed “nothing but tom-tom rhythm” and that black spirituals were a “faithful reflection of instincts and superstitions born on another continent.”85 For Woody, on the other hand, Indian imagery and black musical influences were at the core of his identity as a dissident refugee.

popular frontism on a greasy string: hillbilly music and local politics Returning to Los Angeles just before the outbreak of World War II, Guthrie wrote friend and folklorist Alan Lomax, an Oklahoma-born performer, about his desire to revive Woody, the Lone Wolf, hoping to use the program

68

/ Big City Ways

to rally Los Angeles workers behind a platform of economic populism and municipal reform: Los Angeles and southern California is thickly settled. This little station covers a strip about 100 miles in each direction. It is full of people that work and talk a working man’s lingo, no matter what tongue or color; so I thought, beings our program on WABC [in New York] was overloaded, beings it only come on 3 times a week, beings it didn’t ever get released onto a nationwide chain, that it might be better for me to step off out here and take a swing at her six times a week, and cover this country that’s so newly settled and where there’s a possible chance for a lot of new things to get started.86

Guthrie’s dream of radicalizing the Southern California workforce, “no matter what tongue or color,” in his old position at KFVD never materialized, and much of the rest of his life would be spent in New York, but this aspiration hints at just how political his final months at Woody, the Lone Wolf became.87 By late 1938 Guthrie had begun overtly backing political office seekers and political initiatives, using his position as a broadcaster to bring migrants and other listeners into the motley and potentially factional alliance that dominated progressive politics in Los Angeles: labor unions, New Deal stalwarts, Hollywood liberals, idealist lodge members of the Utopian Society of America, anticorruption civic activists, third-party partisans, old-agepension backers, and socialist-leaning EPICites. While this alliance’s power was always tenuous, it nevertheless accomplished a few cumbersome tasks, including halting a decades-long antipicketing ordinance that crippled local labor, electing a pro–New Deal governor in longtime Republican California, and defeating a corrupt local municipal regime that had, among other things, victimized migrants.88 Though Guthrie was among the most pointedly political, he was not the first performer to combine country music with populist paeans to “the people” or odes to the social programs of the New Deal. A few country songs of the era leaned toward the conservative Republican position, such as “Old Age Pension,” Roy Acuff’s satire of Social Security, but the great majority of country music activism leaned toward the Democrats or farther to the left.89 The southern hillbilly radio pioneer Fiddlin’ John Carson championed FDR’s efforts for farmers in “Hurrah for Roosevelt,” and Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, a Texas hillbilly-jazz band, penned “Fall in Line with

Refugees / 69 the N.R.A,” a celebratory ode to Roosevelt and his National Recovery Administration.90 Even the mildly populist matinee idol and cowboy singer Gene Autry later claimed to have played a character whose actions were in line with the New Deal ethos.91 So powerful did the combination of radio and politics become that by the late 1930s some hillbilly entertainers launched their own bids for public office, painting themselves as populist outsiders. W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a Fort Worth hillbilly personality, used his program to win the Texas gubernatorial race in 1938, the same year that Stuart Hamblen, a rival of Guthrie’s who performed on KFVD with his cowboy band the Lucky Stars, ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for a congressional seat representing north central Los Angeles County.92 Guthrie was aware of the success of populist performer-politicians such as O’Daniel and at least considered their success in gauging his own activist pursuits. His personal writings from the time note that, after O’Daniel got to be governor of Texas “on a breakdown fiddle,” hillbilly musicians everywhere “have sobered up a little and are all getting big ideas. . . . Yessir, I’ve seen judges and representatives and all kinds of congress men get elected on in there just on one good greasy string.”93 Guthrie’s first public act in the electoral realm included supporting New Dealer Culbert L. Olson’s bid for governor and FDR’s antipoverty programs on air and in his column in Light. More moderate than Sinclair, Olson served as a leader of the EPIC-liberal Democratic bloc in the state legislature and won the gubernatorial race in 1938 with the support of labor, pension plan backers, and liberal Democrats. In one radio text, Guthrie advised his audiences to send in for a sample copy of Light so that they could presumably learn about Olson. “It’ll set you up on a high Viewpoint, and you can see a lot of things about Lost Angeles Politicks that you caint see from down here in the crowds,” he wrote.94 At about the same time, Guthrie also began using his media influence to support the Ham and Eggs initiative. Based loosely on the original and somewhat nefarious Old Age Revolving Pensions plan designed by the Long Beach physician Francis Townsend, Ham and Eggs would have provided scrip payments of thirty dollars a week to the elderly in an effort to bolster consumer spending and reduce unemployment, by encouraging older workers to retire and allow younger workers to take over their jobs.95 Guthrie wrote and told friends he believed the measure would help stabilize the lives of migrants broken by social dislocation and economic depression. Even before Guthrie got involved with the economic populism of Ham and Eggs, Crissman and he had performed at a few meetings of the

70

/ Big City Ways

Townsend movement. Once Guthrie officially joined the Ham and Eggs cause, he began performing his own pro-pension compositions, songs such as “Give Us That Old Age Pension” and “Ham and Eggs Is Marching On,” set to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”96 After Ham and Eggs was defeated in 1938, Guthrie wrote a seventy-nine-page pamphlet, $30 Wood Help!, urging support for the measure’s 1939 campaign: “You might say Ham & Eggs wont work out. Can it go any more haywire than the system we got? Can over a third of our people starve to death? Or is it worth the change?”97 Guthrie even touted the measure on Woody, the Lone Wolf by publicizing a daily straw vote in which he tallied listener mail to determine attitudes toward the plan.98 Despite the support of many migrants, the measure suffered a final defeat that November.99 Guthrie also crafted the image of the city of Los Angeles into a symbol of great political substance in his songs and writings. He not only verbalized his own misgivings about the urban environment as a means of counterbalancing the uncritical image of Los Angeles offered by boosters but also incorporated into his descriptions a scathing critique of the city’s social and political elite.100 To Guthrie, the Los Angeles of the late 1930s was often “Lost Angeles,” a city plagued by significant problems—downtown traffic congestion, a corrupt jail system, greedy finance companies, class disparities in its disaster containment policy, overpopulated skid rows, and diseaseridden flophouses.101 Like the acclaimed Italian-American novelist and flophouse-dweller John Fante, Guthrie created what Henri Lefebvre later termed “differential spaces”: working-class antimythologies of Los Angeles that debunked unrealistic portraits and assailed the greed and maliciousness that seemed to accompany the rise of a middle-class-oriented consumer society.102 Turning the Southern California citrus orchard motif on its head, Guthrie argued in the notes of one songbook that the “Big City” was “like a bunch of warts on yer hide, formin’ and growin’ like bacteria on an orange, and a spreadin’ its racket and noise and greed and heartbreaks and selfishness in every direction.”103 He similarly assailed the city in his radio ballads. “Big City Ways,” a song popular enough to be added to his only KFVD air check recording, detailed how the city corrupted and beleaguered migrants, imbuing urbanites with a rapacious materialism and perverting their morals. While “the working man he gets run down,” the city also strained familial relationships: “Sister married a gigolo honey/Brother’s a-payin’ alimoney.” Another song chronicled a potentially preventable 1934 deluge that had killed more than forty people, many residing in poorly developed exurbs populated by the unemployed and the working class. Likewise, “Fire in Los Feliz Hills” honored

Refugees / 71 twenty-nine unemployed county conservation corps workers who had been burned to death in 1933 trying to defend Griffith Park and the surrounding expensive homes from a wild brushfire. Most powerful, however, were Guthrie’s “Skid Row Serenade” and “Fifth Street Blues,” which depicted the skid rows on Fifth Street and Hollywood Boulevard populated by hundreds if not thousands of homeless people in the late 1930s. Such ballads drew contrasts between the down-and-out residents of these sections and the better-heeled pedestrians of other parts of town, but they also explicitly blamed the political system. “My senator,” Guthrie sang on the air check as if to eliminate any doubt, “sent me down on the Skid Row.”104 Guthrie also extended a hand to the “people’s politics” of organized labor, publicly pledging his support for striking Northern California dam workers while performing at fund-raisers for motion picture unions, rallies for CIO farm and cannery locals, and a few marches for the Works Projects Administration enrollees who were organizing the unemployed into the Workers Alliance. Taking a cue from some of the more radical members of organized labor and the Los Angeles left, Guthrie also started to promote an emergency nationalization of some types of industrial property. By the time he signed off his last broadcast of Woody, the Lone Wolf, he was advocating “Production for Use,” a program once espoused by the EPIC movement and the left-leaning, pseudo-Masonic Utopian Society lodges, in which idle factories would be seized by the state and returned to production, thereby employing the jobless.105 Guthrie apparently was unwilling to cultivate the substantial discipline necessary for membership in the Communist Party, but his political predilections began to approach the kind of populist “Popular Front” socialism espoused by fellow travelers, such as his friend Will Geer, who would eventually be known for his roles in the blacklisted film Salt of the Earth and the television program The Waltons. Geer, a budding stage and film actor, met Guthrie through Ed Robbin and eventually convinced the singer to try his luck on the radio and labor movement circuit in New York. In Los Angeles and New York, the pair became involved with a series of theater and musical productions supporting trade unionists, racial justice advocates, and the Communist Party, which by the late 1930s sought to build a broad-based cultural front of liberal and leftist artists would who help bring about a new inclusive age of American socialism.106 While the party had once limited its musical involvement to European-style workers’ choruses and formalized concert music, in its new “Popular Front against Fascism” form it began to seek out audiences of popular and traditional music.107

72

/ Big City Ways

Despite Guthrie’s affinity for lionizing “the people,” his reception by party members was lukewarm at times, partly because of the party’s skepticism about the Dust Bowlers and the singer’s seemingly unorthodox political pursuits. “At that time, there was a still a fear of the peasantry because we had seen what they could do [for the fascists] in Europe,” remembered party activist Harry Hay, a gay intellectual who would later be booted for his own sexual and political unorthodoxies.108 Guthrie used his humor to, in turn, keep his distance from the party, potentially allowing himself room for populist criticism of the leader-intellectuals of the self-styled “party of the workers.” “I aint a communist necessarily,” Guthrie joked in one issue of People’s World, “but I’ve been in the Red all my life.”109 Guthrie’s populist edge, and his support for purportedly loopy EPIC and Ham and Eggs measures, raised eyebrows among party dogmatists, especially those critical of the permissive new Popular Front doctrine.110 Unmoved, Guthrie continued to write and draw political cartoons for the California Progressive Leader months after he began writing “Woody Sez” for the People’s World, even though the two papers clashed over the Treaty of Nonaggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, otherwise known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Soviet Union’s offensive gestures toward Finland and Sweden.111 Though tracking Guthrie’s success in reaching and mobilizing listeners is made difficult by the limited surviving paper trail, we do know that migrants participated in organizations the singer-songwriter directly or indirectly endorsed. Charles B. Spaulding found that the migrant refuge of Bell Gardens had a Democratic club and an active chapter of the CIO-affiliated Labor’s Non-Partisan League, both of which appeared to have appealed to the working class: “The union working men who attended [Labor’s NonPartisan League] meetings evidently found some satisfaction in this organization which represented them. They discussed antipicketing ordinances and labor candidates for political office with evident relish and a certain amount of real knowledge of local affairs.”112 Other migrants took part in CIO-organized strikes at the Vultee and North American Aviation aircraft plants,113 while “depression-confused, robbed and despoiled Middle Westerners” made up a significant portion of the thirty thousand people attending a Hollywood Bowl rally for the Utopian Society. The Utopians even raised money by sponsoring old-time hillbilly dances.114 Although playing a diminished role by 1938, the EPIC movement used its EPIC News to assail the Los Angeles Police Department blockade and praise its “Dust-BowlBrethren,” and to urge other Californians to wise up and “say ‘Welcome Stranger.’”115

Refugees / 73 Most popular among migrants, however, were the Ham and Eggs initiatives. Migrants with southern and southwestern accents were among the twenty thousand Southern Californians who rode automobiles, buses, and trains to Sacramento to call on Governor Olson to enact the measure in May 1939, but they were so active that some opponents portrayed the archetypal Ham and Egger as a stereotypical Arkansas hillbilly.116 While it is difficult to establish just how many of these migrants became involved after listening to Guthrie on KFVD or reading his $30 Wood Help!, one historian found that the Okie-saturated town of Arvin, just over the Tehachapi Mountains from Los Angeles, voted nearly two to one in favor of the measure without even receiving the KFVD signal and was much more in favor of liberal Democratic candidates than the state as a whole.117 Although state political officials and the Ku Klux Klan had thwarted earlier progressive movements in the southern plains, most migrants had at least some acquaintance with indigenous economic populism. Dust Bowlers migrated from heavily Democratic states, helping the party increase its small lead among voters in Los Angeles in 1940, and were also heir to a dormant tradition of working-class radicalism. Such populist leanings had spurred members of the Texas-based farmers’ alliance to vote for the actual People’s Party in the 1890s, persuaded a multiracial coalition of Oklahoma dirt farmers to launch the antiwar, antigovernment Green Corn Rebellion against the draft on the South Canadian River banks in 1917, and convinced earlier smallholders and fieldhands to join the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World union and vote for the Socialist Party.118 More contemporary for most migrants was the American Foundation for Abundance, a fledgling movement started by Oscar Ameringer, an immigrant and Socialist organizer whose activism extended back to the nineteenthcentury’s Knights of Labor. Ameringer published the American Guardian, an Oklahoma newspaper that espoused pacifism, industrial democracy, Spanish republicanism, and its own unique brand of agrarian radicalism. Bearing slogans such as “Building a Collectivist America Week by Week,” the Guardian covered migrant hardships in California and acquired such a substantial migrant readership that it launched a joint marketing campaign with the EPIC News of Los Angeles: “Two Great Liberal Papers: One Year for $2.”119

74

/ Big City Ways

the dustier you are, the finer you’re polished: guthrie’s country music legacy The politicization of Guthrie, Crissman, and their audience ultimately contradicted the prevailing scholarly interpretations during the era about the impact of radio on people’s lives, especially interpretations stemming from researchers at Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s prominent Office of Radio Research in the late 1930s. Researchers at this office separated hillbilly shows from higher brow, “serious” programming such as educational and classical music programs while grouping the hillbilly genre with “low brow” radio soaps and comedies, arguing that hillbilly programs were unlikely to produce a wellinformed or politically active electorate. What these researchers missed is something crucial and simple: hillbilly could be combined with publicinterest programming and still be relatively successful. Guthrie and Crissman’s ostensibly “less serious” programming urged listeners to make the most of public life by voting, joining political organizations, and taking to the picket lines, to essentially become participants in what the historian Michael Denning has called the “moment of the Popular Front,” the “central instance of radical insurgency in the modern US history.”120 Guthrie also made a significant impact on commercial country music. In assessing his posthumous influence on rock, contemporary scholar Charles McGovern has argued that Guthrie’s focus on creating new “folk” songs out of topical issues and his own experiences left the music world a major bequest: a “do-it-yourself ethos” that “meant the individual’s own perspective, gifts, and voice—no matter how untrained, unorthodox, or untalented—were central to the force and significance of his or her work.”121 From Dylan to Springsteen, and from the Sex Pistols and the Clash to Lucinda Williams and System of a Down, do-it-yourself has been the vital core of rock—sometimes intermingled with a direct line to Guthrie, as in Springsteen’s Nebraska and Ghost of Tom Joad albums.122 But do-it-yourself was never absent from country music. True, Guthrie bequeathed country such standards as “Oklahoma Hills,” popularized by his cousin Jack in the 1940s and reaching number seven on the charts for honky-tonker Hank Thompson in 1961. And he bequeathed “Philadelphia Lawyer,” the inspiration for a popular early Rose Maddox cover and a later duet by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson that is in line with the pair’s series of bandit odes.123 But Guthrie’s more lasting legacy was to help legitimize the yearning, frankness, and plaintive unpolishedness that now permeates country-folk, alt-country, and much of today’s “hard country” outlaw and honky-tonk tradition.124 The West Coast Okie performers who

Refugees / 75 in the 1960s pioneered the “Bakersfield sound,” with its spontaneity and minimalist engineering, have been a particularly prickly bunch of unreconstructed do-it-yourselfers. Haggard, standard bearer of the Bakersfield sound, may have been unaware of Guthrie when he penned his first lyrics about the Okie poor, but his forty-year songwriting career reverberates with candidness, an “ethnic” pride, and a certain Guthrie-esque awareness of the political uses of plain-folk Okie identity. Though Haggard is often viewed as an exemplar of a working men’s conservatism, his recent politics seem to have aligned with Guthrie’s in his populist criticisms of homelessness, reckless military adventurism, and what he sees as the curtailing of civil liberties by an authoritarian presidential administration and attorney general.125 The contributions to the liberal-populist moment by Woody and Lefty Lou and Woody, the Lone Wolf were perhaps diminished by KFVD’s humble thousand-watt signal, but the very existence of this dissent on a commercial country music program suggests just how agreeable the genre and Okie culture could be to oppositional politics. During the 1940s, new forms of migrant music shed most of the heightened political rhetoric Guthrie espoused, but they too promised to remake the cultural politics of Okie music by envisioning a new musical syncretism and a democracy of gender on the dance floor.

3

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens Race, Gender, and the Eclectic Populism of Wartime Western Swing

Coworkers Gustav H. W. Sudmeier and Vince “Little Fox” Waldron lived in two worlds. By day, they were industrial workers who cut, ground, honed, and crafted some of the most sophisticated aviation components of the 1940s. By night, they drew on their age-old inheritances as western swing musicians. Sudmeier, a tool-and-die maker at Longren Aircraft Company in Torrance, California, had left a life as a truck farmer in Baden Station, Missouri, a burg so thick with Germans that Sudmeier, the son of immigrants, never lost his accent. Waldron, a machinist, was a member of the Blackfoot nation who had been an itinerant worker throughout the country and picked up skills in woodworking and electrical assembly. At Longren, they helped make the parts that kept Southern California’s major aircraft manufacturers on their production schedules. Once a month, the two young men put their technologically complex world aside and partook in an old southern plains tradition—a Saturday night hoedown. Sudmeier loaded up the family car and drove his family to Waldron’s house on the outskirts of Torrance, a blue-collar satellite on the Pacific edge of Los Angeles. There the families shared a potluck dinner. Before the night was over, Sudmeier would pick up his fiddle and Waldron would bring out his steel guitar. Sudmeier had learned to play from a town elder and knew scores of traditional German and American “folk” breakdowns, as well as several jazzy new “western swing” numbers popularized over the radio by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Waldron was similarly enamored of western swing, so much so that he built his own steel guitar. A master craftsman, he had cut a wide plank of ash to make the base of the guitar and, then, using his electrical and metalworking skills, installed his own strings, frets, amplifier, and pickups. “He used to sit there and make that thing twang and moan,” remembered Sudmeier’s son, Glenn. “I used to just 76

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 77

marvel at it.” Together Sudmeier and Waldron practiced bits and pieces of songs and eventually settled down to play an informal concert for family and friends. “They were quite talented,” Glenn recalled. “Every once in a while, they’d hit a lick on a song just right and people would have to get up and dance a little.”1 As both fans and musicians, Waldron and Sudmeier were among tens of thousands of migrants and nonmigrants who created a live performance–oriented music culture in Los Angeles during the 1940s that enabled the city to temporarily rival Nashville and certain other cities as a national center for country music. As their story demonstrates, 1940s country music meant more to fans than the slew of increasingly candid “divorce” and “broken-heart” hits that some scholars of this period highlight, or a rapidly institutionalizing commercial industry that others emphasize. Western swing, the predominant style of country music in Southern California during the war decade, acted as a subculture that combined elements of work and leisure with consumerism, social mutuality, and shared occupational experience. Incorporating informal modes of production, such as Waldron and Sudmeier’s Saturday night jam sessions, as well as TV, radio, recording studio, and dance-hall performances aimed at mass consumption, the Los Angeles western swing subculture involved scores of performers, songwriters, and music industry personnel but also encompassed tens of thousands of fans who participated actively in its creation by buying records, dancing in ballrooms, forming fan clubs, and even playing their own music. Central to western swing culture was the production of new forms of migrant identity and its promotion of an eclectic inclusive populism that embraced culturally disparate influences, celebrated an ethnically and racially diverse cast of country performers, and thumbed its nose at elitist detractors. If Woody Guthrie helped forge a refugee persona, western swing entertainers and fans turned Okieness into a virtual industry, one in which performing a song about migrants or simply adopting an Okie nickname put one on the road toward commercial success. Central to this new articulation of migrantness was a hybridization of cultural, ethnic, and gender identities that had potential for making a lasting impact on the political culture and racial climate of the region. Long before rock and roll promised to bridge the gap between white and black listeners, western swing performers and fans were borrowing styles and conventions from African American jazz performers, emphasizing their own ethnic and cultural blendedness, and creating new forms of identity by appropriating from a variety of ethnic, immigrant, and unorthodox gender sources. Women, a group regularly excluded from commercial country music

78

/ Big City Ways

performance or relegated to certain narrow roles, also began to come to the fore as performers and consumers, often advocating the most radical borrowings and modernizations. Although male musicians led and predominated in western swing bands, migrant women working in the defense industry, in particular, served as the lifeblood of the nascent ballroom-based phenomenon, creating among other things an assertive women’s fan culture that allowed the so-called Okie “Rosie the Riveter”s of the World War II era to challenge prescribed gender categories and social roles. Though western swing failed to bring members of the largely white migration into the kind of multiethnic, class-based coalition that Woody Guthrie had envisioned, or to entirely reroute the conservative realignment of gender roles that occurred in the 1950s, an examination of the subculture suggests that the roots for a more inclusive and more multicultural set of social relations could have begun to take hold well before transformations began in civil rights, housing law, and electoral politics. Although country music is often accused of yielding to rural tradition and resisting modernity, its new emphasis and image did just the opposite. Rather than pining for an idealized past, performers and fans partook in rituals of abandon and expressiveness that challenged conventional mores by blending southern plains traditions with multicultural, urban, modernizing impulses and an increasingly liberated sense of gender and sexual identity. At times, western swing’s appropriation of minority musical styles was involved in fetishizing racial differences and expressing prejudices: using black culture—in Dick Hebdige’s words—as “a kind of sorcery” or a “passage down into an imagined ‘underworld situated below the familiar surfaces of life’ . . . where the values, norms and conventions of the ‘straight’ world were inverted.”2 Nevertheless, western swing provided room for some Native American and Mexican Okie performers to gain local prominence while helping migrants cast off Tobacco Road stereotypes. By bending over backward to portray themselves as culturally eclectic and cosmopolitan, Okie fans and musicians undermined the antimigrant movement’s yokel image while shaping the wider culture of Southern California. In doing so, they also participated in their own assimilation into middle-class consumption patterns and the cultural mainstream.

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 79

“more sought after than extra shoes and coffee”: western swing and the growth of the los angeles music industry No figure was more emblematic of this new turn in migrant-image-making than Donnell Clyde “Spade” Cooley. The son of a poor Oklahoma sharecropper who himself became a migrant farmworker, Spade Cooley would rise to epic heights, eventually becoming the leading light of the Los Angeles country music scene.3 Though forces such as a robust local broadcasting and recording industry and a growing demand for Okie music were important in his rise to the top, Cooley’s successes stemmed largely from his part in introducing Californians to “western swing,” a popular new music style that migrants carried with them from the southern plains. Originating in and around Fort Worth, Texas, western swing combined jazz influences with the traditional Texas fiddle sound. An oil boomtown, Fort Worth had absorbed thousands of job-hungry rural migrants after World War I, creating a market for fiddle band performances at informal barn dances. Before long, these early performances evolved into spots on local radio stations and concerts at a resortlike dance pavilion on the edge of town.4 Spurred on by the high attendance, working-class Texans such as the singer Milton Brown, a former peanut sheller, and the fiddler Bob Wills, a former barber and farmworker, began introducing elements from pop, blues, and—most important—jazz into their fiddle arrangements. To satisfy Fort Worth’s taste for syncopation, Brown and Wills “laid a heavy beat” on popular and hillbilly tunes by adapting them to a two-four Dixieland rhythm, emphasizing the off beat, and inserting improvisational four-four jazz choruses—creating the style that would come to be known as western swing. Later with his own band, the Texas Playboys, Wills even added a jazzoriented brass section. The invention of the public address system similarly revolutionized the music, emboldening vocalists to opt for a smooth poplike singing style rather than the more piercing “folk” vocalizations belted out over megaphones in the past. Borrowing from the vocal styles of regional African American performers such as Big Bill Broonzy and the folk yells of local white musicians, western swing band members also improvised distinctive hollers—usually high-pitched “hawwws,” “ohhh-yeahhhs,” and extenuated “aaah-has”—to be used when the music moved them.5 Although Brown’s accomplishments were cut short by his death in 1936, he and Wills helped popularize western swing among tens of thousands in the southern plains through regional radio networks, influencing musicians

80

/ Big City Ways

such as the bandleader Jimmy Wakely, a migrant who would later hire Spade Cooley for his Venice Beach band.6 Western swing’s appearance in California coincided with a massive second wave of migration, when hundreds of thousands of newcomers arrived from the southern plains. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce—now proclaiming itself a proponent of the Okie newcomers—reported that more than twenty-five thousand people arrived from the region during a single eight-month period in 1943. Although migrants had been turned away during the 1930s, the war and the needs of industry now placed them in demand. The respected combat journalist Ernie Pyle called the new arrivals “Aviation Okies” in 1941, noting that many were drawn to trade schools and by “visions of work” in the region’s aircraft industry. But Billboard was probably more correct when it deemed them generic “khaki and overalled Oakies.” Military duty brought a large contingency from the southern plains, and thousands more were attracted by work in the region’s shipyards, foundries, canneries, factories, and entertainment industry.7 Dust Bowl performers such as Wills, Wakely, and Cooley reaped enormous benefits from the “khaki and overall” relocation, effecting what Down Beat would later proclaim a “Hillbilly Boom.”8 Migrants nearly dominated western swing audiences and the ranks of local performers. Billboard reported that even nonmigrant musicians were cajoled to “please the dancing Oakies,” and jukebox operators scrambled to fill machines with up to 80 percent “folk records.” Fan and performer estimates suggest that more than half the people at live appearances were Dust Bowlers, and a study of some sixty-seven performers active in the Los Angeles country music scene during the 1940s and 1950s reveals that forty-one performers—or 61 percent— originated in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, or Missouri. Though a star in his own right, even Wills followed the migrant stream, establishing Los Angeles as his home base in 1943 before moving on to central California and then back to the southern plains. One Billboard columnist argued in 1943 with only slight embellishment that, “if a fellow is draft exempt and has hillbilly entertaining ability, brother, he’s more sought after than a fellow with extra shoes and coffee.”9 Many performers reflected their migrant backgrounds in their choice of nickname or stage name. Along with “Smokey Oakie” Rogers and Jesse “Arkie” Shibley, there was a seemingly endless slew of Texes: Tex Atchison, Tex Ritter, Texas Jim Lewis, Texann Nation, Tex Texiera, and Jenks “Tex” Carman. Other performers alluded to their home region with band names such as the Plainsmen, the Ozark Playboys, the Oklahoma Sweethearts, and the Oklahoma Rangers. T. Texas Tyler, a performer really from Arkansas,

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 81

had three states covered by naming his band the Oklahoma Melody Boys. So lucrative was adopting a Dust Bowl persona that some western swing entertainers fabricated southern plains backgrounds in the hopes of cashing in on the migrant dance-band phenomenon. Smokey Oakie Rogers, whose legal name was Eugene, was really a native of Tennessee, while Sollie “Tex” Williams, a prominent bandleader and onetime vocalist for the Spade Cooley orchestra, was actually born and raised in Illinois. Williams advertised himself as Tex only after Cooley suggested that more former Texans resided in California than expatriates from the upper Midwest.10 Trained in classical violin and rural fiddle traditions, Cooley welcomed the eclecticism of the Wills-Brown sound and added his own personal swing touches in an effort to attract “khaki and overall” newcomers. His former boss, Wakely, experimented with a brass section in the early 1940s, but Cooley instituted major changes after Wakely left to pursue his own career as a western movie star. As the new leader of the Venice Beach band, Cooley hired big-band arrangers and added as many as twenty performers to his ensemble, introducing harpists, vibraphonists, and a fiddling trio. This formula proved so successful that Cooley’s first single, “Shame on You,” became the trade journals’ number one country waxing of 1945. Although Brown and Wills pioneered the western swing sound back in Texas, it was because of Cooley’s enormous popularity in Los Angeles that western swing finally acquired a name. After Cooley bested big band leaders Benny Goodman and Harry James in a radio poll to determine the “King of Swing,” bewildered jazz disc jockey Al Jarvis proclaimed the Okie bandleader the “King of Western Swing.” At least one local country music group advertised itself as a “western swing orchestra” before the poll, but Cooley’s popularity and his continued use of the ceremonial title helped establish the phrase as the appellation of choice among fans and the industry.11 So unshakable was the demand for migrant music that Los Angeles was quickly becoming a national center for country music production—if not the capital of American country music. Billboard went so far as to headline a 1951 story “Hollywood Now Hillbilly H.Q.,” arguing that Los Angeles was rapidly rising “as a possible rival” to Nashville with its mix of broadcasting, filmmaking, recording, and live performance: “Whereas artists trekked to Nashville for prestige, many are now turning to Coast ventures. This town’s position has been strengthened by the migration of numerous Western artists who, drawn here by the lure of the film studios and their ramifications, have stayed and more or less created a mecca of Western activity.” Billboard reported that many artists even stopped booking trips to Nashville, because fewer acts could be “showcased” there than in Los An-

82

/ Big City Ways

geles, and because Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry offered little more than low pay and a certain noteworthiness: “Television know-how is here, and it is doubtful whether many cities in the Nashville area will have such facilities.”12 Southern California was indeed a significant rival in the 1940s, possessing a dozen large dance halls, a substantial pool of Okie musicians, and more than two dozen TV and radio programs featuring country music—proving itself a national pioneer in both country music television and the allcountry radio music format. Although Nashville had two downtown studios producing records for major New York labels, by 1950 Los Angeles already boasted its own major label with a country music division, studio space for the New York recording giants, and fifteen independent country music labels. Still billed as the “Athens of the South” for its colleges and universities, the future Music City U.S.A. did not entirely outshine Los Angeles until the Eisenhower era, when lower wages, royalty licensing issues, and an abundance of musicians prompted permanent construction on Nashville’s Music Row.13 Capitol Records, based in Hollywood and partly financed by film money, was central to the Los Angeles boom. Launched in 1942 by a group of entrepreneurs that included the chief of Paramount studios, the owner of a large local record store, and the renowned pop tunesmith Johnny Mercer, the label was intended as an outlet for jazz and pop talent in the film industry. Though originally a minor label, the company drew an unheard-of $12 million in its initial stock offering and made several fortuitous business decisions in the mid- to late 1940s: brokering peace with the musicians union, stockpiling shellac during the war, and supplying free records to DJs. No longer a dark horse, Capitol soon joined the New York–based giants Decca, Columbia, and Victor as one of the top four majors labels of the recording field. While Nashville-based performers were still traveling to New York, Dallas, and other cities to cut phonographs, the Hollywood label was recording hundreds of homegrown jazz, big band, and “western and folk” artists and signing major recording deals with singing-cowboy film stars. Jazz and pop remained Capitol’s bread and butter, but country waxings served as a consistent and often much-needed source of income. Not only was the label’s first million-dollar seller, “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (That Cigarette),” a western swing record by former Cooley band mate Tex Williams, but three of its first decade’s ten top-selling records were country music issues.14 Contending with Capitol and its barrels of capital were dozens of smaller labels as well as some new territorial campaigns by the “hillbilly” divisions

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 83

of the New York majors. Specializing in rhythm and blues, doo-wop, country, and Latin music, local labels such as Exclusive, Four Star, and Aladdin popped out tens of thousands of discs, while New York majors such as Columbia sent their leading scouts west to woo performers such as Spade Cooley, setting them up for recording sessions in Hollywood’s state-of-the-art radio and sound studios. Los Angeles also offered opportunities for movie tie-ins with its perennial, low-budget singing-cowboy films, providing the emerging western swing kings Cooley and Wills with lucrative contracts, unprecedented publicity, and work for their band mates and acquaintances. Country music radio, one of the few venues for migrant musicians in the 1930s, also moved from being an important sideline to an industry in and of itself. While in Guthrie’s day it was difficult to find a stretch of airtime without a “hillbilly” band, by 1946 there were so many competing live shows and country-disc-jockey hours to choose from that one fan magazine column offered listeners hour-by-hour recommendations. The Pasadena radio station KXLA, considered by many scholars to be the first all-countryformat station in the nation, was broadcasting country music twenty hours a day by the early 1950s. Even the growing national security state was involved in the production and promotion of western swing, recording local performers on wartime V- or victory-disc radio transcriptions broadcast to hundreds of thousands over the worldwide Armed Forces Radio Service network.15 Television too became an important venue for western swing. Building on live dance audiences of up to ten thousand by the end of the war, Cooley was a pioneer in both local telecasting and country music television, using his broadcasts to become the most recognizable personality on the local country music roster for a decade and a half. Partly financing his own telecasts, Cooley hit the air in spring 1947 as host of the Hoffman Hayride, a popular variety program broadcast on Paramount studio’s KTLA-TV, marking his show as one of the first, if the not the first, regularly broadcast country-music-themed local television programs in the nation. An almost overnight success, the Cooley show was broadcast weekly from the mammoth Santa Monica Ballroom, a lavish dance hall on the Santa Monica pier that made Cooley’s presence a part of the seaside landscape by displaying the bandleader’s name in giant lettering (figure 3). The broadcast portion of the show paired Cooley’s big western swing band with a vaudeville-style lineup of guest acrobats and magicians, as well as offered regular appearances from famous athletes, country music notables, and Hollywood celebrities. By 1951, the renamed Spade Cooley Show was besting Milton Berle’s show on local audience surveys, won two local Emmys, and was ki-

84

/ Big City Ways

figure 3. The Santa Monica Ballroom advertised its affiliation with Spade Cooley’s western swing band on a grand scale in the late 1940s. Cooley’s ballroom performances allowed him to launch a lengthy television career and become one of the most recognized performers in Southern California. Randy Young Collection, RY103. Courtesy of the Santa Monica Public Library Image Archives.

nescoped for East Coast telecasts. Cooley’s program remained on the air— a sort of permanent fixture in many Angeleno living rooms—until 1959, paving the way for a slew of country music programs that emerged on local television in the 1950s: Town Hall Party, Hometown Jamboree, B-K Ranch, and Western Varieties. Despite the Los Angeles Times’ preference for “legitimate” concert hall music, the paper later minced no words when evaluating the bandleader’s celebrity: “Everybody knew Spade Cooley.”16

“cherokee to his western swing”: race, hipsterism, and the okie image Although Woody Guthrie’s emphasis on liminally white refugees linked migrant identity with eastern and southern European dissidents and liberalpopulist political aspirations, western swing provided room for eclectic multiethnic and even multiracial Okie imagery. Spade Cooley, a complicated figure whose life would later turn in a violent and tragic direction, was an important part of this trend in the 1940s. In the press of the era and in his

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 85

later memoir, Cooley emphasized that he was a quarter Cherokee, the son, he claimed, of a half-Cherokee father.17 And, according to these reports, even his musical background was eclectic. While his family tended fields in Oregon, Cooley reportedly used his Cherokee status to attend an all-Indian school, where he received violin training from a German immigrant teacher. There, on account of his poker skills, he acquired the nickname “Spade,” a sobriquet that stuck. From Oregon, Cooley went on to perform with small traveling hillbilly acts, arriving in Los Angeles in 1937 with little more than fiddling talent. Cooley moonlighted by portraying a musician in western movies and even worked as a stand-in for Roy Rogers before joining and assuming leadership of Wakely’s band.18 Cooley met this newfound fame by emphasizing—and even capitalizing on—his family’s claims of mixed Indian-white ancestry. As the most visible product of the Okie migration in Los Angeles during the 1940s, Cooley began to take up the mantle of Will Rogers, the populist, part-Cherokee screen actor and pundit who, until his death in 1935, seemed to embody Oklahoma and Indian pride. Rather than hide behind a veneer of assumed whiteness, Cooley was outspoken in asserting and touting his Indianness, as well as his taste for black musical styles. He professed his Native American background to the music trade journals as early as 1944. The members of his band, mostly migrants, reciprocally referred to their sound as “Indian jazz,” offering some vision of cultural harmony just months after the city had erupted in the racial violence of the Zoot Suit Riots.19 During the two weeks of rioting, gangs of white soldiers assaulted stylishly dressed Mexican American and black youths, beating them and often stripping them publicly of their drape suits. Cooley’s public disclosures were particularly daring, in that Indianness itself had been on trial in Los Angeles. In his testimony in a very public 1942 case, in which Mexican American zootsuiters were accused of murder, a representative of the Los Angeles sheriff’s office relied on eugenic racial theories to argue that the defendants harbored a “total disregard for human life” because of their purported Aztec ancestry, a background inclined toward “human sacrifice” he claimed.20 Cooley persisted in intertwining his Okie and Native American identities in interviews throughout the 1940s. When he appeared on the cover of Billboard in 1946, the magazine trumpeted his roots, identifying him with the tagline “Cherokee to His Western Swing” both on the front page and in the inside story. Maintaining a public image as a Cherokee, a jazz virtuoso, and a dapper Hollywood cowboy, Cooley linked his purported Native American background with migrant identity by labeling his prominent singing trio Okie, Arky, and Tex.21 Rather than allowing his Native American back-

86

/ Big City Ways

ground to serve as a simple statement of group pride or an interesting trivia morsel, Cooley often gave political undertones to his public image as a Native American and a migrant. In a 1946 article in the local fan press, Cooley claimed—along with his Cherokee ancestry—direct descent from the Apache military leader and medicine man Geronimo.22 A figure who has become one of the most recognized symbols of Native American resistance in the twentieth century, Geronimo led a small band of Chiracahua Apache warriors against thousands of federal soldiers before surrendering in Arizona and being deported to a Florida prison in the late 1880s.23 Cooley’s proud claims to such ancestry did not, however, keep writers from resorting to cultural stereotypes. Overture, the magazine of the local musicians’ union, argued for instance that Cooley’s Indianness helped explain his fondness for “primitive rhythm.”24 Cooley’s acting pursuits during his short and never entirely successful film career presented a comedic public image that also circumvented stereotypes, often playfully confounding viewer expectations and filmmaker clichés. Square Dance Jubilee, a 1949 Robert L. Lippert feature that portrayed Cooley as a suave, big-city bandleader and king of the hit parade, included a comic bit in which two New York talent scouts were sent west to discover the next Cooley. There they encountered a Native American chief dressed in Sioux headdress and regalia. Attempting to communicate with the chief in broken English and the predictable greeting “How,” the New Yorkers were astonished to find that the chief—an eloquent, Britishaccented graduate of Oxford—was more fluent in the mother tongue than they.25 Much of the humor of The Silver Bandit, an independent film released later that year, was aimed at Cooley, who starred as himself, using his name as his character’s name, but playing an urban accountant and musician unable to adapt to the equestrian ways of the frontier. Whereas viewers might expect a self-identified descendant of Geronimo to skillfully ride bareback, Cooley played a fastidiously dressed bookkeeper who had trouble getting situated in the stirrups.26 Outside of the movies, Cooley cultivated a refined image by presenting himself as a yacht enthusiast and a collector of gems and a seventeenth-century Gaspard Duiffopruggar violin.27 Cooley later even sought to reconcile his image with “highbrow” classical music conventions by recording Bach- and Carmen-themed western swing boogies.28 Cooley was not the only western swing or migrant entertainer to announce his Indianness. Several Native American and Mexican American migrants, in fact, were active participants in the western swing scene. Dusti Lynn, an up-and-coming western swing singer and self-described “fugitive

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 87

from light opera,” revealed her part-Cherokee background in the National Hill-Billy News in 1947. Lynn proved to be a major advocate for Indian identity, using her column to promote films about Native Americans and circumvent Indian-migrant stereotypes—in one instance proclaiming Cooley “that hard working Cherokee band leader.”29 Even the genre pioneer Bob Wills, Cooley’s only real rival for the title of western swing “king,” was an eighth Cherokee and appears not to have concealed his background from the press.30 By the late 1940s, several Mexican American performers were also becoming minor but widely acknowledged stars of the Los Angeles western swing scene, adding new dimensions to migrant and country music identity. Pete Martinez, a featured steel guitarist with Jack Rivers and His Texas Tornados, was performing nightly in Long Beach in 1946, and the Oklahomaborn guitarist Benny Garcia served in Tex Williams’s Western Caravan, an innovative new ensemble that spun off from Cooley’s orchestra after an internal dispute. The son of immigrants from Zacatecas and Mexico City, Garcia was one of several western swing musicians who regularly visited the African American jazz clubs along Los Angeles’s world-famous Central Avenue, an area that spawned such national talents as Charlie Parker.31 Such voluntary disclosures not only hint at the extent to which Native American and Mexican ancestry has been unreported by census takers working among Dust Bowlers but also suggest that many migrants were expressing pride in a more inclusive form of Okie identity. As the nation’s formally designated “Indian Territory,” Oklahoma boasted the largest Native American population in the country, and surrounding states such as Texas had significant Native American and Mexican American populations.32 Even the leading icon of the migration and the Great Depression itself—Florence Thompson, the migrant mother in Dorothea Lange’s most famous photograph—was an Oklahoma Cherokee raised by a Choctaw stepfather.33 Although Thompson kept her identity concealed for decades, one sociologist interviewing Oklahoma migrants in California in 1947 found that many seemingly white transplants were “proud of Indian blood, especially if it be that of one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes,” the largely Christianized “Trail of Tears” nations forced to settle the Sooner state in the early nineteenth century.34 Indian pride was especially visible within the ranks of migrant Southern California aircraft workers who were touted in company newspapers for their “Americanism.” The Douglas Airview, published for employees of Douglas Aircraft Company, reported that Comanches from Texas, and Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Kiowa-Wichitas from Oklahoma, found work

88

/ Big City Ways

at Douglas’s migrant-inundated aircraft plant in Santa Monica. In an article titled “Douglas All-Americans,” Thomas Jefferson Harjo, a sheet metal worker from Oklahoma, talked proudly about his Seminole background, posing for a photograph while fabricating components for what appears to be a dive bomber.35 A later article examining the “cross section of peoples” at Douglas identified the graphic artist Joe Noonan as a full-blooded Cherokee, a characteristic that made Noonan a “100 percent American,” the Airview insisted.36 Successful figures such as Cooley and Garcia paved the way for the small Mexican American country audiences Garcia later noted, as well as for other Mexican and Native American performers of the 1950s, such as Gil Baca, the pianist for Hank Thompson’s locally popular western swing and honkytonk band; Miguel Salas, an ex-farmworker and English-Spanish cowboy singer; and the part-Cherokee television performer Jenks “Tex” Carman, known for his Sioux headdresses and Hawaiian-themed Cherokee-language novelty hit, “Hillbilly Hula.”37 Cooley even endorsed such performers, posing for a publicity photograph with Chief Wah-Nee-Ota, a Creek radio musician and storyteller, in a 1953 Country Song Roundup profile of the chief (figure 4).38 The visibility of Native American and Mexican performers helped make blended cultural and racial backgrounds a more accepted aspect of migrant identity. By identifying himself as a mixed-ancestry Okie, Cooley, the migration’s most popular living performer, also played a substantial role in countering the racial bigotry that often informed antimigrant and eugenic thought. If eugenicists such as Madison Grant could brand Oklahomans “race bastards” because of the region’s reputation for mixed Indian-white marriages, Cooley—the hard-working folksy TV persona, cultivated popularizer of jazz arrangements and European classical music, and avatar of cultural mixing—undermined racial baiting and elevated the status of migrants among established Californians in perfect populist style. Not only did everybody know Cooley, as the Times suggested, but Cooley’s successes in the television and recording mediums also garnered significant respect among local audiences, which in turn signaled a reevaluation of formerly denigrated groups such as Native Americans and Okies. Such respect promised to bring Native Americans and those of mixed ancestry into a broader definition of the “the people,” and it reinforced earlier notions that Dust Bowlers were virtuous producers who would bolster the local economy. Although western swing fans embraced Cooley and Garcia, this courtesy was never entirely extended to African American performers. Blacks were wholly absent from the western swing scene, and the larger country music

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 89

figure 4. Publicizing his purported Cherokeeness in the 1940s, Spade Cooley (right) used his celebrity to help the careers of Native Americans. This photo appeared in the April 1953 issue of Country Song Roundup, accompanying a profile of the Los Angeles radio and film performer Chief Wah-Nee-Ota. Courtesy of the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

subculture could project ugly, old prejudices in its attempts to reaffirm Okie whiteness. Though western swing artists celebrated African American compositions and musical styles, deep and contradictory prejudices remained within the Okie country music milieu, evidenced by, for example, a 1941 “minstrel show” put on by Douglas Aircraft employees. Attracting some fifteen hundred people, who packed into a high school auditorium in Santa Monica, the stage show paired pop songs and more traditional country music with insulting blackface acts, reflecting a decades-old interplay between American music and the racist art form. So successful was the show that in 1942 Douglas hired Lee “Lasses” White, a Texan comedian-singer known for his blackface acts on The Grand Ole Opry, to direct portions of the show. Although Douglas management produced the show and suggested

90

/ Big City Ways

the blackface theme, southern plains migrants and workers constituted a significant portion of its audience. “It seemed very obvious that the Lone Star State was the best represented of the 48,” the Douglas Airview approvingly reported. “Any mention of Texas brought a rousing cheer.”39 Despite the existence of such ridicule within country music at large, black culture was a central preoccupation of the Southern California western swing set. At times this interest was appreciative, provoking artistic allusions and deeper contemplation about race relations, but at other times it devolved into fetishized distorted forms of cultural appropriation, the kind of consumer-culture obsession with “primitivism” that bell hooks has called “eating the other.”40 Ultimately, such tensions influenced the ways Okieness would come to be represented. Expressions of Okie pride began filtering into western swing as soon as it arrived in Southern California.While some musicians proudly signaled their ethnoregional identity with Okie stage names, others reached out to migrant audiences by playing at annual Oklahoma State Association picnics and local Texas Day celebrations, at which Cooley eventually drew a record forty-five thousand people.41 Western swing, however, soon remade the very meanings of “Okie” itself, refashioning the onetime slur into a proud expression of migrants’ modernity and sophistication by connecting them with hipsterism, urban lifestyles, immigrant influences, and cosmopolitan jazz. Though never entirely dismissive of country music traditionalism, this new western swing imagery presented migrants as slang-talking, jazz-dancing, and sometimes cynical urban hepcats, highlighting migrants’ transformation from stereotypic ruralites into a thoroughly modern urban people. Although western swing hipsterism did not go so far as to feature a hillbilly zoot-suiter, Cooley came pretty close with his 1945 composition, “Jive on the Range.” More than a decade before Norman Mailer celebrated white appropriation of black culture in his controversial essay “White Negro,” Cooley presented an image that sought to reconcile country music’s white cowboy image with novel elements derived directly and indirectly from African American expressive style. In the song, jazz became the vehicle through which figurative singing cowboys—“ickies” who “sang thru [sic] their nose”—redeemed themselves by updating their sound and becoming conversant in black language and stylistic culture. Although not as successful as the hits “Three Way Boogie” and “Shame, Shame on You,” “Jive on the Range” insisted that the almost irrevocably square western singers must abandon the vestiges of frontier life and find “a new kind of rhythm that was solid on the beam” in order to transform themselves into “real hepcats.” A swingified reworking of “Home on the Range” and the classic 1912

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 91

Tin Pan Alley tune “Ragtime Cow Boy Joe,” the Cooley number insisted that, through cultural borrowing, the cowboy singer can not only reassert his status but also become—as Cooley’s contest nickname suggested— something akin to royalty: “Rag time Joe don’t [w]rangle no more, / He’s laid his guns away, / He’s the rhythm king of western swing.”42 Soon after “Jive on the Range,” migrant “rhythm kings” who found social redemption in black style began cropping up in songs more explicitly about Okie identity. “Oakie Boogie,” a song written and first recorded by white Oklahoman transplant Johnny Tyler, described Okies not as victims or bumpkins but as slang-talking hepcats engaged in a fashionable western swing dance. Rerecorded and popularized by Woody’s former partner and cousin Jack Guthrie in 1946, the song drew from black cultural references less overtly than “Jive on the Range” did, but it insisted that migrants possessed a unique aesthetic style at least tenuously linked to black music and language. Eventually hitting the number three spot on national folk charts, the song implored its listeners to “do the Oakie boogie, and do it Oakie style,” arguing that “that mean ol’ Oakie boogie drives everybody wild.” Backed by Missouri migrants Joyce “Red” Murrell and Quilla Hugh “Porky” Freeman, two boogie-oriented guitarists who would later be celebrated as anticipators of rock and roll, the Jack Guthrie version made it sound as though being an Okie was not just commendable but also fun.43 Hipsterism also appeared in other songs featuring migrants who espoused pride in their own modernity. Attempting to capitalize on the market for migrant-oriented lyrics, non-Okie bandleaders Cliffie Stone and Zeke Clements alluded to the geographic mobility of migrants in their popular western swing compositions about jaded but thoroughly suave Okie hipsters. “He’s a Real Gone Oakie,” sung by Stone band vocalist Judy Hayden, employed a double entendre—the slang phrase real gone—to describe its protagonist as both a suave hepcat and an absent heartbreaker. Clements’s “Oklahoma Blues,” on the other hand, featured a rambling blues singer proud of his status as a Dust Bowler: “They can call me what they want to / But Okie is O.K. with me.” The song’s catch phrase and its play on words (“Okie” and “O.K.”) suggested a coming to terms with the Okie image as a positive and even honorable form of identity—a sensibility emphasized by the number’s upbeat piano and steel guitar solos.44 Perhaps the only Okie songs lacking hipsters were the minor 1947 hit “Dear Okie” by Texas migrant Doye O’Dell and its less successful sequel, “Okies in California.” Tackling migrant unemployment, O’Dell’s Okie numbers compared migrants’ extravagant expectations of California with the bleaker realities they found. “Dear Okie,” a novelty song resembling

92

/ Big City Ways

early Dixieland more than western swing jazz, suggested that the Golden State offered only dead-end jobs ranging from “selling used cars” to ditch digging. The song did not portray its protagonists, “Okie,” “Arkie” and “Tex,” as suave urbanites, but it did characterize them as skeptical and possessing the same sense of irony inherent in the Stone and Clements numbers.45 “Dear Okie” attracted considerable attention at the time of its release—a period of postwar reconversion layoffs and exorbitant living costs—and the folklorist John Greenway found the song still being sung in the early 1950s among the down-and-out in Los Angeles’s Pershing Square.46 Repetition of the word Okie in so many choruses and titles of the 1940s western swing songs was a transformative development for migrant culture. Up until this point, the term was considered by many to be an insult, unused even by Woody Guthrie until his later published writings.47 Although Okies were now in demand for their industrial work, discrimination against the migrants and the sting of Okie insults had not entirely receded. A 1944 sociological study of the prejudices of California college women found that attitudes expressed in response to a question about continued “Okie” settlement were nearly as negative as, or even more negative than, attitudes toward questions dealing with “zoot-suiters,” “Negroes,” “Filipinos,” and most remarkably, “the Japanese.”48 Other incidents such as Douglas Aircraft’s decision to hire the notorious Okie persecutor and former L.A. police chief James Edgar Davis to supervise security over the migrants working at its plant in Santa Monica reminded Dust Bowlers that scapegoating had not been completely extirpated.49 By employing the still loaded word Okie frequently and almost salaciously in their songs, country music artists communicated a defiant populist form of group pride and conveyed a sense of irony wrapped up in the psychological tensions surrounding the hardscrabble lives many migrants were still forced to live.

“a giant step forward”: jazz, modernity, and the cultural patois of western swing While the lyrics and celebrity surrounding western swing promoted a more complex, culturally mixed public image of migrants than offered by the mainstream media, western swing compositional and performance styles provided a platform for a new aesthetics of sound that countered the Tobacco Road canard by insisting on migrants’ modernity. If country music was the language of the Okie subculture, as James N. Gregory has argued,

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 93

western swing served as the subculture’s patois by blending white fiddle influences with a variety of African American, immigrant European, and Latino musical traditions. Even the subgenre’s central compositional tenet—the adaptation of jazz arrangements to a fiddle band—created a significant rhythmic and melodic space for modernizing and complicating Okie identity. By emphasizing jazz and other purportedly metropolitan styles, western swing allowed migrants to counter slights about their purported backwardness while promoting an urban “ethnic Americanism” that encompassed a variety of groups within an egalitarian whole. Western swing’s amalgamation of jazz and country was not entirely new to Southern California or to hillbilly music. From the very beginning, rural southern music had reflected a centuries-old interplay between blacks and whites.50 Early hillbilly music in Los Angeles was no exception. The hillbilly radio star Jimmie Rodgers recorded with jazz great Louis Armstrong in Los Angeles in 1930, and the Sons of the Pioneers had been covertly inserting jazz influences into their cowboy-themed three-part harmonies since the mid-Depression.51 What was new in the 1940s was a system of production that had the potential to blur racial and genre boundaries. Capitol executive Johnny Mercer, himself a pop and jazz composer, actively backed the label’s jazzier country and western swing projects, appearing in publicity photographs and even recording songs with artists Merle Travis and Foy Willing.52 Several smaller labels such as Coast, Imperial, Exclusive, and Black & White featured some combination of jazz or Latin music and western swing. Four Star, a label started to promote a rhythm-and-blues song, failed to produce many jazz hits, but it did a brisk business with Latino acts and western swing–oriented artists such T. Texas Tyler and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, eventually becoming a sort of “major” minor label among fans of West Coast country.53 Though this overlap did not necessarily create a space for solidarity between white country musicians and black or Latin performers, genre barriers between jazz musicians and country artists were occasionally relaxed. Capitalizing on the fact that records offered an anonymous way to reach the public, white Cooley guitarist Jimmy Wyble and his white Riftette band temporarily passed themselves off as black musicians by recording for the “race” division of Ohio-based King Records in Los Angles in 1946.54 Others such as Merle Travis and Johnny Bond begged off racial passing, preferring in later writings to simply acknowledge western swing’s polyglot roots and their appropriation of Mexican and black music, especially New Orleans jazz.55

94

/ Big City Ways

Black forms of jazz, pop, big band, and swing music were especially important to the subgenre founders Milton Brown and Bob Wills, but so were Hawaiian and Mexican traditions. Brown insisted that even his string performers play like jazz instrumentalists, and his band, the Musical Brownies, introduced jazz piano and the twangy, amplified Hawaiian steel guitar to the genre. Wills and his Texas Playboys added drums, reeds, and a whole brass section in an effort to make his fiddle band sound similar to a swing band.56 Although most Los Angeles acts tried some amalgamation of the Texas fiddle tradition, jazz, and the big band sound, the overwhelming majority of western swing musicians chose to present themselves as cosmopolitan connoisseurs of a variety of ethnic musics. Mexican and European folk styles were particularly popular, helping to emphasize the melding of immigrant cultures into a more pluralistic, urban “Okie” musical identity. Revered in Mexican-American Los Angeles, brass mariachi became an increasingly influential aspect of Cooley’s repertoire. Influenced by his early exposure to Mexican fiddle practices, Bob Wills introduced a mariachi chorus into his signature “New San Antonio Rose” back in Texas, performing it and a few Spanish-language songs to spillover crowds while in Los Angeles.57 European folk melodies and especially polka were also popular, particularly among German American and Czech American migrants, such as the Sudmeiers, whose ancestors had settled the southern plains in the nineteenth century.58 Adolph “Dolph” Hofner, a German-Czech Texan who pioneered polka-style western swing, drew such large crowds at a seaside ballroom in Los Angeles that his San Antonians were held over as the house band, helping to encourage Cooley and Tex Williams’s own western swing polkas.59 Western European folk dances were also standard sources. Cooley’s popular late-1940s “Swingin’ the Devil’s Dream” began with a single fiddle playing the Scottish folk reel “Devil’s Dream” in a traditional manner. After a couple of bars, the whole band cut in, delivering a series of improvisational instrumental interludes—in effect swinging the “Devil’s Dream.”60 Despite such influences, black music remained the paramount source of Los Angeles western swing. St. Louis and Kansas City jazz traditions, which grew up in and around the Dust Bowl, were particularly important. Tex Williams’s band frequently performed Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” and numerous groups covered Bennie Moten’s rousing swing composition “South.” Charlie Christian, an African American jazz guitarist born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma, had cultlike status among Los Angeles western swing guitarists.61 New York–based jazz men such as Duke Ellington also proved popular, with Ole Rasmussen cutting a version of “C-Jam

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 95

Blues” and Rody Erickson and His Dude Ranch Boys waxing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Broonzy’s folk hollers were imitated by Wills (who in turn was emulated by Rasmussen), and T. Texas Tyler’s growling vocals appear to be based at least partly on the Delta blues tradition.62 Porky Freeman and Red Murrell, the session musicians on Jack Guthrie’s “Oakie Boogie, “ even recorded a guitar instrumental, “Porky’s Boogie Woogie on Strings,” which many enthusiasts argue invoked Memphis barrelhouse music and anticipated rock and roll. Cut during the war, the independent release proved so popular that Freeman and Murrell rereleased it, putting it on both sides of the disc to keep jukebox listeners from wearing out the groove.63 Western swing hybridizations also went the other way, affecting performers in the jazz scene. Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman, Matty Malneck, and other bandleaders stationed in Los Angeles in 1943 told Billboard that they had begun performing “ditties with a Texas-Oklahoma flavor to please the dancing Oakies.” Armstrong was particularly adamant: “Those cats in slacks [migrant war workers] and all the servicemen don’t want to hear anything else.”64 Jazz saxophonist Jimmy Maddin and jazz vocalist Dorothy Rae also crossed genre lines by working or appearing with the Williams-Cooley bands, while Jimmy Wyble and Cooley bassist Stan Puls performed in jazz ensembles, touring with Jack Teagarden and Barney Kessel, respectively.65 Even long-hallowed jazz clubs felt the pull of western swing. The Zucca brothers temporarily transformed their Hollywood French Casino into a “western” nightspot in 1943, while other venues such as the Aragon experimented by “playing cowboy outfits along with a straight dance band,” Billboard reported.66 Nevertheless, segregationist club policies made it easier for musicians from western swing’s Riverside Rancho to venture out to see black jazz artists play on Central Avenue than vice versa.67 Jazz-style improvisation provided migrants with a powerful way to assert a new Okie modernism by allowing Okie performers to experiment with an ostensibly urban musical style while maintaining a connection to country music’s purportedly rural and populist roots. Although critics have described Southern California’s big western swing bands as less spontaneous and more tightly arranged than the smaller outfits in the southern plains, radio transcriptions such as a recording of Cooley’s mid-1940s “hot jazz” version of “Shame on You” suggest that live performances were actually more improvised than has been thought—an idea that several musicians stressed in later writings: “‘Western Swing’ is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music

96

/ Big City Ways

they feel, beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brain,” wrote guitarist-songwriter Merle Travis. “When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have ‘Western Swing.’” Indeed it was Cooley, who assembled the largest orchestras in the area, that performers such as Oklahoma transplant Johnny Bond viewed as the primary innovator: “It seemed like everything we were doing at the time, everything that was being done in country music, there was a sameness involved. And then one day we learned that Spade [Cooley] was makin’ some electrical transcriptions for Standard, and we thought nothing particular about that until they played ‘em on the radio. And like everybody’s ears perked up with kind of a new sound. His arrangements had taken [country music] a giant step forward.” While the sheer size of the Southern California bands made tighter arrangement necessary, it did not entirely prevent streams of expressiveness associated with proper jazz and Texas western swing.68 Battles of the bands were another key ingredient for affirming the cosmopolitanism and modernity of Okie music. Mimicking the jazz competitions that had rocked New York clubs such as the Savoy since the 1930s, Wills and Cooley faced off in a band battle as early as 1942. The two bandleaders alternated bands for two nights at the Venice pier in front of record crowds, according to accounts of local musicians. Jimmy Wakely claimed Cooley won the contest, but others insisted that Wills was the victor. Like the jazz competitions on the East Coast, the outcome of the event remained up to individual interpretation.69 Los Angeles western swing could even effect a high modernism, linking itself with “highbrow” composition and the self-proclaimed avant-garde of the American jazz scene. Although Cooley dabbled in the classical canon with his adaptations of Bach and Bizet, Tex Williams went a step further in 1948 by recording the complex “progressive jazz” opus “Artistry in Rhythm,” written by his fellow Capitol artist Stan Kenton. In an attempt to emulate the dark, complicated brassy orchestral crescendos of the Kenton arrangement, the Williams rendition, retitled “Artistry in Western Swing,” featured the collaboration of nine musicians—a harpist, a trumpeter, a drummer, an accordionist, two guitarists, and three fiddlers—in an effort to keep intact the composition’s elaborate system of antiphonal breaks. Williams assured readers that the waxing would please the jazz crowd. “Cowboy bands are not all corn,” Williams told Capitol News. “We can do things in a progressive jazz manner, too.” Taking a note from the more experimental trains of bebop, the western swing bandleader Hank Penny even began labeling his instrumentals with outrageous and self-

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 97

referential titles: “Penny Blows His Top” and “Progressive Country Music for a Hollywood Flapper.”70 The biggest internal struggle within Okie country music in the 1940s pivoted on the extent to which black influences and jazz modernism should reign. On one side were several powerful promoters, including the KXLA disc jockey George Saunders and the former Texan ballroom owner Bert “Foreman” Phillips, who feared jazz influences would turn off audiences attuned to the traditional “hillbilly” repertoire. In the other camp were the musicians Wakely and Penny and fan magazine publisher C. Phil Henderson, who believed that jazz influences revitalized country music by broadening its audience and appeal.71 Ultimately, the debate over jazz rested largely on differing interpretations of listener taste. Those in the conservative camp believed any attempt to deviate from country’s rusticity—the purported locus of its authenticity—meant attendance losses, an abandonment of tradition, and a sneaky, slippery appreciation of African Americans, the most tabooed of racial Others. “I don’t like the tendency of some recorders to run ‘brass’ and other instruments that do much better in ‘jive’ bands,” wrote Saunders as a guest columnists in Henderson’s Tophand magazine. “Let’s stick to strings and leave the hardware where it belongs.”72 Phillips, who also played host of national radio’s Western Hit Parade, was even more adamant. Clashes over the introduction of a jazzy horn section to the house band at Phillips’s Venice Pier ballroom, prompted bandleader Jimmy Wakely to leave his job there in 1941. Phillips, who later extended his popular County Barn Dances to ballrooms in Culver City, Baldwin Park, and Compton, thought Wakely’s brass section clashed with country music’s convention. But Phillip’s crusade against jazz did not end there. Spade Cooley reportedly introduced a jazzversed harpist and his famous “swing” fiddling trio to get around a stringsonly rule with which the musically ignorant Phillips hoped to rein in jazz. Preferring that country maintain a rustic image, Phillips also insisted that bandleader Hank Penny play “more hillbilly” and fire musicians who were “too good . . . for the type of people we play to.” When musicians rebelled by emphasizing improvisation and rhythm, Phillips posted backstage signs that read “Stick to the Melody.”73 Western swing also drew contempt from some members of the jazz community, especially white critics aligned with the modernist impulses that many migrant musicians sought to emulate. Down Beat supported western swing by reporting on Wills and Cooley, but the magazine also featured detractors.74 In 1949, Charles Emge, the West Coast correspondent for Down

98

/ Big City Ways

Beat, penned a dismissive front-page article, “Hillbilly Boom Can Spread Like Plague.” In it, Emge complained that the only big bands going strong in Los Angeles were western swing bands. “This barn dance boom, which was expected to die off with the end of the war as the defense plant workers moved back to their farms (something else that didn’t happen) is apt to get all out of hand on us from the way things are going,” he wrote. Emge feared that Southern California’s venerable jazz tradition would be torn asunder, naming several seminal moments when white jazz men such as Paul Whiteman and Benny Goodman had made important contributions to jazz history in Los Angeles. “That should be [a] final warning that some action should be taken to block this Hollywood hillbilly boom—before it’s too late!”75 Although the alarm in Emge’s title and conclusion was meant to be somewhat facetious, comparing western swing to a plague and complaining about Okie permanence held the potential to reopen old wounds that had resulted from Depression-era scapegoating. Opposite these critics were promoters and musicians who celebrated western swing’s connections with jazz. Jimmy Wakely believed brass instruments were not just stylistically pleasing but also a technical necessity amid the noise of the crowded Venice Pier ballroom. “You can’t dance 4,000 people with a small band and only one fiddle,” he wrote of his experience with Phillips. Henderson, a local emcee and former Down Beat writer, edited and published the primary organ for the jazz camp, Tophand magazine, a nationally distributed enterprise that briefly competed with the only other national country music journal, West Virginia’s National Hill-Billy News. Subtitled “Western Orchestra World,” Tophand pushed “race” music and offered western swing musicians a place to expose the interference of antijazz promoters and proclaim themselves the champions of a serious modern art form. Hank Penny labeled Foreman Phillips “the ‘Iron Duke’” in Tophand’s June 1946 edition, writing that the ballroom promoter ought to look at the books of the rival Riverside Rancho after Cooley’s successful countryjazz band played there. “I still say, and always will, that good music can, and will pay off,” Penny wrote, undergirding his argument with a populist salvo: “Why insult the intelligence of our ‘western fans’ by saying ‘they don’t understand it?’”76 More biting however was the satire on the cartoon page. One thinly disguised spoof showed a country musician reading a “Musicians Wanted” sign outside the “Doorman Fillips Country Barn Dance.” The sign mockingly insisted that inquiring musicians “play corny style melody on all numbers” and “double on washboard and jug.” Grievances about both work and style intersected in the unsigned cartoon as job seekers also had

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 99

to be willing to keep bar at intermissions and seek janitorial work during the day to make up for paltry salaries.77 Building on this economic populism, several jazz camp songs of the immediate postwar era scrutinized issues facing the wider Angeleno working class. Following in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps, some, such as Rudy Sooter with his “Easy Payment Blues,” exposed exploitative rent-to-own schemes; other songs, such as Penny’s “Politics,” argued that “connections” allowed some to rise above hardworking ordinary citizens.78 Ted Daffan and His Texans were more pessimistic, arguing metaphorically within the context of a love affair that—go on strike or not—American workers were “Born to Lose.”79 Foremost among the critics was guitarist-songwriter Merle Travis. His “No Vacancy,” a local western swing hit about the very real lack of affordable housing in postwar Los Angeles, ended up topping the charts nationally; he also penned memorable nonwestern swing “folk” songs such as “Sixteen Tons.” Much has been made of Travis’s Kentucky coalmining roots—“You load sixteen tons and what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt”—but the song has also been interpreted as a cry against any kind of industrial exploitation. Striking a chord locally, the song would be covered by local performer Tennessee Ernie Ford in the 1950s, becoming better known and probably more revered by American workers than traditional labor standards such as “The Internationale” and “Solidarity Forever.”80

“to tell the world about ‘western swing’ ”: blue-collar women and the making of a fan subculture By insisting on jazz and the hepcat image even when the industry leaders discouraged it, western swing musicians countered depictions of migrants as backward and parochial and allowed audiences to begin to view themselves as part of a dynamic, more pluralistic urban culture. But such transformations did not take place without the audience’s help. Often neglected, listeners—especially tens of thousands of working-class women listeners— were active participants in reshaping the migrant image and reinforcing Okieness as a positive form of identity. Women fans helped advanced musicians’ attempts to modernize and legitimate Okie identity by imbuing it with hipsterism and jazz modernism while shaking up the very gender dynamics upon which the migrant music industry rested. Blue-collar women

100

/ Big City Ways

defense workers, in fact, were so important that the reigning archetype of western swing womanhood—the mythic and ornamental “San Antonio Rose” of Wills’s signature song—might better be thought of as another kind of “Rose” altogether—an overall-clad Okie “Rosie the Riveter” working the factory or shipyard by day and attending western swing ballrooms at night. Just as migrant music was beginning to embrace alternative configurations of racial identity, the fan culture touted a new modernized version of Okie womanhood that challenged gender constraints within the subculture. By presenting themselves, their subculture, and their music in these new ways, western swing women offered a positive image of Okie womanhood that countered Depression-era representations of grotesque migrant jezebels. Western swing’s connection to a fan base of blue-collar workers was pivotal even before the genre arrived in California, but in the rapidly industrializing environment of Los Angeles in the 1940s, working-class ties became more evident. A 1942 War Department study of radio listeners that included servicemen in the Southern California region suggested that, despite slight increases among middle- and upper-income listenership, country music’s largest audience segment—more than 57 percent of its total audience—remained working class.81 The same seems to have held true for performers and western swing personalities. Of the twenty-three 1940s-era Angeleno western swing performers and promoters for which I could find familial or personal occupational histories, twenty had either come from farming or blue-collar families or were employed at one point as industrial or service workers themselves.82 Some were working women, such as the former waitress and aircraft worker Emily “Sunny” Ciesla, the longtime West Coast columnist for the National Hill-Billy News. Several male musicians moonlighted in the aircraft plants to make ends meet, while one drove a delivery truck weekdays and played nightclubs six nights a week, a grueling schedule by any stretch of the imagination.83 Further solidifying the subculture’s working-class ties were the union affiliations of musicians and fellow migrants.84 Unlike other musicians’ union locals that blackballed country music entertainers, the Los Angeles local of the American Federation of Musicians organized most country musicians and western swing artists in the late 1930s during a campaign to unionize radio performers.85 Although star performers such as Wills and Cooley pulled in mammoth salaries, the union scale went a long way for others, allowing a lesser known artist such as Wesley Tuttle to purchase the vehicle of his dreams—a brand new Studebaker Commander.86 While some artists were active enough to serve as board members of their American Federation of Musicians and American Federation of Radio Artists locals in

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 101

later decades, western swing musician Ray Whitley worked to establish the unsuccessful Federation of American Folk Artists, an independent “One Big Union”-type organization aimed at uniting all country men and women.87 An affinity for labor even became apparent on the western swing dance floor. Lloyd R. Sims, an Oklahoma transplant and member of the meat cutter’s union, remembered that members of the aircraft-manufacturing United Auto Workers and the International Association of Machinists were often present in large numbers at area dance halls in the late 1940s.88 With many men away at war, women—particularly women workers in unionized heavy industries—provided the backbone of the audience at western swing clubs and became important consumers of western swing movies and phonograph records. Although servicemen like those surveyed by the War Department remained committed country music fans, their involvement was generally limited to listening to camp jukeboxes and Armed Forces Radio Service programming, and to the occasional concert attended while on base or while on leave. Migrant women, on the other hand, became the subject of a major government and industry campaign to fill the war and munitions factories with workers. The work provided many with the leisure money needed for purchasing records and attending ballrooms. The number of women workers at six Southern California aircraft plants mushroomed from 143 in 1941 to nearly 65,000 in 1943. A full 87 percent of the wartime workers at Douglas Aircraft were women, while the California Shipbuilding (Calship) facility employed some 7,000 women.89 Though aircraft manufacturers experimented with hiring local married women early in the war, they later targeted young single women from Oklahoma, Texas, and generally the Midwest, employees such as the twenty-one-year-old Oklahoma transplant Lili Coyer, a welder at Lockheed whom artist Edna Reindel painted for Life magazine.90 Although it is difficult to assess just how many Okie women worked in local industry, three-quarters of California’s women defense workers had come from outside the state in 1944, and the southern plains remained a major starting point for the Californiabound exodus throughout the decade.91 Catering to women workers during the war, the dance halls themselves were generally located less than two miles from the city’s major manufacturing sites, not too far from rapidly growing working-class suburbs such as Culver City, Torrance, Lynwood, South Gate, Compton, and Bell Gardens. The area containing the major ballrooms and industrial workplaces of the 1940s began in the north at Pop’s Willow Lake, near the Lockheed plant in Burbank, and extended south through downtown Los Angeles toward Dave Ming’s 97th Street Corral and the heavily industrialized southeast section

102

/ Big City Ways

of Los Angeles County (see map 1). From there, the area extended southwest toward the Foothill club and Douglas Aircraft’s large Long Beach facility, finally ending near Calship and the Los Angeles Harbor. A loose constellation of clubs and industrial plants was also present near the city’s coastal resort area, involving several Santa Monica–area ballrooms, Douglas’s Santa Monica plant, and North American Aviation’s Inglewood facility.92 Although ballrooms and the larger clubs were the norm, some groups, such as Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, even brought their music to less glamorous locales like Wilmington Hall, a twenty-nine-thousand-unit public housing facility built to accommodate Calship workers near the Los Angeles harbor.93 Left to manage their own finances, and receiving their new, higher wages, many women war workers felt emboldened to seek out their own leisure by dancing. “The first paycheck I got in aircraft was more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” recalled Juanita Loveless, an Oklahoman of Czech and Cherokee ancestry.94 Like many women plant workers, Loveless sought to unwind and enjoy the higher wages by patronizing a variety of area ballrooms. Dancing, in fact, was the number one leisure activity of area women aged eighteen to twenty-four, according to a 1942 survey that included workers at a local aircraft plant.95 For many migrants, dancing was an opportunity to escape the confines of the home and even rebel against strict Baptist and Pentecostal-Holiness religious upbringings, but dancing could also bring a welcome psychological release from the pressures and hazardous conditions of the shop floor. “You got rid of your energy by dancing,” Loveless recalled. Trips to the dance hall also afforded a chance to socialize with women coworkers who went together as group, occasionally bringing along or meeting the sometimes scarce male coworker, husband, or boyfriend. Called to military service during the war, Oklahoma migrant Lloyd R. Sims remembered that it was his sisters who dragged him to western swing events when he returned.96 Although women like Loveless frequented pop and jazz establishments, thousands felt the call of western swing. Women not only supported country-jazz spots but also organized their own dances as part of unions or employee committees. Dance halls and bands reciprocated by catering to women’s desires. While women Lockheed workers hired western swing bands to play at employee-organized dances in 1942, performers such as Bob Wills and Texas Jim Lewis advertised their upcoming events on the women’s page of the International Association of Machinists local’s Los Angeles area newspaper.97 Further attracting women was the fact that western

SAN FERNANDO VALLEY

BURBANK

NORTH HOLLYWOOD

Menasco Manufacturing

Pop’s Willow Lake/ Painted Post

PASADENA

N

Lockheed-Vega Burbank GLENDALE

Riverside Rancho

HOLLYWOOD

BALDWIN PARK

Palace Barn Dance Santa Monica Ballroom

Wilshire Blvd.

SANTA MONICA

EL MONTE

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

MAYWOOD

Lockheed, El Monte

Garment District Legion Stadium

Warman Steel Studebaker

Douglas Aircraft, Santa Monica BELL Chrysler Plantation Culver City club Goodyear BELL GARDENS Ballroom Venice Pier Vultee Aircraft ballroom Florence Ave. General Firestone Western North American Aviation Motors SOUTH GATE Palisades club 97th Street Corral Lockheed Douglas Aircraft McDonald Ballroom Northrup

TORRANCE

Western Ave.

Redondo Barn Dance

LYNWOOD

Town Hall Ballroom

COMPTON

ANAHEIM

Douglas Aircraft, Long Beach Foothill club LONG BEACH

SAN PEDRO

California Ship Building

PACIFIC OCEAN 0

3

6 mi

0

5

10 km

LOS ANGELES HARBOR

Harbor also included: Consolidated Steel Shipyard, Bethlehem Shipbuilding, and Todd Shipyards

Industrial workplaces Major western swing ballrooms Other important nightspots

map 1. Western swing dance halls and industrial sites in Los Angeles and environs in the 1940s. Locations for each are based on information in fan magazines, regional newspapers, music business journals, and the Works Projects Administration’s book Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs, American Guide Series (New York: Hastings, 1941), as well as other sources.

104

/ Big City Ways

swing ballrooms—with some exceptions—were generally not magnets for the type of men who would drink and then get into fistfights. Some ballrooms served food, and most served only soft drinks and beer. Cognizant of defense workers’ round-the-clock schedules, dance halls even appealed to women aircraft and warship workers by sponsoring late night “swing shift dances” for those just finishing a work shift. Even after the war, spots such as the South Gate’s Trianon ballroom made special pleas to women, offering nylons—an item rationed and coveted during the war—free to those attending a country music event in 1946.98 While the consumer base of western swing became increasingly feminized, women also made some strides in the actual operation of area ballrooms. The earliest western swing ballroom operators were mostly men who had been involved in ancillary aspects of western and jazz entertainment such as the disc jockey Foreman Phillips; the rodeo promoter Dave Ming, who ran clubs in South Central and Anaheim; and jazz booker Marty Landau, who ran the Riverside Rancho, a premier ten-thousand-square-foot facility near Glendale. A select group of musicians even built their own clubs, including Tex Williams’s Palace Barn Dance—converted from an old Mack Sennet studio in the Echo Park neighborhood—and Pop’s Willow Lake in North Hollywood, a club built by Penny’s band mates during the off-season.99 By the mid-1940s, however, women began to take the lead by opening their own western swing businesses and nightspots, breaking barriers and modernizing notions of a woman’s worth in the process. Bonnie Price, a hotel and coffee shop manager from Alabama, converted her jazz club near Long Beach into the Foothill, a long-standing nightclub that drew oil workers, shipbuilders, and horse racing fans.100 Even more closely tied to the big names of western swing was Bobbie Bennett, operator of the Western Palisades club in Santa Monica. The wife of a western swing drummer, Bennett orchestrated Spade Cooley’s early rise to fame as his business manager, and later took the ailing ballroom and transformed it into a business that attracted live remotes from radio’s Hollywood Barn Dance as well as performances by the day’s biggest acts in western swing and country music.101 Other smaller scale entrepreneurs, such as Grace Purdy, a Capitol Records employee by day, helped maintain fans’ emotional connections by keeping the Western Music Corral, a small booth in which she hawked song folios, artist photos, and western swing records at area dance halls at night. Wearing what Down Beat described as a “cowgirl costume,” Purdy stressed the bridge-building aspects of her enterprise: “My aim has always been to bring

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 105

together the folks who love western music and you cowboys who sing it,” she wrote in one explanatory Tophand column.102 Fan magazines further supported the breaking of gender boundaries and remolding of representations of Okie womanhood by hiring women as writers and by praising the efforts of entrepreneurs such as Bennett and Purdy. Dusti Lynn, Sunny Ciesla, and Purdy chronicled western swing happenings in Los Angeles in their columns for Tophand and the National HillBilly News. Lynn, the part-Cherokee singer, presented herself as the very antithesis of the Depression-era Okie stereotype, informing readers of her visits to elite nightclubs and tony resorts and appearing in her monthly column’s mug photo as a glamorous, daintily gloved society woman propped improbably against a film-set wagon wheel.103 More prolific, however, was Ciesla, a midwestern transplant who turned to fan writing after an illness had kept her bedridden. Corresponding with local radio performers to keep her mind off her ailments, the former aircraft worker convalesced and used her contacts to land a job as the Hill-Billy News’ “Round-Up in Hollywood” columnist.104 So prominent were women in journalistic and nightclub work by 1946 that Tophand not only named Bennett club owner of the year but also ran a poem and article praising Purdy for her selfless efforts to “tell the world about ‘Western Swing.’”105 Although often dismissed as an auxiliary activity positioned well within women’s conventional sphere of influence, fan-club membership also offered women a way to step outside of everyday roles and enter pursuits that were earlier unavailable to them. Women predominated as club presidents where they often acted as unpaid publicists, and they formed the largest segment of club membership. For Marcy D. McCrae, club work offered the exciting opportunity to hang around film studios and ride horses on location with western stars. Dusti Lynn’s stint as president of the Spade Cooley Fan Club, and her column for the Hill-Billy News, gave her the connections needed to advance her own career as a featured western swing singer and part-time motion picture actor. So enthusiastic were some women fans—a Tophand headline reported that one Mrs. Billie Green of Los Angeles belonged to “25 Western and Cowboy Fan Clubs” including those of several jazz-camp artists—that it appears likely that women’s patronage may have even helped western swing survive as a genre when ballroom box-office receipts plunged during a period of inflation before servicemen returned in early 1945.106 Tens of thousands of other fans participated in western swing by advocating jazz innovation and creating occasional reserves of consumer ac-

106

/ Big City Ways

tivism. When screen stars such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Tex Ritter reacted to the jazz-camp craze by introducing whole bands of fiddlers, horn players, and improbably electrified steel guitarists in their “Old West” films, women fans jumped to their defense.107 “First off,” one enthusiast wrote to Tophand, “why can’t studios give their musicians a little better instruments? In the majority of Westerns the guitars resemble broken down cigar boxes. . . . I’m pretty sure that the movie going public and also the musicians would appreciate a change.”108 Thousands more responded to radio polls such as the one that named Cooley the “King of Western Swing.” Hoping that success in democratizing the work routine might be translated to their leisure lives, women defense workers even used trade union–style tactics such as the shop-floor petition to put pressure on resistant disc jockeys. Billboard reported that seventeen hundred workers at the largely femalestaffed Lockheed plant signed a 1943 petition mailed to Western Hit Parade in support of an artist the magazine left unnamed. That particular request, Billboard noted, was the program’s “longest petition received to date.”109 Women enthusiasts not only supported jazz-camp composition but also borrowed elements from the jazz dance floor to create their own sophisticated styles. Although some western swing tunes called for traditional Euro-American dances such as the waltz and the foxtrot, many fans—especially those of the younger generation—found themselves jitterbugging and Lindy-Hopping to boogie-influenced country-jazz numbers.110 Clubs such as the 97th Street Corral encouraged such unorthodoxy by holding jitterbug contests.111 Some migrant dancers even developed their own uniquely “Okie” adaptations of jazz dance styles. After returning from his tour of duty, Lloyd R. Sims remembered being taught to do the “toddle”— a stylish wobbly jazz dance fad from the 1920s apparently revived and perfected by the women defense workers during the war.112 Dress too became a vehicle for expressing a modern new conception of Okieness and working-class womanhood. Like the women in city clerical jobs who rebelled against a mayoral “no slacks” edict in Los Angeles in 1942, blue-collar western swing fans developed new styles that defied conventional standards for women’s dress. Finding slacks comfortable and inexpensive, many who wore pants for safety at work also began to wear them for a night out on the town, while others paired denim work shirts with a silk blouse before heading for the dance halls after work.113 Billboard identified these changes as a new “Oakie” fashion sense that bucked national trends and even contributed to a budding stylistic hipsterism among men: “Dance bands soon to head for Southern California will find themselves playing for a vastly different dance audience than those of New York, Chi-

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 107

cago and other Eastern Cities,” the trade magazine reported in 1944. “Here it is a common sight for girls in slacks to jitterbug with men in suede jackets, collars open.”114 This revolution in apparel even appeared to have some effect on male bandleaders such as Cooley, Tex Williams, and Hank Thompson, who affected sartorial and even dandyish forms of dress in attempt to capitalize on the female market for hipster style. Williams pioneered the wearing of fancy drape suits, a design created by a local tailor based on the zoot suit, and Cooley appeared as a debonair urban dandy in expensive oversized “western” outfits that featured sequins, wild stripes, piping, and appliquéd card spades.115 “There was nobody who dressed as sharp as him, not even Roy Rogers or Gene Autry,” remembered Hank Penny, who spiffed up his own appearance with contact lenses and shiny copper “penny” shirt buttons.116 Women fan magazine writers such as Ciesla and Lynn presented themselves as fashion connoisseurs, assuming command of the sensual gaze by heaping both praise and dissatisfaction on male performers, depending on their latest threads. “Hope the warden doesn’t mistake Spade Cooley for an escaped convict when Spade wears his green and white striped suit,” wrote Lynn in 1948.117 Male fans too were affected. Lloyd R. Sims, a meat cutter, enjoyed wearing brightly colored western shirts for the first time when he returned from war.118 But others were more conflicted about the blurring of gender barriers in dress. Singer-songwriter Merle Travis poked fun at the phenomenon in a Tophand cartoon that featured a self-conscious masked cowboy gunman demanding a “pink suit with green and yellow stripes” from a prominent local country music tailor.119 Women performers also used dress to attract audiences, often relying on more traditional skin-revealing techniques pioneered by advertisers and beginning to be used by up-and-coming models and actresses such as the former local defense worker Marilyn Monroe. In a move unusual for country artists of the time, western swing vocalists such as Carolina Cotton and groups such as the Rangerettes presented themselves to the male gaze by baring midriffs in their publicity shots. Cotton even appeared in one publicity photo kit in a glitzy lingerie-influenced evening dress that bared her legs, back, and midsection. Emphasizing western swing’s cowboy imagery and hinting at Cotton’s libido, the photo was paired with a suggestive caption: “Dynamite in the Saddle.”120 Women fans, on the other hand, appeared more concerned with the bodies of men than obsessing about the female photographic image. Although the homosocial atmosphere of wartime defense work emboldened many lesbian women to be more forthright about their relationships, heterosexual

108

/ Big City Ways

women were particularly assertive of their sexuality.121 While the daughters of this generation of fans would later swoon, scream, and run after Elvis and the Beatles, 1940s-era women had long before created a young women’s fan culture in which it was permissible to assert themselves in sexually aggressive ways. When Cooley’s and Wills’s bands played, young women lined up at the edge of the stage with arms extended toward the performers.122 Dusti Lynn noted that bobby-soxers were beginning to swoon over Tex Williams.123 More shocking to some, women fans began to tear at western swing performers’ clothes, and to run their hands up Wills’s pant legs while he performed.124 Servicewomen in the Women’s Army Corps were equally assertive. In one incident, two hundred of them entered the 97th Street Corral, picking up a stunned Texas Jim Lewis and parading him around the dance hall after he highlighted the underacknowledged women’s division in one of his songs.125 Though some have suggested that lack of male companionship may have elicited such displays,126 many women appear to have been drawn to western swing’s focus on vim and romance. Jazz elements gave some performers an aura of energy and sophistication, while the candid, gentle brokenheart songs and good looks of others endeared them to their fans. Dusti Lynn commented in her column on Tex Williams’s “warm smile,” and Sunny Ciesla argued that Hank Penny’s “handsome features set the feminine hearts a fluttering.”127 To Purdy, one of Cooley’s vocalists deserved exclamation marks: “Then that smilin’ Irishman, Red Egner, steps up to the mike and all the girls hearts start to beating faster,” she wrote in her column. “Gosh! What a beginning!”128 With the increased female box office, women country music performers began to emerge in important new roles in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although Los Angeles country music remained largely male-dominated, the all-women Oklahoma Sweethearts band and radio vocalists-hosts Carolina Cotton and Rose Maddox broke with the convention that kept women in place as “protected” members of siblinglike duos such as Woody and Lefty Lou or family-style ensembles such as the Beverly Hill Billies.129 Dance-hall bands offered opportunities for performers such as Margie “Fiddlin’ Kate” Linville, Marilyn Tuttle, Becky Barfield, Virginia “Ginny” Jackson, and most notably Mary Ford, of Les Paul and Mary Ford fame, all of whom would later appear as performers on television and in film.130

Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens

/ 109

hanging together? the limits of okie modernity For all its hybridizing potential, western swing’s eclecticism, racial populism, and focus on modernity failed to entirely democratize migrant cultural politics or even erase old prejudices. Some glimpses of the kind of social integration that might have emerged out of the blending of musics—white and black, Native American and European, immigrant and native—were nevertheless present. On the heels of a 1942 recording ban sponsored by the American Federation of Musicians when supplies of pressed phonographs were low, Billboard reported that jukebox operators serving African American clients were “going for [country recordings] as never before, when they are tuneful and pretty worded, not just doleful.”131 A few years later, one enthusiast writing in Tophand agreed with a fellow rodeo parade participant that “Okeys [sic], Mexicans, and all foreigners must hang together here in Calif.” Such sentiments were sometimes translated into action through migrants’ participation in a few integrated labor unions as well as through the racially liberal policies of some rising migrant politicians such as Tom Carrell and Jesse Unruh.132 Sadly however, the local culture also harbored elements of racism and sexism that had been transplanted from the southern plains and absorbed independently in California. Although women made strides, they rarely led their own western swing bands. More-insistent performers often clashed with the area’s increasingly notorious “good ol’ boy” recording network, and others faced the sexual harassment of male bandleaders. While Mexican and Native American performers were well liked and even idolized, African American performers avoided or were excluded entirely from work in the western swing ballrooms, and thousands of area residents attended Douglas Aircraft’s racist minstrel shows. A figure who in many ways represented the paradoxes that gripped western swing, Cooley—the champion of black music and the avatar of Okie Indianness—recorded a racist antiJapanese track during the war.133 That Cooley could nevertheless perform tributes to black jazz men, and that the major aesthetic battles of western swing were fought over how much appropriation of jazz was appropriate, did not, of course, erase the sting of such indignities. But as a whole, migrant music-making had changed the migrant image and had given migrant culture greater potential for serving as a force that would bridge racial divisions. It is no accident that the Pennsylvania-based rock-and-roll performer Billy Haley, one of the earliest stars of the music many thought would bridge black and white, ac-

110

/ Big City Ways

tually started out by leading the Four Aces of Western Swing, a group patterned after performers such as Cooley and Wills.134 The frequent collaborations between the African American pioneers of Central Avenue and white jazz musicians such as Barney Kessel, Jack Teagarden, and Chet Baker—all transplants to Los Angeles from the Texas-Oklahoma region— further attest to the potential migrant culture held for creating a liberating politics of sound. The potential of this culture to create a social movement did not last long. While Okie performers and audiences were busy redefining Okieness and making elements of migrant culture a part of the mainstream cultural landscape of their newfound home, tremendous forces were reshaping the music business in Los Angeles and in a central Tennessee college town, some two thousand miles away. Once a fledgling industry based on the live performance of the dance hall, Southern California country music was quickly transforming into an industry based on the merchandising of the recorded form. Although Los Angeles had had a healthy recording industry since the 1920s, nonmigrant technical experts such as Capitol Records’ Lee Gillette and Ken Nelson came to supplant Texan Foreman Phillips, the traditionminded ballroom impresario, as the regional country music business’s most powerful men. Though elements of western swing resisted new forms of commodification, the subculture itself helped in its own undoing by touting new forms of consumption, especially television. Western swing’s focus on technical modernizations such as sound amplification also proved lethal, as club owners began to book well-amped, smaller, and more economical honky-tonk and rock-and-roll groups as a means of offsetting the more substantial investment required for the multitude of musicians in a western swing orchestra.135 In the 1950s, the content of Los Angeles country music also began to change, reflecting less the daily demands of performing for a live urban dance audience and more the distribution strategies required to target consumers outside the city or within the region’s far-flung suburban fringe.

pa rt ii

Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

4

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier Suburbanization, Whiteness, and the Unmaking of Okie Musical Ethnicity

For a pop music disc jockey, the Los Angeles radio personality Art Laboe was unusually dispassionate in assessing the competition posed by country music. In a 1951 interview with Western Music, a new fan magazine whose very existence demonstrated the strength of the local country music market, Laboe lavished praise on the genre. He told the writer from the magazine that he frequently mixed country with pop songs during his daily radio program, and predicted a glowing future for the local country music industry. “It seems that western music has arrived and is here to stay,” he said.1 Today, in the aftermath of the mid-1950s rock-and-roll explosion, Laboe’s comments seem fraught with irony. Competition from rock and roll—a genre pioneered by black artists and popularized nationally by a young, white, former country artist named Elvis—sounded the death knell for the careers of many Southern California country music artists and industry personnel by mid-decade. For country performers, as the longtime musician Johnny Bond would write in his memoir, the decade was no longer a “golden age” but the “Nervous Fifties”—the era of “the Rock and Roll scare.”2 Even apart from the threat posed by rock and roll, there was good reason to be nervous. Before the decade was out, Nashville had displaced Los Angeles and other contending cities as the new national center of country music production. And by the mid-1960s, local country music experienced a drought in recordings and available broadcasting venues. Laboe’s own career would later testify to the slow collapse of regional country music. The Los Angeles disc jockey rose to national fame in the mid-1950s on KPOP, formerly known as KFVD, Woody Guthrie and Spade Cooley’s old station, but now focusing on pop and rhythm and blues. Laboe became one of the highest ratings-getters of the decade by introducing rock and roll to thousands of Southern Californians in a Top 40 radio format that often excluded 113

114

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

country artists. He also enjoyed one of the longest-lasting careers in the industry, appealing to “oldies” fans during subsequent decades.3 With its strong television market and ample consumer base of transplanted, country-music-listening “middle Americans,” the local industry ultimately weathered the threats posed by rock and roll and Nashville. But its survival did not immunize the largely Okie-dominated country music culture from apprehension about the social status and the perceived “ethnicity” of its listeners who were former Dust Bowlers, nor did it inoculate local music against the conservative strains of political thought that were beginning to characterize segments of national culture. Anxieties about social status and changing social mores, as well as a shift of country music’s nightlife from the old migrant neighborhoods into whiter, wealthier, farther-flung suburbs, pressed performers and industry personnel to deemphasize elements of Okie identity—in effect de-ethnicizing their recordings and acts. Although Okieness and multiethnic influences had been a hallmark of the local country music industry in the 1940s, an emphasis on performers’ migrant backgrounds became increasingly rare in the 1950s and 1960s. Contrary to recent scholarship suggesting that strong, almost ethniclike, allegiances to Southernness and Okieness were catalysts for the new political Right that emerged in postwar Southern California, an analysis of the Okie-dominated country music culture suggests that demonstrations of Okie and Southern identity were in fact waning as the new conservative movement was beginning to expand. While there is no question that a substantial portion of the southern plains migrants participated in, and contributed to the rise of, an antiliberal political moment, study of the country music subculture suggests that the right-wing tilt of the 1950s and 1960s can be explained not so much as the “southernization” of Southern California political culture, but as the “Southern California-ization” of the region’s transplanted southerners—a process in which working-class Oklahomans, Arkansans, and Texans threw off the ways of the southern plains for the political and social mannerisms of the coastal Sunbelt’s middle class. Once depicting themselves as dissident ethnic refugees and jazz-dancing rhythm kings, migrant fans and performers became less proud to be Okie and sought to assimilate into their new suburbs by increasingly defining themselves as political conservatives and acquiring a calculated obliqueness about the mixed racial and ethnic origins of the country genre itself. Loosed from its liberal-populist moorings in Depression-era cinema, the figure of the country-music-singing cowboy reemerged in the 1950s and 1960s as an

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 115

emblem of a new, white, suburban form of Americanism hostile to Communism, liberalism, and secularism. Formerly an outlet for left-wing political dissidents and more recently a source for cultural borrowing, the local country music culture became a proving ground for middle-class whiteness as the region’s most prominent performers downplayed cultural borrowing and aligned themselves with campaigns antagonistic to efforts to integrate local housing. This is not to say that the local subculture totally abandoned cultural and musical integration. Though often relegated to the stylistic fringes by the mainstream country music recording and radio industry, some performers and audiences challenged musical segregation and the politically conservative redrawing of country music and Okie identity. Much of the industry and the vast majority of promoters, however, partook in efforts to promote sounds and images that concealed cultural borrowing and reinforced country music’s reputation as the “whitest” of America’s indigenous popular music forms. Ultimately, anxieties about class and Okie ethnicity, especially as expressed within mass-marketed country music culture, posed substantial challenges to the same New Deal coalition that had positioned itself as the defender of migrant interests in 1930s and 1940s. More important, efforts to bolster local country music’s status by downplaying its Okieness and emphasizing its Americanness helped shape the new conservative political style that would come to dominate Southern California politics and facilitate the rise of homegrown national figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bob Dornan.

muzzling fertilizer fred: suburbanization, corporate centralism, and the depoliticization of the country music medium In explaining the rising popularity of conservative candidates among white working-class voters in the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars have typically pointed to a racist backlash against new fair employment practices, and to frustrations over access to Great Society social programs and over short-sighted housing policies that exacerbated residential segregation and fed suspicion of minorities and government.4 Conservative writers such as the New Right architect Richard Viguerie explain the turn to the right as the result of pithy media strategies that convinced a blue-collar electorate to square an unparalleled religiosity with its habits in the voting booth.5 Others, such as Michael Kazin and Thomas Frank, point to a rhetor-

116

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

ical war waged against liberalism, one partly disingenuous but successful in framing the current class struggle as a battle between a humble, Godabiding “Middle America” and an effete, wealthy “liberal elite.”6 Within Okie country music culture, this right-leaning revolt began to take root not in a polemical minefield, but in an era of overall depoliticization, a shrinking away from country music’s once prominent role in the political and civic sphere. The new communications technologies and practices of the 1950s were one factor that helped strip Okie music of its traditional liberal-populist political overtones and realign local country music in a new nonpolitical direction. New media of the 1950s—television, DJ-dominated hits-oriented radio, high-fidelity sound systems, and the “unbreakable” 45rpm and multitrack 33 1/3-rpm records—made access to country music entertainment easier for the average consumer but also contained a significant trade-off for audiences: the decline of the communal practices that marked the culturally hybrid western-swing dance-hall culture of the 1940s and the outright demise of the communal politics that Woody Guthrie attempted to drum up on civic-oriented, mixed-format radio. Now lacking both a place to convene and a central channel for talking openly about identity or politics, the political culture of local country music became susceptible to new homogenizing forces that weakened Okie identity and constrained left-ofcenter voices. In a sense perhaps not anticipated by Marshall McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message” dictum, the decline of certain media in favor of others orchestrated a message in itself—the death knell for earlier, freer places of dialogue, as well as an overall retreat of country music from public venues into the more insular sphere of the suburban home. One place this inward turn was most evident was at the box office. Across the nation, attendance at movies, professional sporting events, and live musical performances declined markedly during the early 1950s as audiences turned toward home-centered entertainment.7 Locally, the mammoth, urban, western swing dance halls of the 1940s such as the Riverside Rancho and the 97th Street Corral were hit especially hard, and many closed in the 1950s. Even the leading impresario Bert “Foreman” Phillips sold the last of his chain of popular County Barn Dance halls in 1952. Live entertainment did not completely dry up but moved to smaller sites. In the 1940s, premier nightspots included the seven-thousand-person-capacity Venice pier ballroom and the five-thousand-capacity Riverside Rancho. Their replacements in the 1950s and 1960s were petite by comparison. The Foothill, a country music nightclub and bar in Signal Hill, held a modest four hundred patrons. Even the Palomino, located in North Hollywood and usually recognized as

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 117

the premier Southern California country music club of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, had about half the square footage of the old Riverside Rancho.8 Country music venues also became more geographically dispersed, often butting up against the region’s suburban fringe. When comparing listings of nightclubs and the locations of regular performances listed in local country-music fan magazines between 1950 and 1970, it becomes apparent that the most dramatic incursions of country music nightlife occurred in three areas far from the urban core: the central western San Fernando Valley, the El Monte–Baldwin Park area, and the Orange–Los Angeles county line (maps 2 and 3). Not only did the occasional country venue tend to be farther from the city center, but the most important new sites for live country music, such as the Palomino, the Foothill, and El Monte’s Nashville West, were further removed from the metropolitan core than the 1940s-era standard-bearers.9 This relocation of country music nightlife into the exurbs followed the movement of former Dust Bowlers into whiter and more prosperous neighborhoods and participated in surburbanization’s larger endeavor of curtailing working-class political action and labor militancy. As George Lipsitz has noted, business elites viewed the suburbanization of workers and their work sites as a powerful tool for breaking up large aggregations of labor in a single big plant that might serve as “sources of solidarity and support during strikes.”10 While some large aggregations of labor remained at regional plants such as Bethlehem Steel, and General Motors, South Gate, sites whose smokestacks marked what one writer has called the “happy ending of the Grapes of Wrath,” thousands of former Dust Bowlers now worked in smaller, nonunion aerospace and electronics plants in northern Orange County and western portions of the San Fernando Valley. Population followed production, dispersing old centers of retailing and civic life and creating a new suburban “crabgrass frontier” characterized by novel forms of social organization that at times disrupted older, more communal ways.11 Facilitated by regional planners, this movement away from longtime Okie and Mexican neighbors and African American newcomers not only separated migrants from the old centers of migrant concentration but also removed them from regular contact with people from other racial and cultural backgrounds.12 Taking advantage of federal postwar housing provisions and higher-paying aerospace jobs, migrants moved into some areas that saw simultaneous upsurges of Latino migration, such as El Monte and Downey, both just east of the older Okie locus of Bell Gardens, which itself became more Hispanic. But more of the migrants appear to have moved into

X

Wilshire Blvd.

X

Bell Gardens

Los Angeles

5

0

10 km

6 mi

PACIFIC OCEAN

ORA NGE C O U NTY

Santa Ana

Riverside

R I V E R SI D E CO UN T Y

Fontana

San Bernardino

X Nightspots operating between 1940 and 1949

S A N B ERNARDINO C O U NTY

N

X

map 2. The suburbanization of country music nightspots in Southern California, 1940s. Locations for each are based on information in fan magazines, regional newspapers, music business journals, and the Works Projects Administration’s book Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs, American Guide Series (New York: Hastings, 1941), as well as other sources.

3

0

Long Beach

LOS ANGELES HARBOR

X

X

Anaheim

Fullerton

Garden Grove

Santa Fe Springs

La Puente

San Dimas Baldwin Park Covina X

Azusa

LOS ANGELES COUNTY

X El Monte

Pasadena

X Florence Ave. X South Gate Watts Norwalk X X XX Compton Lakewood Torrance

XX X X

Santa Monica

North Hollywood X Glendale

San Fernando Valley

X Newhall

Western Ave.

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 119

lily-white communities such as Lakewood, Norwalk, and Garden Grove, areas with small Spanish-speaking populations that were also less than 1 percent black.13 Culturally mixed Downey, for instance, more than doubled its population in the 1950s, but white Garden Grove, just over the Orange County border, saw its population multiply by nearly twenty-two times.14 In addition to isolating migrants and their children and weakening the effectiveness of strikes, suburbanization also reduced opportunities for country music fans to forge a community with other fans. The large concentrations of union workers observed at dance halls in the 1940s become more improbable in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, fan magazines began to experience a dramatic increase in recruitment announcements from pen pal–style fan clubs, which seems to indicate that the search for community led many to find alternative, less personal means of interaction.15 While the size of venues for live music shrank, sales of television sets, phonograph players, and the new hi-fi stereos grew substantially.16 And television proved a powerful draw for local country music audiences. Seven full-time television stations—including several launched by major Hollywood studios—were operating in Southern California by 1952. Census takers found that even Bell Gardens had a high degree of television ownership as early as 1950, with one out of three homes owning a box.17 Country musicians such as Spade Cooley were among the medium’s earliest and most successful local pioneers and helped staff the popular television barn dances of the 1950s—KLAC’s Hometown Jamboree and KTTV’s Town Hall Party. Launched in 1949 and 1952, respectively, Hometown Jamboree and Town Hall Party each filled local television screens for nearly ten years, with Town Hall reaching national audiences via NBC radio simulcasting and syndication on Armed Forces Television.18 Although country TV performers occasionally told an off-color or culturally insensitive joke, and although several later Okie rockabilly guests posed challenges to prevailing sexual politics, barn dances and programs such as Cooley’s generally avoided overt discussion of ideological, political, or civic fare.19 Changes in radio too helped depoliticize local country music. The most drastic of these was the switch from live programming to the Top 40, disc jockey format. During the late 1940s, more than ten Southern California stations allotted airtime to country performers on a regular basis. Such programs ranged from amateur hours to professionally staffed barn dances and disc jockey roundups, allowing a significantly diverse lineup of country musical performances to be heard by the public. While few of these programs approached the degree of political discussion that Woody and Lefty Lou had offered in the late 1930s, performers such as Guthrie’s friend Rose Maddox

5

0

10 km

6 mi

X

Lakewood

Long Beach

XX

Compton

PACIFIC OCEAN

X

Azusa

Garden Grove

X

Anaheim

Fullerton

Santa Ana

X

X

ORA NGE C O U NTY

La Puente

San Dimas Baldwin Park Covina X El Monte

Santa Fe Springs

Norwalk

X South Gate

LOS ANGELES HARBOR

X

Watts

Bell Gardens

Los Angeles

Pasadena

LOS A NGELES COUNTY

Riverside

Ovals indicate new areas of concentration

Nightspots that bridged the two eras

Nightspots operating between 1950 and 1970

Nightspots operating between 1940 and 1949

X

San Bernardino

R I V E R SI D E CO UN T Y

Fontana

S AN B ERNARDIN O C O U NTY

N

map 3. The suburbanization of country music nightspots in Southern California, 1950 to 1970. Locations for each are based on information from oral histories of musicians and fans and on club listings in Country Music Report, Country Music Review, California Country, and California Town and Country, as well as other sources.

3

0

X

Wilshire Blvd.

X

X Florence Ave.

Torrance

X

XX XX

Santa Monica

North Hollywood X Glendale

San Fernando Valley

X Newhall

Western Ave.

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 121

and Spade Cooley—both of whom had appeared on Guthrie’s former station KFVD—developed their own content, remaining in a mixed programming lineup that might entice listeners to stick around for more political or civic-oriented shows.20 By the turn of the decade, this began to change. Pasadena station KXLA became a national leader by pioneering the all-country format in 1949, a move that ensured more exposure for certain artists but fewer opportunities for encountering frank or open discussion of civic affairs. By the early 1960s, most local stations that had once played some country had either switched to all-country or another format, and nearly all country stations began to emulate pop’s Top 40 format, with its established playlists and frequent rotation of a fixed number of “hit” songs. The former KXLA disc jockey Joe Allison helped pioneer Top 40–style country at a Sacramento station in 1962 to make things easier on a staff unfamiliar with country music.21 Soon, most of the Los Angeles stations followed suit, establishing playlists or strict limitations on the types of records allowed on the air.22 The San Fernando Valley station KBBQ, a nonunion juggernaut in the local country market, for instance, introduced a eighty-song playlist, restricted what its disc jockeys said, required time-consuming taped promotionals, and eventually prohibited unscripted interviews of fans via telephone or remote.23 Social and electoral politics still got play, but less frequently and in diffused modes, often only in the repetitive four-and-half-minute, hourly newscasts that focused on news of the San Fernando Valley, or the occasional debate-provoking single.24 The occasional special broadcast of the prisoner-awareness-raising album Johnny Cash at San Quentin offered some opportunity for liberal political expression, but the few syndicated political programs that KBBQ continued to offer tended to be right of center. As late as 1969, KBBQ broadcast the archconservative news commentary of Sensing the News, a program produced by the segregationist, antilabor Southern States Industrial Council.25 KBBQ’s programming director Bill Ward celebrated this new professionalized but silenced jockeyship in a 1969 Cashbox interview, proclaiming his jocks to be “intelligent business types” as opposed to yesterday’s folksier “Fertilizer Freds.”26 “Keep in mind,” he reminded his jocks in a programming guide from the same year, “you must be friendly and sincere without sounding corny. You are a young executive playing country and western music. You are playing to adults, not kids, not hillbillies. Don’t overtalk.”27 The diversity of voices on the air was also curtailed by the centralization

122

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

and corporatization of the country radio field. Faced with competition from television, rock and roll, and an oversaturated all-country market, several country stations went off the air or switched formats, and a few lucky stations emerged as major players. By 1966 only four country radio stations served the greater Los Angeles area: the original KIEV in Glendale, KFOX (formerly KXLA) in Long Beach, KGBS (formerly KPOP and KFVD) in Los Angeles, and KWOW in Pomona.28 A fifth—KBBQ—was added the next year, when a San Fernando Valley pop Top 40 station reformatted and changed its call letters. The station quickly brokered an advertising revenuesharing agreement with KFOX, and both stations were eventually purchased by a single corporation. Reaching more than a million people a week, one of the largest, if not the largest, markets in the country, the joint KFOXKBBQ venture became known in business circles as the Los Angeles Metropolitan Country Combination. Under mounting pressure, the competitor KGBS soon fell out of the race, switching to a religious format. In less than twenty years, country music in Los Angeles went from being performed live on more than ten stations to being featured as a recorded enterprise on only three independent operations.29 Songs with controversial themes also lost out as radio and television grew in stature as hit makers. Earlier reliance on jukebox play as a measure of a single’s potential had allowed honky-tonker Hank Thompson to hit big with singer-songwriter Jimmy Heap’s provocative 1952 cheating song “Wild Side of Life,” put out by Capitol Records. But such successes became increasingly difficult for Thompson as radio programming supplanted juke vending as the primary promotional vehicle for new singles. Though Thompson was getting tremendous live audience response locally when his band played Roy Hogsed’s 1948 drug- and murder-themed song “Cocaine Blues,” Capitol Records balked at recording it as single, fearing that nowpowerful radio programmers would object to its controversial themes. Thompson and his producer, Ken Nelson, eventually circumvented the industry’s faintheartedness by pairing “Cocaine Blues” with other bawdy but less controversial drinking songs on the 1959 concept album Songs for Rounders. Radio stations predictably refused to play the song and, despite its overwhelming popularity with live audiences, the song was prevented from charting. Thompson recalled being baffled by the industry’s skittishness, saying decades later that the song taught an important moral by having its cocaine-using protagonist sentenced to life in San Quentin.30

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 123

“pleases more than ‘sooners’ ”: status anxiety and the unmaking of okie ethnicity While changes in the medium began to deprive country radio of its controversy and its politics, the local industry also became embroiled in a major skirmish over whether working-class, ethnically hybrid, and Okie identifications would remain at the heart of the local country music image. Several key promoters, advertisers, and performers began to shun the folksiness and regionalism that characterized 1930s radio programs such as Woody and Lefty Lou and the Beverly Hill Billies as well as aesthetic vocabularies of black culture and jazz that had marked wartime western swing performance. In their place, they began to promote an image more in line with KBBQ’s “young executive” DJs, one that emphasized middle-class or whitecollar characteristics such as efficiency, affluence, prestige, and statusoriented consumption. Local country had, in a sense, gone uptown, spawning its own version of “populuxe,” Thomas Hine’s word for the aggrandizing stylistic elements—chrome, Naugahyde, bright or pastel colors—that manufacturers employed in the 1950s to assure customers that luxury items and the latest modernizations were finally available to the people.31 Rather than touting migrant pride or multiethnic hipsterism, promoters and musicians now downplayed or suppressed blue-collar Okie associations in favor of a new aggrandizing image that emphasized assimilation into a younger suburban middle class that was whiter, wealthier, more attuned to modern influences, and more culturally and ethnically homogenous. Transformations in radio and television advertising were one major impetus for this change. Beginning in the 1950s, and then increasingly throughout the 1960s, sponsors became more aware of the import of demographic research and began to gear their sponsorships and advertising spots toward specific target audiences whom they believed made important purchasing decisions.32 Rather than the large general audiences sought in the early 1950s, advertisers and programmers began to seek more upscale and often younger audiences because the wealthy could afford higher cost items and the young were believed to spend more of their disposable income and to be establishing lifetime purchasing habits and brand loyalties.33 Although ad men had set their sights on middle- to upper-income audiences since the advent of the professional advertising agency in the nineteenth century, the focus on target audiences and demographic research began to spell doom for certain types of general audience programming.34 The text-

124

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

book example of this was CBS’s cancellation of general-ratings leaders such as Gunsmoke and Green Acres in the early 1970s because they were believed to be attracting an audience that was too downscale, too old, and too rural. Netting high overall ratings without attracting more upscale viewers, executives assumed, might mean the loss of important ad revenue from the manufacturers of expensive cars, business machines, and other items.35 Country music promoters were similarly gripped by the new demographic thrust and sought new ways of making country palatable to advertisers seeking upscale audiences. Sometimes they did so by simply claiming to have an influence on desired audience groups. In 1963, Broadcasting reported that KFOX, the country station with the largest local audience at the time, revamped its lineup, catering to “the tastes of an audience that is mostly middle-class, augmented by the more recent college and coffee shop set.”36 By 1968, Country Music Life, the region’s dominant fan magazine, similarly claimed that the average age of its readers was twenty-eight, and that its readers had a 70 percent rate of home ownership and owned 1.6 automobiles per home. It also touted its high subscription rate among professionals and medical doctors.37 While more impartial third-party surveys of local country radio listeners suggest these claims were at least somewhat inflated,38 this rush to recast country music as acceptable, modern, and properly middle class appears to have had some effect on advertisers and program sponsors. Local country broadcasters, bolstered by their new image, the extension of credit to more consumers, and some actual economic mobility among listeners, had been experiencing a dramatic shift in advertising trends since the early 1950s. During the 1930s and 1940s, sponsors of country music radio programming had been largely purveyors of necessities and nondurable consumer commodities such as clothing, groceries, and gasoline. But by the 1950s, major commercial backing for all-country radio and the new country music television programs began to come from companies that sold more expensive durable goods, such as the furniture chains and television manufacturers. Country music advertising advanced from a science of addressing basic needs to an art of producing desires.39 Perhaps most indicative of this shift was the profusion of ads and sponsorships associated with Southern California’s most celebrated consumer investment: the automobile. Although a few dealers, such as Podolar Motors, had been involved in country programming since the 1930s, mammoth new suburban dealerships such as Vel’s Ford in Torrance and Cal Worthington’s Worthington Dodge in Long Beach became active supporters of country broadcasting, reflecting both the military-industrial Fordism that

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 125

bolstered listeners’ wages as well as a growing national mania for the automobile.40 Worthington, a poor Oklahoma migrant who made good by selling cars in working-class Okie haunts, began buying television time in 1955 to air Cal’s Corral, a three-hour program that combined musical performances with Worthington’s folksy sales pitches and daredevil stunts, often involving large dangerous animals. Big names like Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins appeared free to capture publicity, and Worthington’s feats and homespun appeals attracted thousands, making his dealership, as one magazine put it in 1963, the “largest Dodge Agency in the world.”41 Even those country music sponsors that continued to hawk nondurables abandoned the gimmickry that had characterized earlier advertisements aimed at working-class listeners, banking instead on themes such as scientism and increased efficiency in the workplace—qualities that might appeal to an audience of professional “organization men.” Pitches for Peruna Tonic, the highly dubious elixir that Woody and Lefty Lou hawked in the 1930s, were replaced by pleas from more “scientific” and “respectable” vitamin makers, who focused on a particularized list of discomforts associated with a fast-paced corporate lifestyle. Spade Cooley’s 1951 Thyavals vitamin ad in Western Music, for instance, did not tout the product as a patent medicine cure-all, but emphasized its ability to reduce stress and compensate for the overwork, sleep loss, and poor diet that plagued members of his busy “organization,” the cast and crew of his TV show.42 In the words of leading 1950s advertising whiz David Ogilvy: “It pays to give a product a high class image instead of a bargain-basement image. Also you can get more for it.”43 At times, this shift toward a populuxe image extended to discussions of the musicians themselves, who were encouraged to live up to middle-class and elite standards of propriety. National and local fan magazines from the era emphasized demeanor even over musicianship and advised performers to adopt an almost Victorian set of middle-class virtues, such as hard work, sobriety, good grooming, clean language, and a brisk no-nonsense walking style. “Every program director in the country has wished his hillbillies would ‘get a move on,’” one National Hill-Billy News columnist wrote in 1950. “You should walk as if you enjoyed living, as if you always had somewhere you were on your way to. Don’t loiter. Keep busy. Learn things.”44 In a 1965 column, Orange County’s Country Music Life similarly cautioned aspiring musicians to “smile a lot,” be “professional,” and think of themselves and their act as a commodity: “Sell yourself. Sell your song (or act) and create the desire for more.”45 Performers in turn cultivated their image as a people on the climb by displaying the trappings of upward mobility. The Maddox Brothers and Rose used an entourage of shiny new Cadillacs to an-

126

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

nounce their performances, and Hank Thompson adopted the image of a busy executive by zipping off to performances in his custom-insignia twinengine Cessna. Having survived the dire poverty of an Oakland Hooverville, Maddox’s mother-manager suggested that Cadillacs brought an instant boost to socioracial status, allowing the family to “start livin’ like white folks.”46 Even the publicized charity activities of performers began to take on a veneer of social mobility. During the 1940s, local musicians devoted much of their volunteer time to raising money for an Encino school for the disabled, reflecting the historical and psychological connections that had developed between early radio stars and disabled listeners, a group referred to pejoratively but affectionately in the fan press as “shut-ins.” Fan magazine accounts from the 1950s, however, suggest that many country music performers supplanted performances at the school’s humble fund-raising drives with appearances at the celebrity softball games of the Hollywood Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce), a charitable organization that promoted the values of the corporation and the market place while making special appeals to aspiring young business leaders. “Push charity causes,” one magazine argued. “Find out how you can help the community grow . . . to prosper [yourself].”47 Perhaps most dramatically, promoters and musicians began to assail the widely used genre categorization “hillbilly” in an effort to appeal to suburban middle-class listeners by ridding the genre of embarrassing associations with working-class or “lowbrow” culture. While Woody Guthrie had used the term to carve out a political identity at odds with the regional power structure, and the Beverly Hill Billies had used the term as a fictive element in the telling of the radio group’s origins, by the late 1940s local industry leaders were beginning to take issue with it. The powerful Columbia Records producer and scout “Uncle” Art Satherly started the ball rolling in the mid-1940s by instructing the label’s Los Angeles artists “from Autry on down the line” to stop using the hillbilly designation and to dissuade reporters from doing so.48 Not all took Satherly’s rebukes seriously. The columnist Slim Hawkins took the antihillbillies to task in the 1946 Tophand article “Hillbillies or Mountain Williams?” A radio personality who typically wrote Guthrie-like tall tales about life back in Texas, Hawkins complained that objections to hillbilly only arose after performers encountered the glitz of movieland: It seems to me everybody out here tries to go Hollywood and over night become a big shot, trying to forget as soon as possible that they were born

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 127

and raised on Rt. 2, and that their friends and neighbors in the same category made it possible in the first place. . . . Don’t forget that there are ten “hillbillies” for every sophisticate. Those people have made this industry, and if it were not for them, none of us who make our living in the business would be here to today. I repeat, I am a hillbilly, proud of it and I intend to stay a hillbilly as long as I can make a living in the business.

Even among the objectors lay a bedrock of inconsistencies. The western swing pioneer Bob Wills, for instance, reportedly despised the term, but— moved by a fiddler on a KXLA appearance—implored his audience to “listen to that hillbilly play!”49 The tide against the “hillbilly” label finally began to turn in 1953, when Capitol Records proposed “country” as a substitute by titling its artist catalog with the hybrid “Country and Hillbilly.” More important, however, was the fierce antihillbilly partisanship of the label’s new country music chief, Ken Nelson. Feeling some kinship with poor-white Okies because of his own alienating childhood years in an orphanage, Nelson became partial to the Dust Bowlers he recorded and he viewed hillbilly as a degrading term. He not only prohibited the use of the word in songs recorded on the Capitol label but also worked to persuade record stores to replace outdated “hillbilly” product labels and album dividers in the bins.50 By the early 1960s, the word hillbilly was so moribund that Tex Ritter anguished over recording “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven,” an otherwise harmless hit that paid tribute to founding country performers who had almost universally used the older term. So successful was the campaign that by 1963 the editors of a local youth folk periodical felt compelled to put an asterisk by the word hillbilly and identify it as “not a pejorative term.”51 Shelving hillbilly also proved an excellent way for the local country music industry to highlight connections with a younger and more affluent market. While Country Music Life was claiming an average age of twentyeight among its readership and a 70 percent rate of home ownership, it was also blasting the Saturday Evening Post for ignoring college-educated performers and for using hillbilly, a word it stated was as “obsolete in the country music field as the term ‘flying machine’ is to the aircraft industry.” Substituting country and western, or simply country, even complemented a larger image makeover at Capitol that included a cylindrical sleek new International Modernist headquarters in Hollywood, shaped by the architect Welton Becket to look like a stylus and stack of phonograph records, and a new global marketing strategy via an amicable merger with the British recording giant EMI.52 The actual economic circumstances of listeners, however, often did not

128

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

square with this new image. Reported to be still largely Okie by performers and industry officials, audiences also continued to be predominately working class, but a significant number had moved upward in income. According to a 1969 survey of radio listeners, 57 percent of the male Los Angeles country music audience worked in blue-collar, service, clerical, or sales trades, and more than three-quarters of country-listening households netted incomes of less than eleven thousand dollars a year. Nevertheless the same survey reported that less than 21 percent worked in professional, managerial, executive or proprietary positions, and that more than half of listening households owned two or more cars. Although only about 10 percent of the heads of country-music listening households had completed college, higher education and home ownership in wealthier segregated exurbs, especially in almost exclusively white sections of San Fernando Valley and Orange County, were becoming more common among them.53 Jim Halsey, manager of Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys, remembered a trickle of restaurant owners, bankers, and even doctors and lawyers who were beginning to attend local appearances.54 Many of the fans, however, had not escaped poverty and could only fantasize about college and multicar garages. Census data on the nearly sixty thousand new settlers to Los Angeles from Texas between 1955 and 1965 confirm that poverty was particularly troublesome among those who had hoped the move west would lift them out of the low-wage casual and farm labor sector.55 And despite new inroads, the bulk of the country music retail market still remained in humbler abodes. Don Pierce, chief salesman for the Four Star label, recalled that—outside of a few Okie-dominated spots in California’s relatively undermarketed rural Central Valley—the undisputed leader of country music record sales was the W. T. Grant discount store in working-class Bellflower.56 Despite the strong working-class and Okie components of local listenership, the local industry only stepped up its assault on blue-collar roots, folksiness, and regionalisms, now downplaying or denying the formidable Okie underpinnings of local country music in an effort to promote a more sophisticated image. Although not a fully organized campaign, these efforts transformed Okie identity from a sign of working-class and ethnoregional pride, or a symbol of multiethnic modernity, to a liability—a holdover no longer modern or respectable. Recordings and song titles appearing on local labels give some indication of the extent to which the local industry and local culture was shedding associations with Okieness. In the four years between 1946 and 1950, as discussed in chapter 3, there had been a virtual renaissance of Okie-themed

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 129

recordings, ranging from statements of pride such as 1946’s “Oakie Boogie” and “Oklahoma Stomp” and 1947’s “Oklahoma Blues,” to sardonic renderings of the migrant plight such as 1948’s “Dear Okie” and “He’s a Real Gone Oakie,” to less successful contributions like Doye O’Dell’s “Okies in California” (1949) and Al Vaughn’s “She’s an Okie” (1950). A search of company catalogs, industry listings, and discographies covering the seventeenyear-stretch between 1951 and 1968, however, reveals that only two new “Okie” songs, “Okie’s in the Pokie” (1959) and “Okie Surfer” (1963), appeared locally, both of them by artists who had abandoned the country music field for rock and roll.57 Changing tastes and styles contributed to the demise of the Okie-themed song, but technological changes and transformations in the structure of the local recording industry appear to have been major factors in the gradual effacement of Okie-identified song lyrics. Local independent labels had been the lifeblood of the southern plains song craze, producing five of the seven “Okie” tunes of the 1940s, but new forces in the 1950s, such as the introduction of the 45-rpm recording and competition from Nashville, led several small country-oriented labels to fold or relocate. Although the introduction of cheap magnetic recording tape in the late 1940s allowed for an overall expansion of independents and a deconcentration of the national recording industry, the local country music industry soon endured several setbacks that helped halt the production of Okie-themed songs. Exclusive, the country label formed by the African American brothers Leon and Otis Rene to record such songs such as Doye O’Dell’s “Dear Okie” and “Okies in California,” failed in 1951 because of an inability to convert to production of the new 45-rpm records. Liberty/Blazon, a mom-and-pop label, went on hiatus in the late 1940s when artist-owner Zeke Clements found it financially necessary to go on an East Coast tour. Even Four Star—poised to be David to Capitol’s Goliath—was halted by surmounting costs, competition for distributors, and the cumulative effects of years of mismanagement and defrauding of local artists. Formerly producing singles such as “She’s an Okie” and recording colorful southern plains artists such as Jesse “Arkie” Shibley, Four Star retreated to Nashville in the mid-1950s, refocusing its efforts on music publishing.58 Without a significant pool of independent country labels taking risks on regionally specific recordings, Capitol, which had hits in the 1940s with cousin Jack Guthrie’s 1945 recording of Woody Guthrie’s “Oklahoma Hills” and a cover of the independent Stanchel label’s “Oakie Boogie,” encountered few proven, locally produced examples to translate into national successes. Indeed the only two Okie-titled songs by local artists to appear be-

130

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

tween 1951 and 1968, Jimmy Patton’s rockabilly “Okie’s in the Pokie” (1959) and David Gates’s beach rock “Okie Surfer” (1963), were recorded by relatively new upstarts, Hilligan and Del-Fi, labels either outside of California or outside the traditional country music milieu.59 The overall decline of Okie-identified recordings coincided with a similar trend in many listeners’ lives in which personal identifications with Okieness began to erode. Suburban settlement patterns were especially effective in weakening Okie affinities by breaking up social networks that had existed in older “Okie” neighborhoods such as Bell Gardens. Several Oklahomans, for instance, were among the first settlers of Lakewood, a developer-planned community near Long Beach that piqued national attention as a new breed of model suburb. Although the first group of young Oklahoma couples who bought homes there congregated because they chose their own lots, later home buyers were randomly assigned parcels by the developer and hence were unlikely to be placed next to friends, kin, or fellow migrants.60 Older migrant enclaves also became objects of derision and shame. Bell Gardens, the important migrant center of the 1930s and 1940s, acquired the scornful nickname “Billy Goat Acres” by 1950. Although perhaps prompted by the fact that some thrifty Okie Bell Gardeners raised their own chickens and small livestock, the appellation perpetuated stereotypes of rural backwardness. Like the entomological slurs of the 1930s, “Billy Goat Acres” chained residents to a designation that reduced a whole class of people to the taxonomic status of a rubbish-eating farm animal.61 In more affluent suburbs, some migrants consciously hid their Okieness. The memoirist Donald J. Waldie, who grew up in the suburb of Lakewood in the 1950s, recalled that, though a third of his neighbors were Okies, and though many had lived in government farmworker camps, several migrant couples gave up “their Pentecostalism for milder forms of faith.” More important, many of the younger generation “learned to hide their border state twang.” The distinguishing regionalisms of the southern plains migration, in many cases, shared too close an affiliation with class identity, something anathema to Waldie’s migrant neighbors as they tried to blend in as middle-class homeowners. Suburbia, as sociological observers of the era noted, did not condone “shabby gentility.”62 The appellation Okie itself came to be equated with the harshest of ethnoracial epithets. In his memoir Holyland, Waldie remembered the fury unleashed by a single slip of the tongue in 1950s Lakewood: “When I was growing up, to call another boy an Okie, whether he was or not, would re-

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 131

quire a fight. It was a word that hung in the air between two angry boys like a cocked fist, like the word ‘nigger.’”63 Similar attitudes were even evident in Bakersfield, a middle-size blue-collar farming and oil community some hundred miles north of Los Angeles that, as another major endpoint of the Dust Bowl exodus, was beginning to rival Los Angeles as a proving ground for country artists. Oklahoma-born Ronnie Sessions, a teen on the Mosrite label, told Country Music Life that appearances on local country music television programs earned him classmates’ taunts and the derisory “title of ‘Okie Singer.’” “At times,” the article explained, “it was a little difficult to hold his head up high, smile, and keep singing, especially during his Junior High years.”64 Such attitudes spilled over into debates about the direction of the local country music industry, prompting some to propose that trashing the word Okie would help country music gain respectability, just as dropping hillbilly had. Those most invested in policing displays of Okieness, such as the influential Country Music Life columnist Jim Harris, often positioned themselves as critics of the yokelism and lack of schooling associated with the old hillbilly image, which still jeopardized contemporary country artists. “One of the things that really ‘bugs’ me is to hear someone refer to country music as ‘Okie,’” Harris wrote in a 1966 column. “The general impression that a lot of people hold of country music and the people that are associated with it is that these people have about a third grade education, if any education at all, and they have yet to don a pair of shoes.”65 Presuming that audiences considered the term Okie to be disparaging was itself a significant development, given the proliferation of Okie-themed recordings in the 1940s. Had Harris been writing some twenty years earlier, when the local scene was awash in proud displays of southern plains identity, his calls for a moratorium likely would have been dismissed as antimigrant bigotry and probably would not have graced the pages of a publication addressing a readership largely made up of former Dust Bowlers and their children. For those appealing to the wider broadcasting market that included working-class as well as middle-class migrants, Okie identity became more of a balancing act, one that involved weighing the tastes of listeners in the old inner-tier, working-class suburbs with those of the growing audience that had settled the new middle-class suburbs and exurbs. KFOX, for instance, described the disc jockey Don Hinson as “Okie to the core” in promotional materials, but with the admonition that “his talent pleases more than ‘Sooners.’”66 Elements of Okie and southern plains identity did remain, but did not in-

132

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

voke the kind of force they once had. Performers from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri continued to outnumber those from other regions in the general field of country music, but as a group they placed less emphasis on their migrant backgrounds. Several continued to discuss their Oklahoma and Texas upbringings in interviews, but mentioned their backgrounds much less frequently in their advertising and promotional materials. While Texas-oriented lyrical themes and Lone Star State band names such as Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys were often wrapped up in the cowboy image and survived, performers ceased adopting “Okie” and “Arkie” nicknames or calling themselves by these labels in their press interviews.67 Ultimately, country music and Okie identity survived this trying period, but the two constructions were becoming increasingly distanced from one another. The subculture’s decidedly Okie identity had begun to unravel.

country music conservatism, singing-cowboy stars, and the westernization of migrant political identity In the absence of the almost infrastructural Okie archetype that reigned in local circles during the 1940s, artists and promoters began to reinvent the image of local country music by espousing the most traditional myths of American origin, those of the western frontier and the American cowboy. But the local culture’s use of western imagery was anything but traditional. Westernization, instead, served to fuel a radical break with the past: the assimilation—both symbolic and actual—of a formerly outcast group of listeners into a suburban, socially conforming middle class. Faced with the depoliticization of radio, country’s new focus on status and consumerism, and the crumbling of Okie identity, the local subculture, in fact, took a major turn to the political Right, emphasizing a new conservative populism often affiliated with anticommunism, religious moralism, flag-waving, and a muscular “western” individualism. Although broadcasting had been largely shorn of traditional electoral politics, and most area performers presented themselves as nonpartisan if not entirely apolitical, those performers and broadcasters who did take sides were among the most powerful, the most politically conservative, and the most effective in using celebrity to bolster their chosen causes. By making the cowboy image dominant and then linking that image with a strident new brand of conservatism, right-wing

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 133

singing-cowboy performers and their promoters and fans played a substantial role in ostracizing the genre’s liberal-populist holdovers. That this new conservatism arose not so much from trying to preserve southern plains tradition as it did from anxieties about respectability and social mobility suggests that some rethinking of the migration’s impact is in order. Recent scholarship has argued that the backlash against Civil Rights, feminism, taxation, and the social safety net—the so-called “crabgrassroots” suburban political movements of the 1950s and 1960s—occurred because of white working-class fear about declining property values in integrated neighborhoods and because of a middle-class impulse to reconnect selectively with “traditional” small-town upbringings in the Midwest and South as means of the coping with the complexities of urban life. Implicit in these arguments is an earlier thesis that Los Angeles–Orange County politics were “southernized” by the influx of newcomers and therefore assumed a conservative outlook associated with southern culture. This southernization fused or dovetailed with indigenous forms of conservatism, but nevertheless served as a coequal force in inciting rebellion against secularism, racial egalitarianism, and social liberalism.68 A different story emerges when one examines issues surrounding the social status, Okie identity, and white ethnicity in a mass-mediated form such as country music. Indeed, it was during the early 1960s, the period when fans and performers made the greatest efforts to throw off the ethnicities inherent in Okieness and southernness, and began establishing the primacy of western identity, that political and racial conservatism was beginning to establish its strongest foothold. Southern racial attitudes may have persisted among migrants and their children, but other forces, including the impulse to assimilate into a California’s idealized and respectable white suburban middle class proved more powerful in creating a base of support for conservative political figures ranging from precinct-level neosegregationists like Floyd Wakefield and Lawrence E. Walsh to homegrown luminaries of the national Right such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bob Dornan.69 A westernized identity was nothing new to Okie culture or California country music. The southern plains and California had been deluged with cowboy performers since the Texas folklorist John A. Lomax published his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a 1910 song collection that celebrated European conquest but also invoked some of the cultural diversity of the frontier.70 In California, early efforts to market “western” music tended to embrace, if anything, a left-leaning populism. Harry “Haywire

134

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

Mac” McClintock mixed cowboy songs with the radical laments of the Industrial Workers of the World in his 1920s San Francisco radiocasts, while Woody and Lefty Lou introduced an occasional Lomax standard into their repertoire of topical “hillbilly” ballads. The popular singing-cowboy films of the 1930s, too, pitted honest laborers and farmers against corrupt capitalist villains in an effort to enlarge box office receipts from working-class. The image of cowboy was even used to express the social aspirations of African Americans, women, and an emerging gay minority as the careers of singing black matinee cowboy Herb Jeffries and singing cowgirl Patsy Montana, as well as the historically grounded fiction of John Rechy, suggest.71 Cowboy costumes remained prominent into the late 1940s, but western song themes were becoming diluted as they mixed with other country music traditions or were reconfigured into the sly and slightly mocking selfreferences of the western swing bandleaders. Spade Cooley, Bob Wills, and Tex Williams dressed the part of the dapper Hollywood-ized cowboy at the mike and on film, but the same artists were just as apt to invert or tease new meanings out of the cowboy canon. Cooley’s aforementioned “Jive on the Range” is a good example, not just in its irreverence for the cowboy hero but also because it was intended as a modernist send-up of a Tin Pan Alley “western” number and Lomax’s hallowed “Home on the Range.” By the early 1950s, California “cowboy music” was rapidly receding in the face of competition from Nashville and elsewhere. Imports such as the string band revival by the Opry mainstay Roy Acuff; Ernest Tubb’s candid, aching Texas honky-tonk; and the polished country-pop of Eddy Arnold all drew large crowds in Los Angeles. The singing-cowboy movie faded as well, a victim of rising production costs, competition from television, economic problems affecting box-office receipts in the important film market of Britain, and a war-scathed American public no longer appreciative of the movies’ simplistic plots and sunny moralism.72 The decline of western imagery did not, however, last long. Recovering from setbacks and reshaped to fit the new realities of the cold war, cowboy imagery resurfaced with a vengeance during the Korean War. In fact, the persistent use of the compound adjective “country and western” among members of the Baby Boom generation can be attributed largely to the efforts of Southern California promoters and fans during this period. The Los Angeles fan magazine Western Music was one of the earliest to tout a western revival, its inaugural edition masthead in 1951 emphasizing the primacy of “Western Style Music” over lesser focuses on “Folk Songs, Ballads, Hillbilly, and Spiritual Music.” The magazine later amended its name to Western and Country Music apparently in part as a means of holding the new

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 135

“country” designation in a subordinate position to “western.” Adorned with Conestoga wagons and cattle brands as fill art, Western and Country Music’s devotion to westernness at times bordered on the inaccurate or the bizarre. One item, for instance, identified artist Ernest Tubb as “a singer of Western tunes” even though the same article counted off a long and decidedly unwestern list of tear-jerking hard-boiled honky-tonk hits such as “Slipping Around” and “Daddy When Is Mommy Coming Home?”73 Although positioning “western” before “country” never caught on, local efforts to maintain country music’s westernness continued to gain ground throughout the 1950s and were bolstered when the Depression-era screen stars Gene Autry and Roy Rogers revitalized their careers by launching popular television programs aimed at the children of the Baby Boom. Musical director Dmitri Tiomkin’s choice of the local TV host Tex Ritter to sing the haunting theme song of High Noon, the gritty 1952 “film noir western” and box office hit, further asserted the primacy of the cowboy image while helping the film garner an Oscar for its music.74 The high-water mark for country music westernness, however, came in 1964 when industry officials and local enthusiasts formed the Hollywoodbased Country and Western Music Academy. Formally renamed the Academy of Country and Western Music (ACWM) four years later, the trade organization posed itself as a populist alternative to the Nashville-based Country Music Association. Dominated largely by record executives and programmers, the latter, established in 1958, was what music critic Jonny Whiteside has called “an insider’s club” that merely announced the radio industry’s anointed chart toppers at its annual conventions. The ACWM, on the other hand, served as a social as well as business organization. Among other endeavors, the academy pioneered the country music awards show, allowing even fans a vote in the selection of annual winners.75 The choice of the compound title—“the Academy of Country and Western”—was significant in that it emphasized a regional West Coast identity at a time when Nashville and many of the trade magazines had largely abandoned the “Country and Western” tag. Still intimate enough to keep track of its members on three-by-five index cards, the ACWM posed itself not only as a western, people’s alternative to the corporate Country Music Association but also as an overall advocate for West Coast music production. Regionalism was especially apparent in the ACWM’s first decade of award winners. With a few exceptions, including several best female vocalist awards for neotraditionalists such as Loretta Lynn, the group overwhelmingly selected West Coast artists, most of whom hailed from Los Angeles or Bakersfield.76

136

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

Bolstering the ACWM’s stand on westernness were local anxieties about the future of Southern California country music. Indeed fan magazine writing and memoirs such as Johnny Bond’s suggest that locals were deeply afraid that regional styles would be replaced altogether by the slicker aesthetics of the growing commercial juggernaut in Nashville. Although Los Angeles artists had popularized such conventions as the rhinestone suit and guitar thumb-picking, there was good reason to fear, because by 1960, with the exception of Capitol, the major labels had consolidated most of their country music recording in Nashville. While L.A. still retained a stronger country television lineup, some local promoters lashed out by linking personal grievances with the claim that Nashville was squandering its West-ofthe-Mississippi inheritance. In Country Music Review in 1964, one local disc jockey mocked the organizers of the annual country music DJ convention for always holding the event in Nashville and for slighting artistic developments in the West: “Now, I’m not knocking Nashville as a place. As a matter of fact, it’s home of the Nashville sound . . . created by Westerners in the West (excuse me) West Nashville. Imported, exported all around town.”77 The ACWM’s westernized moniker also spoke to the fact that singing cowboys were one of the association’s most powerful constituencies. Jimmy Wakely and Eddie Dean, former horse-opera regulars of the late 1930s and early 1940s, played active roles in the group’s nascent years, and Johnny Bond, a honky-tonker–comedian turned cowboy artist, was elected association president in 1964. Keeping country and western intact also ensured the goodwill of Autry and Rogers, whose commercial ventures had gained them influence as promoters of new talent. The ACWM’s emphasis on westernness even had a westernizing effect on decidedly nonwestern country artists and mediums. Stressing “hard” honky-tonk and “modern” country-pop airplay, KBBQ nevertheless promoted its DJs as “western gentleman,” referred to its music as “western,” and used jingles such as “KBBQ: The sound that’s winning the West.” By 1968, a triumphant Tex Ritter told a local fan magazine that the same artists that had “burned their cowboy boots and suits before the cameras” a few years ago were now “happy” to resupply.78 The ACWM’s inclusion of Western in its name also seemed to jibe with the rhythms, fears, and sublimated desires of country’s newly targeted suburban audiences. Sociological tracts from the era noted a near-contagion of consumer westernness. Middle-class suburbanites lived in ranch homes, drove ranch wagons, purchased cowboy clothes for tots, and barbecued western style on ranch-style patios. Journalistic accounts often invoked

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 137

Cole Porter’s wartime hit “Don’t Fence Me In” as the theme of an age characterized by large private yards in new suburban quarters. Celluloid westerners, as Richard Slotkin suggests, also spoke to deep psychological needs. Whether based on the conventions of the classic western or infused with the new graphic realism of the psychological gunslinger thriller and the neocolonialist John Wayne epic, the cowboy hero and his almost obsessive goit-alone individualism seemed to offer a poignant counterpoint to the “other directedness” or white-collar “yes man” herd mentality that had come to worry sociologists. Self-reliant, the western protagonist also proved a cathartic figure, often selling suburban audiences patriotism, reassurance, and clear-cut victories amid an era of containment, détente, and mutually assured nuclear annihilation.79 Seeking to profit off the trend, Southern California’s thriving suburban theme parks even incorporated western-style country music into their amusements—in effect colonizing the local genre’s hardscrabble Dust Bowl roots and making them safe for middle-class family consumption. Hoping to augment and lend authenticity to its small-town- and western-themed Main Street and Frontierland sections, Disneyland began organizing regular country music concerts in 1966. More “pioneering,” however, was the rival Knott’s Berry Farm and Ghost Ranch. Founded by the grower and conservative “cowboy capitalist” Walter Knott, the park booked the Beemans, a family band of Texas migrants, to perform soon after it opened in 1947, and it ushered in the centennial of the gold rush by moving the performances to a fifteen-hundred-seat amphitheater encircled by Conestoga wagons. In 1955, Knott permanently institutionalized western music by establishing the Wagonmasters, an official theme-park band known for threepart cowboy harmonies like those sung by the Sons of the Pioneers. Such concerts were popular at both theme parks, helping Knott later take the ACWM’s “Man of the Year” award and introducing the genre to new groups of fans. “More than one person was heard to remark on his way to the ‘people mover’ that they didn’t like country music, but ‘that guy was great,’” reported a fan magazine writer at Disneyland.80 Now on children’s television, singing cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were arguably the most successful westernizers of the local subculture. Autry, who began producing his own western films in the 1940s, became the first major singing-cowboy screen star to headline a television series, CBS’s The Gene Autry Show, in 1950. A half-hour musical drama that had Autry playing everything from a ranch manager to a Texas Ranger, the show was wildly popular among the Baby Boom generation. Even after the program’s demise in 1956, Autry remained a presence in local television

138

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

production, using his Flying “A” Production Company to launch The Melody Ranch Show in the 1960s, a western-themed country music variety program. Rogers hit the NBC airwaves in 1951 with his children’s show, a cowboy drama situated in a modern-day ranch and costarring his Texasborn wife, Dale Evans. The program featured minimal music but kept alive the demand for Rogers’s records before going off the air six years later. Rogers returned to prime time with a short-lived variety show, cohosted with Dale Evans, in 1962. Through syndication, both performers remained television fixtures for decades.81 Western imagery’s clout in country music circles was further bolstered by the great fortunes Autry and Rogers amassed. By the mid-1960s, Autry had profited enough from endorsements, royalties, and investments to become a “cowboy capitalist” in his own right. A near one-man conglomerate, Autry and his Golden West Broadcasters held hundreds of millions in assets, including hotels, vast ranch lands, and six radio stations. His biggest ventures, however, were the Los Angeles Angels major league baseball franchise and the local television station KTLA, both purchased in the early 1960s. Although increasingly consumed by the ball club, Autry remained a powerful figure in the local music scene, assisting up-and-coming performers by granting them appearances on KTLA barn dances such as The Melody Ranch Show and awarding contracts on his Champion and Republic record labels.82 Although less prosperous than Autry, Rogers used his celebrity to sell merchandise, produce television, acquire real estate, and launch the prominent Roy Rogers fast food chain in cooperation with the Marriott Hotel conglomerate. Rogers and Autry’s ventures even attracted localized emulators such as former “Dear Okie” vocalist Doye O’Dell, an area television performer who hawked his own brand of popcorn, soft drink, and cowboy clothing and his Doye O’Dell’s Tiny Town Park children’s attraction in Compton.83 The growing strength of western imagery and the wealth of its primary purveyors coincided with a mounting conservatism. Without exception, Autry, Rogers, and Tex Ritter—all three members of the Depression-era triumvirate of singing-cowboy film-box-office leaders—became ardent public supporters of conservative causes and candidates. Even lesser-knowns such as longtime area radio vocalist Stuart Hamblen began to break new ground as cowboy champions of a new moral purity and a right-wing political ideology. The use of country music in support of movements emphasizing traditional mores, cultural purification, and antiradicalism was not completely novel. Both the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Semitic carmaker Henry Ford had

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 139

used fiddling contests and “old-time” music for such ends as early as the 1920s.84 What was new was the extent to which a small subgenre of the local country music scene had produced opinion leaders so effective in shaping the larger cultural and electoral politics. Generally speaking, the singing cowboys’ turn to the Right was a reversal of earlier and decidedly more liberal encounters with the political world. To some extent, this new conservatism was an offshoot of the contradictions that existed within a New Deal rhetorical tradition that attempted to balance a patriotic and sometimes uncritical Americanism and unflinching support of military interventions with a newer and sometimes radical-leaning politics of “the people.” In his early days, Autry had supported liberal Democrats, and he continued to support a few liberal cold warriors such as Lyndon Johnson as late as the 1960s. In a later autobiography, he even attributed his popularity in the 1930s to the political dimensions of his screen persona. “While my solutions were a little less complex than those offered by FDR, and my methods a bit more direct, I played a kind of New Deal Cowboy who never hesitated to tackle many of the same problems: the dust bowl, unemployment, or the harnessing of power.”85 His 1930s movies, as the film historian Peter Stanfield has noted, often featured predatory capitalist villains and involved plot twists which ensured that “the power that was once lodged with the corrupt has been returned to where it rightly belongs, with the people.” Even Autry’s 1939 “Cowboy Code,” an oath aimed at young fans, included a paean to ethnic and racial liberalism, decreeing that the cowboy “must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.”86 Though he never ran for election, Autry held semipublic office, serving as honorary mayor of North Hollywood and officiating at the opening of one of the first legs of the Los Angeles freeway system in 1940.87 Roy Rogers, who hailed from a poor Ohio factory family and had worked alongside the California Okies as a fruit picker, also appeared to have sympathies for labor and the Left. In one of his most controversial endorsements, Rogers and wife Dale Evans appeared alongside the boxer Joe Louis at a “gala rodeo and all nations show,” a benefit for the left-wing Conference of Studio Unions in 1945, as the embattled democratic federation of Hollywood craft unions faced off against right-wing studio moguls, organized crime, and a corrupt anticommunist rival union.88 Autry and Rogers also displayed a certain reverence toward Oklahoma’s favorite left-of-center son, Will Rogers, seeking to link their public images with the late cowboy humorist and liberal-populist newspaper pundit. Famous for his defense of workers, New Deal jobs programs, and American Indian rights, Will Rogers reportedly bumped into the unknown Autry as he

140

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

worked a late-night shift as a telegraph operator in Oklahoma in 1927. The humorist, according to Autry’s later well-publicized accounts of the incident, listened to the young telegrapher sing and play his guitar for several hours, before reciprocating with a pep talk in which he encouraged Autry to pursue his show business dreams.89 Roy Rogers, born Leonard Slye, took the Will Rogers homage a step further by adapting Rogers as his screen name in 1938 to pay tribute to (and cash in on) the late humorist’s popularity. On the advice of studio executives, Rogers was paired with the alliterative Roy—French for king—a moniker that would help earn him his famous “King of the Cowboys” poster billing.90 Joining Autry and Rogers in their early dalliances with left-of-center politics were local-market stars Tex Ritter and Stuart Hamblen. Ritter performed several nonpolitical “open range” numbers at I Hear America Singing, a patriotic tribute to American cultural pluralism put on by the Communist-affiliated People’s Songs Movement at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium in 1946.91 Hamblen, a Texas migrant, had entered the political fray even earlier, using his singing-cowboy broadcasts and performances to run unsuccessfully for Congress in 1938. Identified in the Hearst press as “a cowboy Democrat,” Hamblen emphasized his connections with “the common people” and his opposition to the entrenched “interests” of Pasadena’s wealthy Republican establishment.92 Even before running, Hamblen had linked his radio image with populist inklings, telling the Los Angeles Times: “We don’t want no Rockefellers listenin’ to us.”93 By the mid-1950s, however, Autry, Rogers, Ritter, and Hamblen began positioning themselves on the Right, often employing the same language of their earlier endorsements in support a new conservative populism that embraced the everyman patriotism of the New Deal but now vilified liberalism and the Left as alien or elite ideologies and movements. Hamblen, a reformed alcoholic, was the first to emerge as a fiscal and social conservative, running as the Prohibition Party presidential candidate in 1952 on a platform of strengthening morals, reducing taxes and spending, and banning liquor production. “I’ll rely on the Christian folks in America and not the red noses on the courthouse squares,” he told one reporter.94 In an act that stood in stark contrast to his backing of the embattled, blacklisted Conference of Studio Unions, Roy Rogers joined John Wayne, Pat Boone, and Ronald Reagan in 1961 as a celebrity supporter of the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, a televised six-night program put on by the evangelist Fred C. Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena (figure 5). During a program that attracted live crowds of up to sixteen thousand, speakers at-

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 141

figure 5. A supporter of left-of-center studio unions in the 1940s, Roy Rogers (right) combined a revivalistic faith with right-wing politics in the 1960s. Rogers stands with Ronald and Nancy Reagan for the color guard at the “youth night” of the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, August 30, 1961. Photograph no. 211416, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

tacked the mental health profession for being dominated by “Communist inspired analytical psychiatrists” and top liberals for purportedly serving as “middlemen between the Communist apparatus and the community.”95 Rogers and Evans shored up their conservative-populist credentials in the ensuing decades by combining their advocacy of Anita Bryant’s antigay efforts in Florida and their support of the presidential bid by televangelist Pat Robertson with more mainstream conservative activism, such as supporting Nixon’s Vietnam War escalation, campaigning for Reagan, and filming TV spots attacking California gun control measures.96

142

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

Autry, later identified as one of the “stars of the GOP galaxy” by George H. W. Bush, appeared occasionally at Republican rallies but found greater success as conservative-populist kingmaker. Autry not only gave Orange County’s future New Right congressman Bob Dornan a start as a talk show host on KTLA in the 1960s but also later lent publicity and campaign finances. “He’s a great spokesman for conservatism,” Autry said of Dornan to the Washington Post in 1977. “I like him very much—he’s a fine guy and a very honest and good American.”97 While in Autry’s employ, Dornan developed a reputation for archconservative commentary and antagonizing liberal guests. Years later, while in Congress, Dornan labeled liberal opponents “un-American” and received media attention for excoriating Latino immigrants and making inflammatory and racist outbursts about “lesbian spearchuckers” and a “betraying little Jew.”98 Of all the cowboy conservatives, Tex Ritter was perhaps the most involved in traditional GOP politics, campaigning for California governor Ronald Reagan and presidential hopefuls Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and later helping to bring the first country music concert to the Nixon White House. Ritter ran unsuccessfully for one of Tennessee’s seats in the U.S. Senate in 1970 soon after relocating there for a radio job. Although he proclaimed himself a moderate on Social Security and the environment and attacked a primary opponent for ties to the John Birch Society, much of his platform was in line with the suburban New Right now establishing a stronghold in places such as Orange County, California: school prayer, strict constructionist judges, and unabashed support of Nixon’s policies in Cambodia and Vietnam, a position that put him at odds with John Ritter, his antiwar comedian-actor son. The elder Ritter even befriended the southern, pro-segregation presidential candidate George Wallace, although he claimed to be not as far to the right as Wallace. Ritter told the Nashville Tennessean Sunday Magazine that Wallace “has many good ideas, is a charming man and a good friend. I will say this in defense of the far right, they haven’t shot any policemen.” For Ritter, the politics of the people now meant connecting with Wallace’s neosegregationist constituencies, Nixon’s hard-hatted hawkish Silent Majority, and the populistically framed demands of an increasingly political bloc of traditional and evangelical Christians.99 Although Ritter’s position on Wallace seems to support claims that Okie newcomers “southernized” the California electorate, little of the right-wing activism of the singing cowboys publicly identified itself with southernness. Tex Ritter did give voice to some of the New Right’s racism in his remarks about Wallace and in an interview in which he bemoaned the fact that

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 143

young white activist women were “destroying their race” by taking up with “bearded colored [men].” But Confederate flags and other expressions of Southernness do not appear to have made a major impact on the local subculture until the late 1960s—this despite a local station’s claim that within its range were not only “more Texans than in Dallas” but also “more middle Tennesseans . . . than in Nashville.”100 Often overlooked too is just how important the singing-cowboy phenomenon was in the political career of Ronald Reagan, a former liberal whose electoral successes rested in part on his ability to employ popular culture references in marketing a populist “crabgrassroots” message to a mainstream audience. Reagan’s first Hollywood audition came after he ventured out to see country musicians while covering spring training as radio sportscaster in 1937, and he relied on his visibility in television and film westerns, and support from singing cowboys, throughout his political campaigns.101 The character actor and 1940s Rogers sidekick Andy Devine accompanied Reagan when he attacked welfare and a state fair housing act before a crowd of Orange County suburbanites and working-class Okies from Norwalk at a mall in 1966. And Autry and Rogers appeared in support of the governor and later presidential candidate at ballgames, rallies, and fund-raisers. As governor, Reagan reciprocated country performers’ support by proclaiming a state “Country and Western Week” and pardoning singer-songwriter Merle Haggard for a youthful robbery. While campaigning for president, he told fawning stories about Rogers.102 Reagan’s penchant for singing westerners even crept into his second inaugural address, where it served as a metaphor for inculpability in international affairs: “A settler pushes west and sings his song. . . . It is the American sound: It is hopeful, bighearted, idealistic—daring, decent and fair. That’s our heritage, that’s our song.”103 Reagan’s connections with country music also eventually extended to the California country recording industry itself. Mike Curb, former manager of MGM Records, founder of Curb Records, and longtime Reagan ally, got a start in politics as a California cochair of Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign. He eventually served as lieutenant governor during Democratic Governor Edmund Gerald “Jerry” Brown’s second term, and as acting governor during Brown’s 1980 campaign for president. A proponent of the sometimes controversial tax-revenue-limiting Proposition 13, Curb maintained close ties to Reagan and other conservatives as his small California record company expanded to become a national, Nashville-based player in the country market.104 While their use of southernness was slight, singing cowboys often espoused an ardent unremorseful strain of anticommunism that painted lib-

144

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

eral dissent as foreign, hierarchical, and subversive. Personal conviction and cultural connections to anti-red traditions of the southern plains may account for some of the singing cowboys’ passion. The Woody Guthrie biographer Joe Klein, for instance, argued that Texan Stuart Hamblen red-baited Guthrie while the two worked for KFVD in the late 1930s.105 But much of this anticommunism appears to have been adapted from California GOP strategies designed to make liberals—rather than Communists—seem foreign and subversive. Appearing to copy Nixon’s earlier use of innuendo to disparage California Democrats James Roosevelt and Helen Gahagan Douglas as “pink” liberals who were soft on communism, Ritter, for instance, chastised the incumbent opponent Al Gore Sr. as an “internationalist” and “left-wing liberal” and attacked the Democratic party for its purported “socialism.”106 Accusatory anticommunism, however, was not just the domain of the singing cowboy but also a factor throughout country music in Los Angeles, a city that, among other things, required Communist residents and visitors to register with police. California’s leading anticommunist, Jack B. Tenney, the conspiracy-mongering and anti-Semitic chairman of the state legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, was linked to the local culture, having composed the title score of the 1939 Autry vehicle Mexicali Rose and having served as head of the local musicians union.107 Newspaper accounts suggest that even Woody Guthrie’s former KFVD boss—liberal-populist free speech activist and country music advocate J. Frank Burke—began using his Editor of the Air program to defame former liberal allies as Communists and fellow travelers. Although it remains unclear whether these attacks were the product of a personal turnabout, a coerced act of contrition, or old antagonisms within liberal and leftwing circles, Burke’s new editorial standpoint distanced country radio from liberal- and radical-populist commentary. Renamed KPOP, Burke’s station adopted a Top 40 format in the mid- to late 1950s, but, in 1959, new owners reformatted the station to all-country, building in some ways on the ownercommentator’s early successes with Guthrie, Hamblen, Cooley, and Maddox. Its political connections became increasingly slim, however, until the station was reformatted as a religious station in 1968.108 Anticommunist smear techniques similarly limited artistic expression and quelled remnants of an older populism focused on the rights of labor. While Capitol’s country and western chief Ken Nelson was still working as a disc jockey in Chicago in the late 1940s, FBI agents phoned the station to discourage programmers from playing the country-folk recordings of the Los Angeles artist Merle Travis. Travis, the author of such poignant hits as

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 145

the coal mining–themed “Sixteen Tons” (“You load sixteen tons and what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt”), was considered a Communist simply because his lyrics occasionally dealt with labor issues and social themes.109 Locally, one label’s musical director even tried to discourage Tennessee Ernie Ford from recording his extremely successful 1950s cover of “Sixteen Tons,” arguing it was “too communistic.”110 Individual cases such as Travis and Ford’s were only part of national censure. The “country” tag eclipsed the old “folk” designation in Nashville in the early 1950s, Richard A. Peterson notes, partly because of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to smear several former Guthrie band mates in the Weavers, a prominent political folk group.111 Singing-cowboy anticommunism was often accompanied and bolstered by a growing religious conservatism and a series of conversions in which performers threw off mainstream Protestant affiliations for more revivalistic forms of faith. Hamblen, a Presbyterian minister’s son and selfdescribed alcoholic with a police record, publicly converted at a 1949 tent meeting of ten thousand people led by the up-and-coming evangelist Billy Graham. The publicity generated by the conversion not only allowed Graham to establish himself as a national figure but also helped Hamblen launch his television show, Cowboy Church of the Air, and enter politics as a Prohibition Party candidate.112 Rogers and Evans switched first from Episcopalianism to Methodism. But after fellow Methodists protested their anticommunist activism, they joined an “independent church with a Disciples of Christ background.” There they aligned themselves and their band of biological and adopted children with a fiery politically conservative brand of fundamentalism, which Rogers began to tout on the air and Evans publicized on radio and in a slew of conservative inspirational books.113 Although local country music was more likely to echo the pan-Christian ecumenicalism inherent in one radio host’s admonition to attend “any church you please but please go to church,” or to suggest that a benevolent, nominally Protestant, God the Father could provide refuge from “all the masses of atomic and hydrogen energy, missiles and satellites and rockets,” as one Tennessee Ernie Ford gospel album did, several local artists linked calls to devotion with political alarmism.114 Jimmy Wakely’s 1954 single “The Red Deck of Cards”—patterned after the religious oratory on T. Texas Tyler’s popular World War II–era “The Deck of Cards”—used religious symbolism to warn of Communist designs on religious and political freedoms. While the three card had represented the trinity in Tyler’s song, Wakely’s version had Communist torturers warning two adolescent Korean Christian captives that the two card celebrated statesmen Lenin and Stalin

146

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

and that the three represented Communist plans for stamping out American Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism.115 As the 1960s progressed, Tex Ritter even borrowed religious language and evangelists’ calls for national purity when issuing his own calls for stamping out youthful radicalism. During his 1970 Senate campaign, Ritter reserved his sharpest rancor for a New Left that had begun to emerge on campuses and among civil rights workers and antiwar veterans. To Ritter, the New Left was a cancer, and the remedy was cultural purification. “America is soiled,” he told young GOP volunteers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. “And she can’t be cleaned up by kow-towing to any small, destructive minority voice.”116 Los Angles Times reporter Bill Boyarsky noted similar attitudes among residents of Bell Gardens, Norwalk, and South Gate that year. Country music listeners, in particular, were likely to despise fair housing laws and antiwar protesters, but showed increasing support for the GOP, Boyarsky argued. While liberal Democrat and former Texan Jesse Unruh had begun to make some inroads there during his unsuccessful campaign for governor, the largely Democratic area had become a Reagan stronghold. Noting this rightward turn, George Wallace, in fact, had placed much of his radio advertising on Long Beach country station KFOX.117 Although the excoriation of political opponents helped Los Angeles’s singing cowboys define what they stood against, myriad displays of “Americanism” and flag-waving—ranging from Rogers and Evans’s Americanflag-patterned television costumes to Ritter’s 1960 spoken-word recording of the Pledge of Allegiance—became major ways of affirming who and what they were. Patriotic fervor was nothing new to local country music figures; indeed, among Woody Guthrie’s most memorable contributions was the nation-acclaiming, though not uncritical, “This Land (Is Your Land).” But as the cold war grew hot in Vietnam, symbols of patriotism often became imbued with new political meaning, sometimes openly expressing the hawkishness of their bearers. Based on the success of “The Pledge of Allegiance,” Ritter convinced Capitol to let him release a slew of patriotic recordings, including the 1967 LP Sweet Land of Liberty, the 1970 single “God Bless America Again,” and 1973’s “The Americans (a Canadian’s Opinion).” On these waxings, Ritter typically orated in his trademark, deep, plainspoken voice, defending the nation from critics over a sentimental country guitar or patriotic brass background music.118 Ritter’s “God Bless America Again,” in particular, invoked exceptionalist myths about a sacred national mission to justify the Vietnam War, suggesting that the common man’s love for the nation—even if it sprang from

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 147

total ignorance—was preferable to a more critical understanding of the country’s affairs. Penned by Nashville mainstay Bobby Bare, “God Bless America Again” chastised modern-day Americans who “took . . . for granted” the blessings God bestowed on the young republic, and it anticipated a second round of blessings if only the doubters would repent. Ritter’s rendition—an easy target that likely inspired the unflattering parody of a jingoistic country song that opens Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville— shares some of the Altman spoof’s saccharine clumsiness, but is less surefooted in its nationalism. As narrator, Ritter admits ignorance of America’s possible failings and problems because of his lack of “book learnin’” and hints at the possible validity of journalists’ and war protestors’ claims. Nevertheless, the song’s concluding chorus sanctions this stance, defending the anti-intellectual everyman and equating an unquestioning love of Lady America with an unwavering devotion to dear old mum: And let me tell you this Sir, everything I am Or ever hope to be, I owe to her.

In the Ritter-Bare world, “the people”—not the intellectuals, or privileged Daniel Ellsbergs, or patrician Washington newsmen—stand by the Motherland and therefore constitute the only Elect capable of restoring God’s favor. Most important, they retain this status despite, or perhaps because of, their unsophisticated understanding of the national political destiny, even if this means drawing out a costly and problematic war.119 So powerful were such messages that even those outside the singingcowboy milieu began to tout a heightened and largely uncritical form of patriotism, although not always one as closely linked to conservative ideology. Like Hollywood’s popular and critically acclaimed film noir pictures, the Oklahoma-Texas-flavored honky-tonk subgenre led local record sales with songs that debunked the American Dream with darkly psychological portraits of personal strife and poverty, undermining in some ways the myth that all shared equally in postwar blanket of security and prosperity. But the same subgenre nevertheless produced artists who supported the patriotic fervor. The son of an east Texas farmworker, the local artist Johnny Horton landed his first Billboard top ten hit in the 1950s with a honky-tonk song that emphasized the tavern as an escape from an unhappy marriage. But when he failed to make his mark with honky-tonk, Horton fell back on a series of wildly popular patriotic saga songs in the late 1950s—from “Sink the Bismarck” to “The Battle of New Orleans”—that described American fighting men and their courage under fire.120 Bakersfield honky-tonker Buck Owens, who had become a radio mogul and cowboy capitalist in his own

148

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

right, even vowed in the mid-1960s that he would supplant the “country music” designation with the label “American music.” “Why? Because we’re being done an injustice,” he told Country Song Roundup. “It’s really american music. And when I get the name changed, then we can drop the word ‘country.’”121 Ultimately, singing-cowboy conservatism by no means dominated the Southern California country music subculture. In fact, while the dress and political culture of local country music increasingly borrowed from the fictive renderings of the Old West, the lyrics and sound of the predominant artists of the 1950s and 1960s tended to replicate honky-tonk’s focus on modern barrooms and heartbreaks. Endowed with deep financial pockets and the ability to easily generate publicity, the singing-cowboy stars and conservative industry moguls such as Curb were nevertheless important opinion makers on the local scene and made a lasting impact on the region’s political and social culture.

“honky”-tonkin’: class, whiteness, and the camouflaging of difference in country musical style and dress Although Ritter’s fears about race mixing suggested an obsession with policing the bodies of women and blacks, such overt forms of racism were rare. Promoters and performers were far more likely to purge country music of racial controversies altogether by hiding or denying the multicultural origins of the genre’s musical and aesthetic styles. Intercultural influences, borrowings, and appropriations were outright excised in some areas of local country music life, while in others areas cultural blendings were remolded, repackaged, and concealed as the inspired offerings of a marginally differentiated white middle class. This whitewashing and camouflaging of origins, however, was a complicated process replete with contradictions. Some white artists resisted efforts to gloss over the genre’s rich historical roots, while audiences sometimes surprised marketers by embracing nonwhite entertainers. Nevertheless, the genre became less a space for fudging boundaries and more a place for enforcing norms associated with middleclass notions of whiteness. Dance styles were an early and cogent example of the whitewashing that took place in the 1950s and early 1960s. Encouraged by the jazzy beat of western swing and dance contests at such clubs as south L.A.’s 97th Street Corral, listeners in the 1940s incorporated black-influenced dances such as

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 149

the Lindy Hop and the jitterbug into the local country music dance hall. One Bob Wills film vehicle from the era even featured an amazingly acrobatic “fancy dancing” western swing Lindy Hopper whose frenzied hops, chest-height kicks, drops, and stylized swivels seemed more at place at a New York swing club than at the outdoor rancho-style set at which they were actually shot.122 By the late 1950s, however, the Lindy and jitterbug had all but disappeared from local dance floors, replaced by the more overtly European-identified traditions of the two-step and the square dance. As Charles McGovern suggests, such a whitening of the local culture’s informal choreographic lexicon was partly driven by national transformations in phonograph sales, as honky-tonk, with its lockstep two-four beat, came to supplant the variable jitterbug-ready rhythms of the average western swing arrangement.123 Local fads and industry pressure also played a role. Once viewed as a disappearing folk relic, square dancing—an amalgam of the French quadrille and the British contra dance with important western American permutations—began a major national comeback in the late 1930s.124 Though the square dance appeared in local country venues by the mid-1940s, its popularity intensified dramatically in the 1950s.125 But rather than emphasizing its mixed parentage of Franco-British, Appalachian, and possible Latin and Afro-Caribbean roots, local promoters touted it as an authentic vestige of a western Anglo-American frontier.126 Capitol Records, an early advocate of square dancing, published instructional booklets promoting the “pioneer” square dance records of caller and label talent-scout Cliffie Stone as early as 1947, and the city recreation department launched square dance classes to encourage socialization and exercise.127 Even jazz-oriented Tex Williams hired square dancers for his western swing TV program in the early 1950s. By the 1960s, square dancing was firmly rooted in suburbia, spawning an active amateur dance club circuit in the San Fernando Valley and becoming a featured act at Knott’s Berry Farm’s western stage, the Circle of Covered Wagons.128 More common than replacing country music’s cultural borrowings and blendings with more Eurocentrically defined traditions, however, was the camouflaging of the genre’s multiethnic roots. This was especially true of honky-tonk, the reigning sound of local country music. Musicologically speaking, honky-tonk, like most regional substyles, was the product of decades of interaction between black and white musicians of the South and Southwest. But publicity materials and local fan magazines rarely stressed the interconnectedness of the genre, tending to portray it instead as the inspired product of white working-class southwesterners.

150

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

This development was something new. Western swing artists regularly made covers of well-known musical pieces that had been written, performed, and recorded by star African American performers such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie, artists and songs easily recognizable to white audiences. But honky-tonk’s local publicity engines rarely, if ever, explored interracial and intercultural connections. Local promoters instead camouflaged the linguistic heritage of the term honky-tonk, downplayed honky-tonk’s links to black culture, and hid its true roots as a three-part encounter between rural white Texans and Oklahomans, “indecent” workingmen’s entertainment, and African American musical and cultural sources. The term honky-tonk is said to have first appeared in print in an 1894 editorial criticizing a “highly immoral” burlesque show in rural southern Oklahoma.129 But it truly entered the American lexicon in the 1920s, when black musicians applied the phrase to the taverns they frequented and the style of piano performance they played in these establishments, eliciting a small spate of jazz numbers with honky-tonk in the title.130 Although honky-tonk’s deeper etymological origins remain in dispute, and the term may be simply an onomatopoeic rendering of a cacophonous sound (i.e., honk, honk), one theory suggests that it was transported to the New World by Wolof-speaking African slaves and may be a reference to a domicile frequented by whites. The word honq—Wolof for pink—was historically used to describe the skin hue of Europeans and may have been paired in North America with a nonsensical rhyme (honk-a-tonk) or Tonk, a brand of piano.131 Whatever the origins, by the time of the Depression, honky-tonk came to refer to small taverns and roadhouses of the Oklahoma-Texas border region. Frequented by poor whites, they served beer or, in dry areas, allowed one to illicitly bring alcohol inside.132 Honky-tonk’s connection with white hillbilly music did not fully emerge until the mid-1930s, but even then the musical substyle was inextricably connected with African American musicianship. Honky-tonk’s most prominent popularizer Al Dexter, a white musician and tavern owner from Texas who introduced the term to country music audiences with his 1936 hit, “Honky-Tonk Blues,” had not only worked with black musicians but also once led an otherwise all-black band. Although Dexter’s motivations remain unclear, he may have picked up the term from black collaborators or his own knowledge of “honky-tonk” jazz numbers. “Honky-Tonk Blues,” Dexter’s lighthearted original, spawned a spate of more fatalistic “honky-tonk” country hits. By the mid-1940s, new stars such as his fellow Texan Ernest Tubb emerged to popularize a definitive “honky-tonk” performance style that involved playing percussive closed guitar chords and performing loudly

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 151

because of the poor audio dynamics and raucous patrons of the typical honky-tonk haunt.133 An unpolished hardcore sound that was later adapted to the electric guitar, honky-tonk celebrated the rough-and-tumble world of the barroom while expressing remorse about brawls, drunkenness, ill-fated romances, divorce, and other consequences of the tavern lifestyle. Dexter and Tubb brought honky-tonk to Los Angeles in the mid- to late-1940s, just before the subgenre came to dominate national country charts in the early 1950s.134 In chronicling the rising predominance of honky-tonk, a more unvarnished sound and aesthetic that continues to distinguish California from Nashville even today, Southern California fan magazine publishers and promoters were faced with a quandary. Pledged to make country music more respectable, they were now charged with selling a raw, unruly poor-white subgenre that possibly stemmed from black origins. Opting for respectability, the fan magazines neglected the style’s blended roots, leaving readers with the impression that Dexter, Johnny Horton, the San Fernando Valley transplant Lefty Frizzell, or other white chart toppers had alone spawned the honky-tonk tag and sound. Dexter’s background as a tavern keeper who performed with a black band, for instance, was repeatedly brushed aside by writers, as in a 1966 Country Music Life piece which instead emphasized that Dexter and his kin were “good Christian people.” Profiles of Hank Thompson, a Texas honky-tonker who made Los Angeles the bread and butter of his performing circuit, regularly plugged the classic honky-tonk songs “Swing Wide Your Gate of Love” and “Wild Side of Life” but ignored his band’s excellent 1959 rendering of “Deep Elum Blues,” a blues tune referring to a black neighborhood back in Dallas.135 Associations with lowbrow men’s entertainment were also camouflaged. A 1936 sociological study found that patrons used honky-tonk to describe several downtown storefront establishments that featured topless or scantily clad dancers. Although the L.A. Police Department closed down these “honky-tonks,” nearby taverns continued to feature some elements of the “honky-tonk” strip dance alongside Hawaiian, hillbilly, and cowboy bands into the late 1930s.136 Though the phrase honky-tonk music gained in popular usage in the 1950s, such associations may have prompted fan magazine publishers to cull the term from their pages, often only mentioning it in reference to Dexter’s early work or specific “honky-tonk” song titles. Not only were Tubb’s recordings called “western music,” but later magazines employed the all-purpose euphemisms “country” and “country and western” to describe the more provocative offerings of Thompson and others.137

152

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

More than just a priggish publicity maneuver, the camouflage of honkytonk’s origins and the suppression of the term worked to whitewash the larger culture of country music, making it appear as though local country’s rougher edges were simply the carnivalesque expression of a formerly rural, morally upright, white middle class. A similar type of camouflage took place within country music dress. Although local performers’ stage costumes often reflected the eastern European and Mexican roots of the tailors who produced them, the same outfits became a site for concealing these origins.138 The immigrant Jewish tailors Nathan Turk and Nudie “the Rodeo Tailor” Cohn and Mexican-born designer Manuel Cuevas played particularly important roles in designing outfits worn by local country and honky-tonk performers. Turk, whose real surname was Tieg, learned the tailoring trade in Warsaw and established a western clothing store in Sherman Oaks in 1923, then a small outpost in the San Fernando Valley.139 Cohn emigrated from his native Ukraine to New York, but eventually set up shop in North Hollywood, another San Fernando Valley neighborhood, in the late 1940s.140 As Cohn’s reputation spread, so did that of his chief designer, Manuel Cuevas. Born in Coalcomán in rural Michoacán, Mexico, Cuevas began working for Cohn in the mid1950s and eventually opened his own shop.141 Turk’s, Cohn’s, and Cuevas’s western wear businesses paralleled other immigrants’ artistic reinterpretations of frontier motifs—especially those of vaudeville and Buffalo Bill Cody’s nineteenth-century Wild West exhibitions—as a way of assimilating into American life. Turk, who had sparked the western trend in local country music clothing, borrowed elements of Cody’s costumes to produce dazzling fringe-and-embroidery outfits for film stars Tom Mix and Gene Autry. By the late 1940s, Turk’s shop sold tailored bright fuchsia-, aqua- and chartreuse-colored western suits adorned with symbolic embroidery, such as roses on Rose Maddox’s stage wear and black appliquéd card spades on the costumes of the band lead by Spade Cooley.142 Cohn, who emigrated from Kiev at age eleven to eke out a impoverished life in Brooklyn, drew upon skills taught by his boot maker father to land a job sewing costumes for New York burlesque dancers and vaudeville performers. After spending some time on the road as a boxer, Cohn eventually opened his North Hollywood shop in 1947.143 Realizing the demand for Turk’s innovations, Cohn added more bangles and institutionalized Turk’s practice of personalized pictography with creations such as embroidered huskies and dogsleds on the jacket of Ferlin Husky, a Texas honky-tonker who settled in the Valley.144 Having worked with rhinestones and feathers on burlesque dancers’ costumes, Cohn is be-

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 153

lieved to be the first to have added the shiny imitation jewels to country music singers’ outfits in the early 1950s.145 Trained in garment making in Mexico, Cuevas spearheaded the Cohn shop’s later move to market the rhinestone outfits to rock stars such as Ricky Nelson, John Lennon, Elton John, and the Grateful Dead.146 Worn by blue-collar singers and custom-tailored in bright populuxe colors and ornate embroidery, country music suits—such as Porter Wagoner’s sparkling yellow and green cacti- and wagon-wheel-adorned outfit—were the perfect antithesis to the conservative gray flannel suit, serving as a cogent challenge to the drab uniformity of men’s work dress in the postwar era.147 In Sloan Wilson’s 1955 bestseller The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the suit served as a symbol of conformity, anonymity, and social climbing— of surreptitiously bending one’s values to fit the whims of a demanding employer or the requirements of an unfulfilling job. “I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war,” complained the novel’s protagonist, “but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness—they were pursuing routine.”148 Sociologists soon offered support for Wilson’s observations, arguing that American business had come to value technically proficient “organization men” rather than creative individuals who took part in healthy forms of dissent.149 In stark contrast to the man in the gray flannel suit, the man in rhinestone and gabardine represented a sort of working man’s antihero, a blue-collar renegade who was bold enough to challenge the reigning orthodoxy, and who, although Anglo and white, boldly wore clothing based on that of the Mexican charro and emblazoned with luminous representations of Sioux headdresses.150 But more than a spectacle of dissent, the costumes blended cultures and fashion customs by drawing extensively from the ethnic tailoring traditions of their makers. Turk’s suits often featured floral folk patterns that reflected the peasant traditions of western Europe and his native Poland.151 Cohn’s earliest costumes for honky-tonk performers such as Hank Thompson incorporated signs and signifiers of rebellion by introducing elements of racial cross-dressing. At a time when body-fitting suits were the accepted style for country performers, Cohn produced drape suits based partly on the oversized zoot suit that had become the rage among black and Latino youth in Los Angeles.152 The extensive floral embroidery along the sleeves of his men’s suits appears to be especially influenced by the dense satin-stitched embroidery present on the festive blouses and waistcoats, or keptáree, that Ukrainian brides traditionally wore on their wedding days.153 Turk drew

154

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

from southwestern chic and tourist-oriented souvenirs to introduce Mexican and Native American elements in his designs in the 1930s, and Cuevas began adding patterns and flourishes to his work that resembled the textile design and folk furniture painting of indigenous peoples of central Mexico. “Some of these things I must have subconsciously absorbed,” Cuevas said in a 2000 interview.154 Marketed largely to male performers, rhinestone suits also shaped notions of masculine identity among musicians and fans during the decade. On one hand, their bright colors blurred gender boundaries by allowing male honky-tonkers a space to express themselves in fashions and colors that had once been restricted to women’s dresses and the sparse fabric canvases provided by men’s ties. Years later, Cohn told an academic interviewer that his men’s suit designs were patterned after outfits worn by “flashy looking women,” and that “every man has an aspect of woman in his personality that longs to be expressed.”155 Such gestures indicated that alternative configurations of blue-collar masculinity existed within country music culture, as evidenced both by fan clothing choices and by honky-tonk numbers such as Thompson’s “Cryin’ in the Deep Blue Sea” and Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which speak candidly about a man’s willingness to break masculine social taboos by crying in public.156 On the other hand, this gender-bending was carefully managed during the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that few fans were consciously aware of its presence.157 Turk, Cohn, and Cuevas often combined such touches with elements derived from the cultural inheritance of southern plains migrant customers. The bricolage of embroidery, appliqué, rhinestones, leather fringe, and other materials used in the outfits also corresponded to the mosaics often found in folk art created by the Dust Bowlers, and the designs themselves often evoked the tailors’ own encounters with poverty. Makeshift structures in one Los Angeles migrant encampment during the Depression were, for instance, decorated by “bits of colored glass,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1938.158 Cuevas, in particular, frequently consulted with performers and allowed them to personalize their designs, calling himself a happenstance psychologist in later interviews.159 Cohn himself was a fashion rebel who wore expensive boots in mismatched colors as a way of reminding himself of his impoverished youth. As a teenager, he had been forced to wear rags and mismatched shoes to shield his feet from the fierce New York winters (figure 6).160 Despite such a wealth of cultural influences, the multiethnic origins of suit design and production, like the origins of honky-tonk, remained largely absent from journalistic accounts of the era, which instead described the

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 155

figure 6. Western, frontier, and patriotic motifs played prominently in the handiwork of Nudie “the Rodeo Tailor” Cohn, pictured here in his own wares atop a Cadillac also stylized by his shop in the early 1970s. The dense satin stitching common to his garments appears to be closely related to the tailoring traditions of Europe and his native Ukraine. Photograph by Trina Mitchum. Courtesy of the Museum of the American West, Autry National Center, Los Angeles.

outfits as “western” or “American” and emphasized their relationship to the manly all-American Anglo-Saxon cowboy. No mention was made of Turk or Cohn’s Jewishness, and the Mexican backgrounds of shop tailors were virtually ignored by the country music press during the 1950s. Often cited by later observers as the driving creative talent, Cuevas got little publicity until he finally broke with Cohn and set up his own shop.161 Not all of this camouflage took place without designer consent. Cohn, a consummate salesman who promoted his suits on television and welcomed the coming of color broadcasting as medium for showing them off, took part in the charade, calling his creations “western suits.” Though his motivations may have been manifold, he also appears to have shed elements of the ethnic identity his Ukrainian roots and Judaism might have suggested, by converting to Christianity, placing pictures of Jesus on the walls of his business, and using only his first name, Nudie (as opposed to his identifiably Jewish surname, Cohn), in his interviews and advertising practices.162 Not all country music personalities participated in camouflaging difference and enforcing the color line. In seeking to unite country music with

156

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

rhythm and blues, Okie rockabilly artists Eddie Cochran and Wanda Jackson initially appeared to form a bridge that would reconnect country music with its history of transcultural experimentation and connect teenagers with a car culture that would blur the color line. Jackson even went so far as to lead a mixed-race band, featuring the black performer Big Al Downing, for a short period of time.163 Rockabilly’s promise however never completely materialized, as even the subgenre’s celebrated common car culture provided a way for low-status Okie teenagers to tout customizations, makes of car, styles, and lingo that they believed set them above even lower status black and Latino contemporaries.164 Sung by migrant performer Arkie Shibley, the area’s first custom car ballad “Hot Rod Race” (later reworked into “Hot Rod Lincoln”) even included a line clearly identifying the racer and his passenger as white.165 The most effective barriers, however, arose from the country music industry itself. Not only were the top brass at Capitol Records sluggish in responding to rock and roll, but they also regularly overruled attempts to woo rockabilly acts.166 At times audiences also resisted the whitewash. As Anthony Macias notes, young whites from working-class Okie communities such as South Gate and Bell Gardens and middle-class suburbs such as Lakewood were avid followers of the black performer Big Jay McNeely’s “honking” rockand-roll saxophone style in the early 1950s. One member of the McNeely’s multiracial band, the white guitarist “Porky” Harris, had even played with local country music groups.167 Similarly, in Downey in the 1960s the young fan Dave Alvin, who would later found the neorockabilly band the Blasters, remembered a melting pot of musical and ethnic influences available to those who, like himself, were interested: “Country over at the Tumbleweeds in Bell Gardens or the Foothill club in Signal Hill, norteño and East Side oldies in various joints in Pico Rivera and Norwalk and Bell. Chitlin circuit [rhythm and blues] joints in Compton and South Central. All of it minutes away.”168 Although a local performer as publicly Native American as Spade Cooley would not headline the scene for some time, a few watershed moments also occurred among audiences in the late 1960s. The nationally known black country star Charlie Pride netted number one spots on one local station’s listener surveys in 1969 and 1971, while, locally, ACWM voters chose the black country singer Cheryl Poole as “Most Promising Female Vocalist” in 1968.169 Stoney Edwards, a Bay area country performer and Dust Bowl migrant who saw several of his singles reach the charts in the 1970s before fading from the limelight, suggested new room for a multiethnic Okie identity by heralding his Irish, African American, and Native American ancestry.170 South Asians even began to make a mark on the scene

Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier

/ 157

with the Indian-born guitarist and house band leader Yar Kumar being voted a “Bandleader of the Month” by California Country readers in 1970.171 While important, these breakthroughs occurred alongside other forms of racial backlash and cultural conflict within Okie culture and the local country subculture. The same issue that featured news of Kumar’s honor also carried an ad for the Sun Valley’s Rebel Rouser Club that used the segregationist-friendly Confederate battle flag as display art to capture readers’ attention.172 Even back in the 1950s, ongoing job discrimination, open segregation in the musicians union, a spate of cross burnings, and several attempts to keep blacks and Asians from moving into white neighborhoods and suburbs on the east side of Alameda Avenue suggested that many migrants and other working-class whites had never put aside their prejudices.173 Although the novelist Chester Himes blamed blue-collar Okies in his acclaimed wartime novel If He Hollers, Let Him Go, a Los Angeles Urban League study concluded that racist middle managers, whether Dust Bowlers or not, were behind most cases of employment bias.174 While no apologist for working-class racism, the leading black journalist Charlotta Bass argued that it was real estate agents and prominent citizens, not necessarily blue-collar home owners, who instigated the anti-integration fight.175 Still, tensions remained, sometimes breaking into confrontations like those that occurred between Okie and black communities in southeast Los Angeles during the 1965 Watts riots.176 Even Pride’s late 1960s successes were sometimes taken awkwardly in stride, as in one fan’s revelation: “He’s a human being just like the rest of us. He eats homecooked meals, he drinks water out of a glass, and he sleeps in a bed like you and me.”177 Pride, incidentally, was recognized by Nashville’s Country Music Association fairly early with honors in 1971 and 1972, but not by Los Angeles’s Academy of Country Music (the new name of the ACWM) until 1993.178 Country music’s drift to the right and its attempts to conceal its diverse ethnic and racial origins indicated a new direction for the local genre. Whereas, during the 1940s, efforts were undertaken to bridge the cultural gulf that separated the black music clubs of Central Avenue from the country music spots in North Hollywood and southeast Los Angeles County, during the 1950s and most of the 1960s the perceived chasm between “white” and “black” musics, as well as other ethnic styles, only widened. By the mid-1960s, country music had become less overtly connected with the working class, less ethnic, and less Okie, but more politically conservative and more associated with a suburban white ideal than it had ever been be-

158

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

fore. Divisions remained between honky-tonk and rockabilly rebels, middle-of-the-road country moderates, and western and gospel conservatives, but as a whole the genre was becoming an emblem of difference rather than a step toward pluralism or integration. Okies and suburban country-music listeners were not unique in their abandonment of egalitarian impulses or ethnic attachments. They joined tens of thousands of white Catholics and Protestant professionals in forging a more conservative suburb-oriented politics that was beginning to mark the nation. In Los Angeles, this bloc of conservative white suburban voters would first rival and then supersede two important historical factions: the ruling Old Republican coalition of newspaper scions, growers, and downtown business leaders, and the more recent Democratic alliance of workers, African Americans, ethnic urban voters, and sundry Hollywood and Westside interests.179 A defiant spirit remained within the Okiedominated genre, however, and it found itself most readily in a small group of women honky-tonkers intent on challenging the double standard and gender constraints.

5

Playing Second Fiddle No More? Country Music, Domesticity, and the Women’s Movement

Country musicians rarely made the society page, so when the Antelope Valley Press asked to interview Spade and Ella Mae Cooley at the couple’s massive new ranch home in 1960, the couple quickly consented. Newcomers to the Antelope Valley, an area that was rapidly becoming the rural playground of the Hollywood jet set, the Cooleys showed off their twelve-hundred-acre ranch and talked about the television bandleader’s plans to build a fifteenmillion-dollar Disneyland-style water theme park in the area. The newspaper’s reporter admired the surrounding chaparral, the family powerboat, and other toys Cooley and his sons paraded before the Press photographer, but the reporter was most taken with the blissful domestic environment the family had created. “Mrs. Spade,” the reporter asserted, kept a “comfortable, attractive, spotlessly clean ranch home of Western simplicity.” Although Ella Mae handled the family pocketbook, the paper assured us that she had not abandoned her wifely duty of preparing meals for the family: “Spade,” the reporter noted with a nod to the bandleader’s once-svelte waistline, “doesn’t look exactly starved.”1 Despite the reporter’s efforts to offer readers a candid glimpse of a favorite performer at home, the Press story masked more than it revealed. Not four months after the article ran, the Cooley home was grabbing headlines again—this time as a grisly crime scene befitting the plot of a Hollywood film noir or a Raymond Chandler detective novel. According to newspaper and police accounts, Spade Cooley, a leading light on the Los Angeles country music scene for nearly two decades and one of the most recognizable faces in Southern California, had tortured, beaten, and stomped to death Ella Mae in their home—all in front of their fourteen-year-old daughter. The press lashed out at Cooley, proclaiming the easygoing broadcasting persona of the former Oklahoma farm laborer to be nothing more 159

160

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

than a ruse, an effective device for hiding a private life of affairs, explosive tirades, threats, abuse, and other skeletons. Convicted of the murder, Cooley would remain in prison for most of the rest of his life, giving one last concert before his death in 1969 and reemerging only as a creepy literary character in the James Ellroy “true crime” novels, the retro-rockabilly of Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys, and director Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. No longer a “ranch home of Western simplicity” in the public mind, the Cooleys’ picturesque canyon home had become more a purgatory than anything else.2 Today the Antelope Valley Press piece might be written off as a single instance of sloppy newsgathering or an overall indictment of lifestyle journalism. With its fusion of themes such as domesticity, family, celebrity, and consumerism, the article, however, stands as more than a historical curiosity or the result of a reporter’s glaring oversight. Home interviews of country music performers, in fact, filled thousands of inches of copy in Southern California fan magazines and regional newspapers during the 1950s and 1960s and, like the Cooley article, tended to focus on the homemaking capabilities of what one publication would later term “the women behind the men.” Although few portraits would prove as tragic or as misrepresentative as the Cooley article, coverage of the local scene in Country Music Report and Country Music Life and national publications such as Country Song Roundup worked in conjunction with larger societal efforts to normalize the role of the suburban stay-at-home caretaker and discourage women from pursuing outside employment by repeatedly portraying women’s homemaking abilities as the key to their star husbands’ successful careers. Inserting presumably Okie country music wives into suburban and exurban homemaking roles also became another way to assimilate former Dust Bowlers into an amorphous de-ethnicized white middle class. This is not to say, however, that such notions were digested unquestioningly by women. Indeed, ignited by a strong working-class tradition of women’s employment and involvement in the local fan subculture during World War II, some female artists and fans contested constraints and pushed the boundaries of women’s accepted social, cultural, and political roles. Dissension was particularly strong among artists who still acknowledged or promoted their Okie backgrounds. This chapter builds on the debate that has emerged among women’s historians, such as Elaine Tyler May and Joanne Meyerowitz, about the degree of agency American women experienced during the 1950s. The more pessimistically inclined—a group whose sentiments have been most popularized by May’s seminal Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 161

War Era—have argued that women’s opportunities were severally curtailed. Although May was careful to point out that this curtailment was often negotiated, and that her work explored only middle-class white women, her readings of social and sexological studies of the era led her to argue, in the parlance of a cold war military strategy, that women’s occupational, familial, and sexual desires were largely “contained.”3 On the other end of the debate, stand a group of scholars—many of whom contributed to Meyerowitz’s edited collection Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960—who identify wide divergences in women’s experiences in the 1950s and highlight the agency of working-class, ethnic, and African American women. While cognizant of the conservative character of era gender roles, such scholars highlight the “ambivalence, contradiction, and self parody of gender ideals” in the popular culture of the age and point to “pockets of resistance” when significant groups of women “questioned and loosened postwar constraints.”4 My own research on Southern California country music indicates that the processes highlighted by May and Meyerowitz may have occurred simultaneously, within different though overlapping subsections of a single social group’s cultural milieu. Rather than a site that only reinforced social taboos or a site that only fomented rebellion, the country music subculture served as a contested terrain in which a variety of voices—feminist and antifeminist, as well as modernist and traditionalist—grappled over issues related to women’s role in the home and occupational outlook. Here the area’s mass consumer culture worked in paradoxical ways, producing pulp and vinyl commodities that reinforced accepted notions about gender while providing a new space for women performers and fans to stake out new claims and new roles. Women who defied expectations were not always successful in their efforts and often had to contend with an industry system that discouraged even the mildest rumblings. Nevertheless, the cultural politics of local country music mirrored national debates about women’s roles in cold war society and laid some of the groundwork for manifestations of female country music participation. Some women country artists were embracing feminist inklings far ahead, in fact, of much of the national culture. That the field was so contested should give pause to those scholars who support the popular assumption that country music or Okie culture has always been defined by its parochialism or its social conservatism. In Southern California female country music artists were seizing new roles and advocating for an expansion of these roles far ahead of much of the mainstream.

162

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

meeting the mrs.: fan magazine culture and the domestication of women’s space One sign of country music’s postwar boom was the emergence of several enduring fan periodicals, such as Country Music Life, Country Music Report, Western and Country Music, and Country Music Review—all based in suburban Orange County, California. Along with a regular lineup of Hollywood-based columns in the national Country Song Roundup (headquartered in Connecticut), these magazines of the 1950s and 1960s began to offer local musicians, fans, and businesspeople a longer lasting and more complete picture of local country music happenings. Country Music Life, the flagship of these new local magazines, was a photo-laden glossy whose very title suggested the spectacularly successful Life magazine put out by the publishing impresario Henry Luce. The music magazine, which often featured lengthy transcription-style interviews of major local and national artists, had the longest reign of the locals, running from 1965 to 1969 and paving the way for such tabloid-style 1970s periodicals as Covina’s California Country and Universal City’s California Town and Country.5 Though these magazines cast a more uninterrupted eye on the local music scene, it is important to keep in mind that they were building on an already rich, though more short-lived, tradition of fan journalism. Fan journals of the 1940s such as the Hollywood-based Tophand magazine and the Ventura-based Jamboree Magazine had offered colorful, lucid, but ultimately ephemeral documentation of celebrity news and Southern California western swing.6 Women played important pioneering roles in these earliest days of fan journalism. During the 1940s, a time when tens of thousands of local women entered the defense industry as part of a national effort to win the war, several women writers came to fore. The former aircraft worker Sunny Ciesla was perhaps the best known of the Rosie the Riveter–era writers with her “Round-Up in Hollywood” column in the National Hill-Billy News. Ciesla’s columns often took the standard promotional tactic of mentioning artist and club bookings, but she could also turn a wistful phrase, telling in one column the story of a woman stricken with extreme arthritis who had learned to walk, dance, and even find herself a husband by attending Tex Williams’s western swing performances at the Riverside Rancho. Men such as C. Phil Henderson, a former Down Beat writer and promoter of local country music, tended to dominate as editors of publications like Tophand, but 1940s fan journalism remained enough of a cottage industry to allow female fan club members such as Dusti Lynn and small-time women en-

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 163

trepreneurs like the memorabilia-kiosk operator Grace Purdy to come to the forefront as fan magazine writers.7 During 1950s and early 1960s, women’s pull in local fan journalism began to weaken, however, as the new journals turned to industry professionals and full-time male writers. The national magazine Country Song Roundup started this trend in the early 1950s by hiring a local radio personality, George Sanders, to write the “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown” column, but before long female writers such as Ciesla, Purdy, and Lynn had been almost entirely replaced by male chroniclers in the new Orange County journals—men such as Bill A. Wheeler of Country Music Report and Jim Harris of Country Music Life, who had college degrees in communications or backgrounds in the recording industry. There were of course some exceptions. Carolina Cotton, a popular local western swing singer, tried her hand at writing about the Hollywood scene for the New York–based Rustic Roundup during a short stint in the late 1950s, and Devvy Davenport served as an fan magazine editor in the early 1960s. But the majority of the stories about country music and, in particular, about the aspiring new women soloists of the 1950s, were passed from female to male writers.8 While limiting female voices, local journals also ushered in a new era of social and gender conservatism in terms of content. In the mid-1940s, Tophand had publicized efforts to form a unionlike musicians’ organization, had offered space for local musicians to air grievances, and had run a mildly risqué photo in which members of a female band bared their legs and midriffs. In an effort to effect a squeaky-clean, even-your-clergymanapproves image, Country Music Life, Tophand’s successor in the cold war era, however, sidelined coverage of industry politics and generally avoided discussions of divorce and sexuality, a difficult task indeed while frank honky-tonk numbers topped national and local charts. When photographed, women in Country Music Life were conservatively dressed, often wearing full-length skirts.9 Central to the shake-up in fan journalism were a series of performer portraits that blended suburban family themes with a new, more conservative gender politics. Marginally focused on the careers of successful husbandperformers, the real emphasis of such stories was on scrutinizing how well these women performed with an oven, mop, and broom. In such stories, which became even more plentiful with the advent of the Kennedy era, country music wives and their performer-husbands were judged by women’s ability to care for their offspring and maintain a clean, orderly home. In some, such as Country Song Roundup’s regular 1950s feature

164

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

“Meet the Mrs.,” staffers queried the “women behind the men” and assessed their homemaking skills, while others, such as Country Music Report’s 1960s “At Home With . . . ” series hyped women’s domestic work as crucial to the success of their hardworking image-conscious men. Although the women described in these articles never got negative reviews, the message was clear: The ideal wife and mother gave up career and other aspirations to stay home and care for children and husband. Working outside the home, the subtext of these articles warned, created chaos in the family and might affect one’s husband’s ability to succeed in the business world. Responsible wives and mothers had no respectable choice but to stay home.10 So adamant about touting women’s subordinateness and homemaking skills were the writers of these pieces that they regularly avoided explorations of potentially revealing tensions between the members of prominent country music families. By soft-pedaling or ignoring rumors of abuse within “the charming Cooley family,” the Antelope Valley Press was perhaps the most blatant offender but not the only culprit. Ruth O’Dell, wife of the Southern California western music star Doye O’Dell, was the subject of an early “Meet the Mrs.” Ruth loved “being a housewife” and enjoyed “cooking and baking,” the magazine reported, even though she had given up successful careers as a studio publicist, fashion model, and magazine short-story writer. Most important, Country Song Roundup argued, her husband, Doye, had found solace in the secure and soothing environment she provided in the couple’s hillside Studio City home. “One has only to observe that contented gleam in Doye’s brown eyes to know how happy his home life must be,” the article explained. The writer never queried Ruth, however, on just how happy she was giving up seemingly coveted careers as a publicist, fashion model, and writer who had published in Colliers, Red Book, and Screen Magazine.11 The formats and even titles of these new features—“At Home With . . . ” and “Meet the Mrs.”—stressed a restructuring of the country music family iconography that had consequences for the role of women. While Woody and Lefty Lou featured a folksy egalitarian siblinglike duo and the Carter Family and the Beverly Hill Billies had emphasized women’s active participation in an extended radio family of real and imagined “aunts” and “uncles” in the prewar era, the new fan magazines of the cold war era had narrowed that ideal to a male breadwinner and a subordinate female homemaker with offspring in tow. Appearing with great consistency, such column titles suggested that country music wives never begrudged their husbands the limelight, but preferred a quieter and more private existence, either

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 165

tucked away “At Home” or so removed from the public world that one needed special effort to even “Meet the Mrs.”12 Large, and located in desirable suburban or exurban locales, the homes depicted in such stories were similarly rich in subtext, serving as both monuments to class mobility and testaments to the usefulness of a docile domestic femininity. On one level, fan magazine writers portrayed such houses as symbols of consumerism and male social status, proof that hard work might allow a poor part-Cherokee migrant such as Cooley or the tough-talking son of a country preacher such as Stuart Hamblen the finer things in life. Such stories invited less prosperous readers to fantasize about luxurious spaces such as Hamblen’s large Mulholland Drive estate, a “castle overlooking California’s San Fernando Valley” originally owned by the film legend Errol Flynn, or imagine themselves amid a forest of consumer goods such as Cooley’s luxurious powerboat and purportedly irreplaceable antique instrument collection. Hamblen’s “At Home With . . . ” portrait even attempted to provoke affinity among former Dust Bowler and bluecollar readers by describing the radio and television performer’s rather genteel pursuit of stuffed exotic game trophies for his home as merely the handiwork of an average “impassioned hunter”—an figure and activity with which many country music listeners were well acquainted, at least, on a subsistence level. Such depictions indicated the acquisitions now available to a few wealthy migrant entrepreneurs, such as the car dealer Cal Worthington, while fostering yearnings for consumer goods, suburban homes, and middle-class lifestyles among a listener base that still remained largely blue collar.13 More than Okie Horatio Alger tales, however, these artist-at-home stories suggested that the joy of owning a suburban domicile was as much a product of female subservience as male business acumen. While it was women’s action in the kitchen and the playroom that ensured domestic serenity, the same women who performed these household chores were paradoxically reduced to objects that epitomized the amenities of their family homes. Ruth O’Dell’s Studio City house, “a lovely hillside home with a beautiful view . . . and a large swimming pool,” for instance, reflected “the warmth of her personality,” according to her “Meet the Mrs.” column. Artist-at-home articles also emphasized “womanly” virtues such as resignation and perseverance, suggesting that women’s endurance of men’s indiscretions might ultimately yield unparalleled domestic bliss. Indeed the home itself might act as symbol of what might be accomplished if women compliantly stood by their men. The writer of the “At Home With . . . ”

166

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

piece on the Hamblens, in fact, invoked the family’s large estate as metaphor for the years of patience by the devoted wife and mother Susie while her husband battled the alcoholism and other unnamed “complexities” (i.e., infidelities?) that came with success. “The Hamblen house, 1500 feet above the floor of the San Fernando Valley, culminates a lifelong dream of Susie’s,” the magazine argued. “It is a monument in irony to the happiness of Hamblen’s conquering of a dismal past.” By making this argument, the writer equated Susie’s stoic endurance with the sublime structure of the dwelling itself.14 Occasionally fan magazines deviated from such fare and offered messages promoting some level of equality in chores and household gender relations, but such efforts were often negated by contrary depictions within the same pages. One of these articles, a 1965 Country Music Review piece on Joe and Rose Lee Maphis—billed in the story as “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music”—suggested that it was good and even proper for men to pitch in around the house and for women to make their way in the business world. Photographed in their Bakersfield kitchen, Joe stooped over to mop while wife Rose Lee stood in a more dominant pose looking on. “No Debate— Household chores are shared in this home, just as breadwinning,” read the caption below. The composition of the photo further enhanced the perception of equality and amicable communication between the sexes. While the pair looked thoughtfully into each other eyes, tall Joe’s stooping actually made him appear to be roughly the same height as Rose. Although the Maphis article proved that local fan magazines could momentarily envision a degree of domestic egalitarianism, the general tendency of such periodicals to promote a more lopsided division of duties tended to diminish the potentially progressive impact of such messages. This even occurred in later portraits of the Maphises. Placing a new twist on the traditional artist-athome story, a later Country Music Life interview of the couple on board their deluxe live-in tour bus celebrated the couple’s adherence to conservative gender norms. The article described Joe’s main domestic duty as doing the driving. Rose Lee, on the other hand, kept herself busy “sewing, answering numerous letters from fans, or whipping up that favorite dish for her ever-loving husband.”15 This emphasis on housework and the private sphere of the suburban home as the ultimate setting for country music publicity marked a major departure not just from prewar radio programming and early fan journalism but also from local country music publicity efforts in general. Earlier publicity vehicles, in fact, had almost universally emphasized the great outdoors and tried to link male and female performers to a hardy strain of rus-

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 167

ticity rooted in communal land use. Artists and promoters often used such images to play up the “western” as opposed to the “southern” roots of area country music, but such efforts also bespoke a general sense of awe toward spaces that were open, pastoral, and public. During the 1930s, Woody Guthrie had championed public and semipublic places such as municipal Griffith Park and the Forest Lawn Memorial Park—a palatial combination of cemetery, funeral parlor, art gallery, and wedding chapel—in Woody and Lefty Lou’s folio. During the 1940s, popular country music publicity materials such as Spade Cooley’s Western Swing Song Folio stressed fictional communal spaces in which neighborly cattlemen and ranch women worked together as coequals. The folio pictured Cooley, dressed in a cook’s hat and frock, preparing a meal at a fictional western-style backyard barbecue for the men and women of his band. Cooley’s propensity to cook was even depicted as being an attribute particularly alluring to women. Photographed squatting next to a deep pit barbecue in one shot, Cooley appeared to be placing barbecued meat on the plate of a standing and smiling Carolina Cotton. “Who is tempting who?” read the caption below. Even into the early 1950s, some room remained for alternative nondomestic forms of femininity, especially those based on rough sports and the outdoors. Carolina Cotton, for instance, was recognized as “Queen of the Range” and an “Honorary Sheriff” in one country music publication, suggesting her connection with an active outdoor lifestyle, as well as with past times that were generally associated with men. “She’s a crack shot with a .45 or a rifle,” the article explained, “and is also an expert at wrestling and judo.”16 By the mid-1950s, however, fan magazines and the local press almost universally eschewed outdoor themes and staged rural photo ops in favor of portraits of artists in suburban homes.

home wreckers and exotic fawns: cautionary tales and the racial erotics of submission in male country song Like the largely male-written fan magazine articles of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, male song lyrics also sanctioned keeping women in their place. Especially important were the song narratives associated with local performers of honky-tonk, the punchy new Oklahoma-Texas musical style that had come to replace western swing as the most popular fare in local circles in the 1950s. While it is true that the era’s rougher “hard-shell” honkytonk, especially that of field leader Hank Williams Sr., paradoxically en-

168

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

couraged deeply emotional feminine-like confessions of vulnerability, loss, and even crying for men, the subgenre was Janus-faced when it came to acceptable behavior for women.17 With their emphasis on themes such as tavern life and the tensions emerging within the postwar two-parent nuclear family, the lyrics of the area’s leading male honky-tonk numbers not only unfairly blamed women for domestic strife but also argued that chores at home were the only salvation for the scorned or wayward woman. Quantitative study of honky-tonk lyrics recorded by local artists suggests that when families or relationship mentioned in honky-tonk songs fell apart, tavern-haunting women were almost always the culprit. Particularly informative is a survey I conducted of hits recorded by area honky-tonk leaders Johnny Bond and the Maphises, as well as by local artists who launched national careers in the area, such as Johnny Horton, and national stars who established deep or lasting ties to Los Angeles, such as Hank Thompson and Lefty Frizzell. In a sample of thirty-six chart-topping or regionally popular honky-tonk records made by these six performers during the 1950s, twenty-five songs—more than two-thirds of the total—blamed women for the dissolution of the relationship or men’s declining psychological state. By comparison, Woody Guthrie and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman’s Depression-era radio song books blamed men and women nearly equally for breakups—about half each—in the lyrics of their thirtyfive songs about unrequited love. Of the 1950s-era songs, cheating—featured as the reason for troubles in twelve—topped the list of reasons for women-caused breakups, followed by drunkenness and carousing, abandonment, lack of affection, and lying.18 Two lesser-known songs were even geographically specific: Hank Thompson argued that “California women” were prone to lying and squandering their dates’ money, and Sheb Wooley’s novelty number “Oklahoma Honky Tonk Gal” complained about the insobriety of Okie women.19 On a more qualitative level, the consequences of bar hopping, “honkytonking,” or enjoying, as one song put it, “the gay night life” were also unequally divided between men and women in this sample of lyrics. When men honky-tonked, they generally lost brain cells and sleep. When women honky-tonked, they generally lost families and homes.20 By speaking of the toll that honky-tonking—a presumably public activity—took on women’s lives, male honky-tonk music questioned women’s freer access to formerly all-male institutions and aligned itself at least tentatively on the conservative end of national debates about whether women should retreat into the private realm of home or maintain a balance between work, fulfilling public lives, and responsibilities at home.21

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 169

Media and expert pressure on women to contain their sexual urges during the postwar era—as described by historians such as Elaine Tyler May— further contributed to the conservative tendencies of cold war honky-tonk narratives. Allowed too much freedom in their leisure activities, women, such lyrics argued, might turn to sexual indiscretion, where they risked being tagged with one of an ever-growing list of honky-tonk epithets: abusers, cheaters, home wreckers, two-timing traitors, heartbreakers, or as one Frizzell song put it, “the root of all evil.”22 Some of this name-calling mirrored the scorn heaped on women by important segments of the popular press of the era, especially the writings of essayist Philip Wylie. Author of the best-selling book Generation of Vipers, Wylie would have found common ground with the “root of all evil” sentiment, arguing that access to political power, household conveniences, and “momism,” a sentimental national cult of the mother, had made American women lazy, selfish, and fickle. He described mothers, and women in general, as “Gorgons” and “spiritual saboteurs,” so overprotective and doting, or so self-absorbed, that their children were becoming incapable of confronting the challenges posed by the nation’s authoritarian foes.23 But part of this misogyny also arose from honky-tonk tradition. Condescension toward women in the public sphere was apparent at the infancy of the subgenre in the 1930s when, according to the eminent country music historian Bill C. Malone, the honky-tonk tavern was “essentially a masculine retreat. . . . The woman who went there alone generally was not respected, even if her affections sought.”24 By the 1950s, however, even women considered to be respectable were regularly attending Southern California taverns by themselves, but their presence remained an issue of at least subconscious contention.25 Joe and Rose Lee Maphis’s “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke” was particularly instructive, placing guilt on mothers, as experts such as the psychiatrist Marynia Farnham did, not just for carousing, but also for spending too much time away from a house “filled with love and a husband so true.” Perhaps most devastatingly, the antiheroine is advised in the final chorus that she is trading her “home and little children” for “the club down the street.”26 Like Wylie’s fickle “pseudo Cinderellas” who expected to be whisked away to affluence without developing the calluses and character of the fairytale heroine, the Maphis protagonist sought the sexual and social spoils of the great nightlife without a thought to the brood at home.27 Race too played a role in creating images of womanhood that encouraged domestic servitude, as well as social and sexual submission. Although the popularity of western swing, with its more overt borrowings of minority

170

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

expressive styles, had largely subsided, lyrical references to members of other racial and cultural groups actually increased during the honky-tonk era. One of the most popular themes, in fact, was the love affair between a white male protagonist, often a frontiersman or soldier on the edge of empire, and the mythic, alluring-yet-demure Native American, Mexican, Filipino, or Asian woman: the Cherokee “fawn,” the Mexican vision “in old Spanish lace,” the “dark-haired” Filipina, and the China “doll.” It is useful here to invoke a distinction made by the postcolonial-studies scholar Homi Bhabha between hybridization and fetishization. Hybridization involves a disavowal of discriminatory belief systems by confronting those prejudices with knowledge about the inextricable cultural mixings that take place in a mulitracial society. Racial fetish, on the other hand, is rooted in a system of desire that does not recognize the Other for what it truly is, and by mislabeling, it facilitates supremacist notions.28 During the 1940s, as we have seen, Okie music making was engaged in a number of hybridizing projects that had the potential for creating a lasting impact on the political culture and racial climate of the region. The new musicians of the 1950s and 1960s, however, rarely covered jazz tunes, and they fetishized minority women as desirable, vulnerable love-objects ready for the taking by white men. By introducing minority women as sweethearts and love interests, country lyrics had the potential to foster appreciation of other peoples and cultures. Instead they offered “amateur archaeologies” that “educated” listeners about the purported peculiarities of the woman’s host culture, producing the kinds of misunderstandings that fed the paranoiac streak displayed by many white Angelenos during crises such as the Watts insurrection. Central to these “teachings” was an erotic, fetishized form of womanhood that emphasized an eagerness to please men in sexual and domestic affairs. Although honky-tonk songs often blamed white women—especially those with “blonde curls” and lying “blue eyes”—for familial breakups, songs within the larger culture of country music regularly fantasized about purportedly “passive” women of nonwhite and nonEuropean cultures, touting them as fragile, coquettish, docile, exotically alluring, and domestically inclined vixens. The ideal woman in these song narratives would never talk back, never take a job outside the home, never neglect to emphasize her own beauty. Songs about American Indian and Mexican women, which made up the large majority of locally produced or locally popular intercultural-themed songs, emphasized the softness, ornamental beauty, and small delicate features of the feminine Other: Johnny Bond’s dainty Indian “fawn” in 1950’s “Cherokee Waltz” and the tender “picture in old Spanish lace” in the era’s

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 171

oft-covered early Autry hit “South of the Border.”29 Following in the footsteps of Nanook of the North, Robert J. Flaherty’s classic though faulty ethnographic documentary about Inuit life, Hank Thompson’s comedic 1958 hit “Squaws along the Yukon” (written by Texas Jim Lewis) actually admired Inuit women’s ability as hunters and their fortitude in freezing temperatures, but nevertheless reduced them to a group of docile, sexually available, interchangeable child brides who might be sat toddlerlike upon the white airman-narrator’s knee. While reinforcing stereotypes about alcoholism among Native Americans, the half-Cherokee woman of Wooley’s comic “Oklahoma Honky-Tonk Gal” was also applauded for a perceived strength—her ability to hold her liquor—until she proves such a lush that she can outdrink even the narrator.30 Skin was often described as an erotic surface, a symbol of difference that highlighted the whiteness of the protagonist even while reducing the individuality of an entire people to a set of shared phenotypic characteristics. The generic “squaw along the Yukon” for instance was a “salmon-colored girl who sets my heart a-whirl,” while the narrator in “Filipino Baby,” a much older song that became a postwar hit and remained popular in Southern California during the 1950s, pined for the “jet” hair and “white pearly” teeth of his feminine “dark-faced Filipino.” Occasionally, however, there were attempts to whiten women in an effort to make them appear more desirable to skin-obsessed audiences as in Cooley’s ode to “My Indian maid Pale Moon.”31 For the most part, the listener of these songs is given only a cursory glimpse of the cultures from which these love objects originate. Mexican society seems to be one endless “fiesta” in which eye-catching women are constantly torn between their passion for white men and their “good girl” Spanish Catholic traditionalism, and Native American culture is either replete with tragedy, or a place to wax nostalgically about the loss of quaint customs and easy access to sex. Women could also be reduced to objects that highlighted cold war anxieties. Replete with references to U.S. fighter jets presumably defending Alaska’s airspace from Soviet intruders, the narrator of “Squaws” conflates his desire for Inuit women with an obsession with sleek military hardware, labeling the Inuit woman’s breast “a fuselage divine” and her derriere a coveted piece of “landing gear.” This (con)fusion of fighter jet components with sexualized parts of the indigenous body warned that forays into the sexual and cultural unknown, while enrapturing, were as risky as the cat-andmouse games played by Soviet and U.S. fighter pilots. While presenting Inuit women as potentially powerful femme fatales could be a potentially

172

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

liberating theme, the wider plot of the song only accentuates the white male character’s dominant position by underlining the magnitude and magnanimousness of his sexual and cultural conquest.32 Domesticity and subservience to men also appeared as endearing traits in intercultural love songs. While Cooley’s “My Chickasay Gal” suggested that Chickasaw women possessed enough domesticating charm to convince a free-spirited rambler to settle down, a 1951 Ferlin Husky song argued that loving a “China Doll”—presumably a plaything but also a pejorative phrase used against Asian women—was better than a white woman because of her absolute subservience: “her thoughts are fewer, her lips are truer.” While appearing on Town Hall Party in 1959, Tex Carman went a step further and sang an ode to a “Pretty Geisha Girl,” a role that to casually informed Westerners symbolized the pinnacle of female social and sexual subservience.33 Conspicuously missing from recording and performances of the era, however, were rendezvous with African American women. During the late 1930s, the Beverly Hill Billies touted “My Pretty Quadroon,” a song about a love affair between two slaves that was often mistaken as an interracial affair. But it was not until Merle Haggard released “Irma Jackson,” his 1969 complaint against the prejudice interracial couples face, that any major California artist again tackled the issue of black-white romance. Such omissions point the degree to which old prejudices and new biases affected relations between white migrants and African Americans. Blacks continued to fall last in the pecking order of groups with which many white migrants were willing to assimilate, whether in reality or in song.34 Although the intercultural-affair songs of the 1950s and early 1960s were perhaps buoyed by more tolerant attitudes toward Mexican-Anglo and Indian-white intermarriage among some fans, these representations ultimately emphasized cultural and racial difference, making it easier for a wider majority of listeners to divorce themselves from the plight of real people of color.35 The songs also positioned ornamental beauty, docility, and domesticity as prized traits, suggesting that the most desirable of women’s behaviors involved serving and servicing men.

“women ought to rule the world”: female performers and fans strike back Although efforts to lionize country-music June Cleavers and docile “Cherokee fawns” while berating women for hitting the town made inroads among listeners of both sexes, female fans and performers often negotiated and

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 173

contested the same constrictions. Some local performers went so far as to pit themselves against the “good ol’ boy” industry network and call into question the very foundations of patriarchy, while others toiled metaphorically against other constraints such as the lack of women in political office and the sexual double standard. Rather than being passive and undiscriminating consumers of popular culture, women fans appear to have not only been aware of the strictures placed on women artists but also to have linked personal notions of liberation, in some cases, with the rising careers of local female soloists. Such independent behavior was not entirely new to the region. Los Angeles and California, in fact, had served as home to early iconoclasts such as Patsy Montana and Rose Maddox, who billed themselves as rugged cattle women and touted unorthodox formulations of femininity as early as the 1930s. Born Ruby (later Rubye) Blevins in Hope, Arkansas, Montana had come to Los Angeles at eighteen and found work on local radio in 1931. Though she later left the region for Chicago’s National Barn Dance, while in California she began to develop the rough-and-tumble cowgirl image that characterized her later career. Her signature recording, 1935’s jazzy yodeling hit “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” told of a young woman’s desire to lasso and ride horses along with the men. Although the song defined its female protagonist according to her relationship with a man (she was, after all, “a cowboy’s sweetheart”), Montana saw herself as encouraging young women, especially girls, to pursue careers and outdoor activities that had once been restricted to men. In a 1959 interview program on the Los Angeles radio station KXLA, she told the audience that she was trying to create a kind of girls’ culture—a kind of country music answer to the Girl Scouts—in which women were encouraged to present themselves as the equals of their male counterparts.36 In the 1940s, Rose Maddox embraced an assertive and flamboyant form of femininity rooted in working-class musical style, comedic stage antics, and ostentatious cowgirl dress. Originally from Alabama, Maddox migrated to California’s Central Valley as young girl during the Depression. She fronted the Maddox Brothers and Rose, a raucous hillbilly-style band composed of her brothers and other male musicians. Though technically based in Modesto, the sibling group spent much of its time in Los Angeles, recording on Southern California’s Four Star label and appearing regularly on KFVD, the radio station that helped launch the careers of Spade Cooley, Stuart Hamblen, and Woody Guthrie, a Maddox family friend. Touted as “the Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America” for their dazzling outfits, the Maddoxes also affected a certain individuality in their music by borrowing

174

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

heavily from African American styles such as boogie and singing songs about strong female characters. Maddox’s band recorded not only borderline class protest numbers such as Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer (Reno Blues),” to which she added studio gunshots, but also songs alluding to gender equity such as “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again,” an old public domain song in which a housewife chafes at gender role assignments and complains about the drudgery of domestic chores.37 Southern California performers continued promoting unconventional and confrontational forms of femininity in the early 1950s despite social and business conditions that made it difficult to do so. Jean Shepard, perhaps the most prominent local female soloist from the early Eisenhower era, sang pithy honky-tonk numbers that bemoaned the behavior of the honky-tonk man, and even suggested that through collective action women could uproot the very foundations of patriarchy. Born in Oklahoma, Jean Shepard moved to the California’s San Joaquin Valley with her sharecropping parents after World War II. She began performing in coastal San Luis Obispo in the late 1940s and by 1954 had moved to the San Fernando Valley. There she recorded for L.A.’s sole industry giant, Capitol Records. Among Shepard’s earliest singles were numbers that decried the masculine excesses of the honky-tonk, songs made possible because of an open attitude toward female artists and themes during the late 1940s. Some singles such as 1952’s “The Trouble with Girls” argued that the real problems facing women were the men who refused to do household chores and who took their relationships lightly, while later tunes criticized the male sports culture’s propensity to produce household discord: “It ain’t no fun trying to be his wife when Baltimore ain’t winning.” Such songs were much in line with the bereavedhomemaker image extolled by national country music figures such as Kitty Wells. But rather than simply bemoaning infidelities as many of those songs did, Shepard’s songs began to propose solutions and address the inequities within social roles and within the division of labor in the nuclear family.38 Although Shepard hit pay dirt in early 1953 with “A Dear John Letter,” a weepy Korean War–era duet in which a stateside woman writes her military sweetheart to inform him she has left him, her most feminist recording came later that year. Paradoxically written by a man, Shepard’s “Two Hoops and a Holler” used humor to rail against a double standard that sanctioned men’s fighting, cursing, smoking, drinking, and cheating but heaped public opprobrium on a woman who “drinks or smokes or tells a joke.” The song went on to suggest that women’s duties were more cumbersome than men’s and that women could resist these injustices only by acting together collectively and politically. If the women would “stick by me,” Shepard

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 175

sang, the men would be forced to sleep outdoors and walk on their knees in supplication. More important, the gals might fulfill their calling: “Women ought to rule the world.”39 The recording served as an early and cogent challenge to the underrepresentation of women in positions of authority and presented its listeners with the vicarious satisfaction that oppressive men might ultimately be brought to justice. Such assertive image making also countered the negative images propagated by antimigrant forces during the Depression which had emphasized that migrant women were nothing more than manly wretches or promiscuous strumpets. No longer bound by husbands or stereotypes, the Okie women in Shepard’s songs lobbed populist criticism at male elites and aspired to the highest seats of government. Often photographed in western millinery and an expensive-looking, long red rhinestone dress, Shepard bolstered her image as a mover and a shaker by presenting herself on stage and in her publicity materials as a witty, smartly dressed western career woman, a female counterpart to the Texas-Oklahoma oil man or ranch baron in the age of Glenn McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Everett Smith.40 Despite great promise, “Two Hoops” failed to place on the charts. Although some have argued that the song failed because the song was too shocking for public tastes, Shepard biographer Chris Skinker argues that the most likely reason for the song’s failure was that disc jockeys, a group almost entirely male, were offended by the unrepentant lyrics and failed to give it ample airtime. Whatever the reason, Shepard appears to have followed up by withdrawing from outright challenges to patriarchy in her music and began featuring a more ambivalent assertiveness. Often these songs took men to task for their failings and indiscretions but failed to pose the political transformation offered by “Two Hoops.” Shepard blamed men for lying and cheating in 1955’s “Girls in Disgrace,” as well as for ruining women’s reputations and ignoring their needs in the answer songs “The Root of All Evil (Is a Man)” (1960) and “Second Fiddle (to an Old Guitar)” (1964), but she would not again insist that women ought to rule the world.41 The resistance Shepard faced in getting airplay for more ardently feminist recordings and her subsequent transition to recording less controversial song lyrics was part of a larger dilemma facing women in country music in the 1950s. Yet there appears to have been public support for many feminist-leaning recordings. The Grand Ole Opry and the NBC radio network banned Kitty Wells’s tamer 1952 recording “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” The song eventually became a hit only as a result of live audience response and jukebox play. On a local level, the change from

176

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

live to disc jockey formats further hindered women’s aspirations. Although women such as Maddox and Carolina Cotton had hosted their own live shows locally in the 1940s, the switch to largely or all-male disc jockey staffs in the 1950s ensured an environment more hostile to iconoclastic women performers. By 1963, Long Beach’s KFOX, the area’s leading country radio station, with its signal on both AM and FM bands, even attributed its sales and national prominence to its all-male disc jockey lineup, advertising in Country Music Report with the slogan “KFOX does it with manpower!”42 Women’s labor, however, remained an integral, even if often unacknowledged, part of the industry, especially within songwriting. The Texas transplant Cindy Walker became well known locally for writing popular country songs for Bob Wills and Bing Crosby in the 1940s, and later for producing hits for pop and country stars, including the country standard “You Don’t Know Me” and Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream).” But Country Song Roundup reported in 1954 that many women songwriters concealed their identities behind male pseudonyms, fearing their work would not be taken seriously.43 More feminist offerings such as Shepard’s early 1950s platters may have been ignored by radio programmers, but local performers did pave the way for aspects of the coming sexual revolution to make a mark in local country music culture. Sometimes billed as “the female Elvis,” Wanda Jackson transgressed the almost Victorian social and sexual norms of the country landscape in the mid-1950s with her country and rockabilly songs. Born in central Oklahoma, Jackson lived briefly in Southern California in the 1940s, and then returned to Los Angeles to sign with Capitol in the 1950s and cut compositions that tended to feature sexually assertive young women who often seemed more sensually sophisticated than the men they were courting. Her most lyrically and musically daring recording, 1958’s “Fujiyama Mama,” was a cover of an rhythm and blues song. Jackson eschewed the original, however, and added growls, shrieks, and soft deep-voiced interludes to the song. The lyrics equated the female libido with the volcano and the atom bomb. The narrator begins each chorus by mentioning that what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki might also happen, metaphorically of course, to the object of her affections: ’Cause I’m a Fujiyama mama, and I’m just about to blow my top. . . . And when I start eruptin’, ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.

Despite its potential to raise the ire of Japanese survivors, Jackson’s rendition paradoxically became an overnight smash in the Pacific nation, but failed to chart in the United States. “The American people in the ’50s

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 177

weren’t ready for a female rocker,” Jackson later told one interviewer. “They sure weren’t ready to accept a girl screaming and rocking and rolling.” It may just be that they also weren’t ready for a woman who was willing to take ownership of her own sensuality, at least in the lyrics that she and her producers at Capitol selected.44 On the issue of Okie “ethnicity,” neither Shepard nor Jackson appears to have hid her background. For Jackson, her Okieness was difficult to hide from reporters, since she had moved back and forth between California and Oklahoma several times. Shepard’s folksiness, accent, and use of prominently Okie Bakersfield backup musicians placed her identity front and center. Active on the local scene into the 1950s, Rose Maddox too championed a certain Okie women’s assertiveness in a lighthearted novelty number about the wild-whooping “Oklahoma Sweetheart Sally Anne.”45 Jackson eventually returned to singing less startling honky-tonk and gospel numbers, but others took up sexual assertive lyrics. While Shepard’s vision of political independence and a feminization of the world political system was not realized during the era, the more overt sexuality displayed in Jackson’s late 1950s recordings slowly became safer terrain. A rising star in the late 1960s, Barbara Mandrell, another Texas-Oklahoma migrant who started her career in Southern California haunts, scored her first number one country spot with “The Midnight Oil,” a composition she described as “a sultry number about two people seeing each other in the middle of the night.” Mandrell’s hit proved that it was becoming more acceptable for women to sing candidly about feminine desire.46 Although female performers experienced mixed results in their efforts to broaden horizons for country music women, an examination of members of the Southern California fan subculture suggests that female country music enthusiasts did not fully embrace the subservient domestic ideal promoted by fan journalism and male lyrics. Interviews of and correspondence with fans of the era suggest that the subculture may have actually encouraged women fans to contest the country-music June Cleaver model and develop more liberated ideas about women’s role in society. For local vocalist Ann Glaze, this meant volunteering to sing at benefits with local country bands, an early public activity that led to a lifetime of involvement in both music and civic-oriented performances. “I never became well known, but it was more for the love of the music and the good times,” she wrote in 2001.47 Even more emphatic was Shirley Desy, a self-described “teenage country music lover” who persuaded her father to drive her to a series of multiartist “package” country music shows at the Long Beach Municipal Audi-

178

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

torium in the 1950s before she was old enough to drive. Desy said she strongly identified with the show’s female soloists, women such as Shepard, Wells, and Skeeter Davis, who were just beginning to make a name for themselves in country music. Desy sympathized with the ups and downs of these vocalists’ careers, linking them with her own struggles as an adolescent. In a 2001 interview, she said her contact with the shows led her to realizations about the bias female artists faced, and this allowed her to cultivate a sense of pride at the obstacles these performers were forced to overcome. “Women were not given the freedoms that men were given— anywhere—not just country music,” Desy remembered. “There was probably more of the good ol’ boy concept in country music than anyplace else. I was really proud when women started making things that were good, . . . because I thought that they were all talented and I thought they deserved it.” In their focus on economic struggle and gender bias, Desy also felt, female country music vocalists had something more important to say about the struggles women faced in the postwar period than the female pop vocalists who were more explicitly marketed to her generation.48 Ultimately, Desy found that her experience as a fan made her a more assertive person because it taught her the value of standing up for her own tastes and beliefs. She said she felt a sense of community with the intergenerational Long Beach audiences, but by the mid-1950s her love for country music put her at odds with her high school classmates. “I felt like an outcast to my peers, because during that time rock and roll was the type of music the kids loved,” she said. “I tolerated rock and roll and kept my likes to myself in order to avoid criticism.” When she later relented and went with a boyfriend to some rock events, she felt a slight pang of guilt. “I was so dedicated to country,” Desy remembered. “I felt like I was being disloyal.” Such attachment eventually led her to resist the temptation to hide her affinity for country music. Being “country when country wasn’t cool,” she said, eventually led her to be more confident and, if need be, more confrontational about her own needs and in her relationships.49

reassessing gender conservatism in migrant musical culture Taken at face value, the proliferation of artist-at-home articles in the 1950s and 1960s might suggest a cut-and-dried case of misogyny in Southern California country music culture—proof that the musical subculture largely shaped and sustained by the hundreds of thousands arrivals from the Dust

Playing Second Fiddle No More?

/ 179

Bowl extended the fabled social conservatism of migrants to debates about women’s roles at work and in the family. Okie plain-folk Americanism, according to this view, had reared its ugly head yet again, contributing to a conservative-populist working-class version of the ennui described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.50 The real track record however was much more ambiguous than that promoted in fan magazine literature. Southern California country music fans of the 1950s and 1960s were confronted with a variety of models related to women’s behavior. True, fan magazines and the growing male-dominated honky-tonk industry offered relatively conservative messages about women’s roles in society and in the family, but local female performers were successful—at least temporarily—in countering such depictions and offering new images of a more independent womanhood that, in one case, threatened to place a woman in the world-dominant position. Female fans, as Desy’s story suggests, delighted in female artists’ successes, deeply affected at times with the independence these performers appeared to display. The country music culture of Southern California in the 1950s, then, must be seen as a site of active dialogue about competing notions of acceptable women’s behavior, as well as a contested terrain upon which audiences selectively processed the symbols, messages, and ideologies they encountered. Conservative fan magazine writers, male disc jockeys, and misogynistic lyricists enjoyed a great deal of power over how and what political messages might reach fans, but female performers and fans exercised their own agency in assessing women’s abilities and establishing their place in society. By the late 1960s, significant dialogue about the Vietnam War was also beginning to emerge within the subculture. Although country music allowed room for some discussion, one of the dominant voices was that of Merle Haggard, a onetime Bakersfield studio musician who would make the majority of his hit records in the sound studios of Los Angeles.

6

Fightin’ Sides “Okie from Muskogee,” Conservative Populism, and the Uses of Migrant Identity

Merle Haggard was not only a bit bewildered at the reception of his first public performance of “Okie from Muskogee” but also under the impression that he was being attacked. A thirty-two-year-old country music artist from California’s Central Valley, Haggard was said to have written the song while touring the southeastern seaboard in 1969. He introduced the newly penned composition to a live audience at the noncommissioned officers club in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “It was a small club and the crowd had been exceptionally dead,” Haggard later told a reporter. “But then we sang ‘Okie’ and the whole place went berserk.” Soldiers poured out of the aisles and rushed the stage. Besieged, Haggard stiffened, momentarily wondering how the oncoming crowd had interpreted the song, and if their gestures were friendly. Within a few seconds, he relaxed, realizing that the soldiers were merely rushing forward to shower him with handshakes and bear hugs. The next night at a show for the base’s enlisted men, an even more spirited uproar ensued, as eager soldiers hurrahed the song’s apparent excoriation of critics of the Vietnam War. “They started comin’ after me on the stage, and I didn’t know what was going to happen next until they said we’d have to do it over again before they’d let us go.”1 One of the most memorable and polarizing country songs to emerge from a Los Angeles recording studio, “Okie from Muskogee” not only prompted locker-room-like displays of horseplay and male bonding but also helped make Haggard the best-known exemplar of a migrant musician in the history of the Okie subculture. Though California contemporaries such as Buck Owens had paved the way, “Okie from Muskogee” catapulted Haggard into a league with the legendary country superstars of his generation—performers such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, and 180

Fightin’ Sides / 181 Willie Nelson. From a lyrical and artistic standpoint, “Okie from Muskogee” failed to measure up to “Silver Wings,” “If We Make It through December,” and other stronger Haggard compositions, but the song made the young Bakersfield singer the hottest commodity in the Southern California country circuit, later helping him to fill venues as large as Anaheim Stadium and the Shrine Auditorium. As a single, it sold 264,000 copies in its first year. As an album, Okie from Muskogee sold 885,000 copies, becoming one of the few country albums of the era to go gold. “‘Okie,’” according to Time magazine, “put Haggard in the millionaire class.”2 In the three and half decades since, scholars and commentators have spent considerable effort attempting to explain what “Okie from Muskogee” meant and whether it is fair to link Haggard with the type of conservative-populist politics espoused by the singing cowboy moralists, Ronald Reagan, and other opponents of New Deal and Great Society reforms. Early critics either bewailed the song for its “ultraconservatism” or sought to rehabilitate it by rereading it as a populist working-class attack on a comfortable middle class’s snobbery, decorum, and superficial bohemianism. What linked these early analyses was a sense that the song’s workingstiff narrator had been so blindsided by an onslaught of social and technological change that he could offer up nothing better than a chauvinistic nationalism to protest the forces that assailed him.3 In the last twenty years, scholarship has put aside the reductive tendencies of this psychological emphasis, focusing instead on Haggard’s social background and personal history as a way of explaining the song’s intentions. This undertaking has proved difficult, because Haggard’s own politics are fraught with contradictions and because he has offered confusing and sometimes conflicting accounts of the song’s meaning and origin. Generally seeking to redeem or exonerate “Okie,” these recent analyses suggest that the song had a special meaning to migrant culture. They also point to a larger Haggard repertoire that includes sensitive numbers about race, poverty, and incarceration. Underlying much of this debate, however, had been an unhealthy dose of what contemporary film scholars call auteurism, the almost single-minded fixation on authorial intent that had once gripped cinema studies. Instead of asking what audiences made of the song or how they reacted, much of the debate has figured around what Haggard, the auteur, meant.4 Although Haggard’s intentions remain a central facet of the story, equally if not more important are the ways in which audiences interpreted and understood the song, as well as the roles that the country music industry, the antiwar counterculture, and migrants themselves played in encour-

182

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

aging certain interpretations. Southern California listeners, in fact, “read” and responded to “Okie from Muskogee” in multiple ways, approximating Stuart Hall’s conception of the Bakhtinian notion of polysemy—literally a variety of signified understandings and uses.5 Rather than simply interpreting the song as a pro-war statement or right-wing manifesto, audiences found contradictory and overlapping meanings and responded with a variety of reactions. Haggard himself has endorsed the notion that the song offers a multitude of layered, inconstant, and competing meanings, admitting in one interview that there were “about 18 different messages” in the twenty-four-line song.6 This is not to say that the majority of the audience did not react positively to the song as a statement of ultraconservatism. Reception of the song was instead organized into a set of dominant meanings supported by the prevailing social order—in this case the local military-industrial complex and music industry—and what Hall calls oppositional meanings in which listeners decoded the meaning of the lyrics according some “alternative framework or reference.” But more than just passively reading “Okie,” Southern California listeners also made use of it in varied ways. The chieftains of the local country music industry used the song as a backdrop for ads supporting their own profitable alliance with the U.S. military, which helped promote country music through its broadcasting service. Right-wingers and conservative country music performers created their own emulations of the song, hoping to ride the coattails of Haggard’s commercial and critical success. Migrants saw in it an expression of Okie pride. Others performed “Okie” in ironic settings, imbuing it with the opposite of what many took to be its literal meaning. And finally, country-rock performers, skeptical fans, counterculture youth, and others created parodies of the song in which they reworded and restyled the song for a comic or confrontational effect. As a whole, these varied readings and uses helped inaugurate a major, though transitory, revival of migrant identity, allowing musicians and fans to once again express their pride in being Okie.7 Not all interpretations and uses of the song, however, held equal weight. Hawkish and conservative-populist readings and uses, in fact, were so much more powerful in reaching audiences that they helped sustain and advance the conservative renegotiation of Okie cultural politics that had begun with the singing cowboys. Rather than maintaining the earlier link between Okie identity and the left-wing refugee archetype of the 1930s, the jitterbugging multiethnic Okie hepcat paragon of the 1940s, or the renegade teenage Okie lothario of Jimmy Patton’s rockabilly “Okie’s in the Pokie” (1959), these readings and uses recast the migrant as a jingoistic conservative-populist

Fightin’ Sides / 183 adult white man: antihippie, working class, and uncertain about the cultural changes that urbanization, Civil Rights, and integration had wrought. So powerful was this newly negotiated image, and so paltry were popular histories of migrant identity in Southern California country music, that “Okie from Muskogee” replaced earlier configurations and helped erase from popular memory the notion that migrant identity might be constructed in a variety of ways. Not backed by powerful players of the industry and unable to compete with the industry’s uses of the song, those contesting this image with counterreadings and reinterpretations, especially those offering antiwar countercultural analyses, had a much smaller effect.

in country: “okie from muskogee” as pro–vietnam war anthem The dominant interpretation of “Okie from Muskogee”—the one promoted by the country music industry—worked to justify U.S. involvement in Vietnam, shrug off claims of U.S. imperialism, romanticize small-town life, and delegitimize the voices of those who questioned national policy or, as one line suggested, even dressed differently. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, the song appeared to criticize pacifists, hippies, and marijuana smokers while applauding flag-waving social conservatives and supporters of the war. Many commentators have suggested that it seemed to speak for President Nixon’s “silent majority” of Americans, those who supported military action in Southeast Asia and quietly fumed at the demonstrations taking place on campus and in the streets. With the 1965 Watts riots fresh on the popular mind, the song also seemed to suggest that small southern plains towns, with their less visible elements of racial strife, were bastions of harmony compared to big cities, when in fact even Haggard’s beloved Muskogee had a long history of discrimination and seething social tensions. Haggard, who had impressed many left-leaning critics with his early, moving lyrical portraits of rural poverty, now faced their rancor. “I hate Merle Haggard,” one liberal Hollywood writer proclaimed in an interview with the music journalist Paul Hemphill.8 Given that Haggard spent much of his life on the social and economic margins, it was little wonder that liberals and rock and folk fans were shocked by the apparent conservative tilt of “Okie.” Born in Bakersfield, California, in 1937, the singer-songwriter was the son of farmers who had fled their home in eastern Oklahoma after the family barn was razed by a suspicious fire in 1934. At the time of Haggard’s birth, the family was liv-

184

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

ing in a converted railroad car in Oildale, an unincorporated working-class Okie neighborhood located on the literal and figurative margins of Bakersfield society. Haggard’s father found work as a railroad yardman, but died of a stroke before the boy reached the age of ten. His mother, a bookkeeper for a meat company, raised Merle and his two siblings on her own.9 Haggard was rebellious teenager. He ran away from home, had a number of run-ins with the police, and by age of nineteen, was married and expecting a child. As a young adult, he stole cars for joyrides and pilfered money to support his young family, eventually landing in San Quentin for trying to burglarize a liquor store. As one of his hit songs would later tell it, he “turned 21 in prison” while serving a three-year sentence. Ironically, it was his incarceration that prompted Haggard to reconnect with country music, a genre that had fascinated him since his teenage years, by joining the prison band.10 Upon parole in 1960, Haggard took jobs as a farmworker and oil-field roughneck and spent his free time in Bakersfield’s honky-tonks. Bakersfield had by then developed a vibrant country scene, spawning major label artists such as Buck Owens. Haggard played guitar for house bands at local nightclubs before briefly joining a Las Vegas outfit led by honky-tonker Wynn Stewart. When it was discovered that Haggard also had talent as a singer and songwriter, fellow musicians urged him to cut his own records. He recorded his first platter, “Skid Row,” a lark about a youth who spent his free time on the bad side of town, on the small Tally label back in Bakersfield. By 1965, Haggard had scored his first top ten hit on Billboard’s country charts and signed with Capitol Records, still the dominant label in Los Angeles.11 A city important in Haggard’s lyrical imagery, Bakersfield had grown rapidly as a result of in-migration from the Dust Bowl, federal freeway and aqueduct construction, and the postwar oil, trucking, and farming booms. By 1960, the city had a population of sixty-eight thousand, a vibrant club scene, and two daily country music TV programs. While the number of Los Angeles radio outlets had shrunk, Bakersfield boasted three country stations in the mid-1960s—part of an unprecedented national surge in country broadcasting that saw the genre expand outside its urban base and into more rural regions. Taking note, Billboard labeled Bakersfield, not Los Angeles, the “Country Music Capitol [sic] of the West” in 1967, tapping the Central Valley town to eventually replace the Los Angeles area as “Nashville West.”12 Rather than favoring the more polished adult-oriented country-pop of their middle-Tennessee contemporaries, Bakersfield artists adhered to a

Fightin’ Sides / 185 grittier anti-Nashville aesthetic, presenting themselves as rougher-edged blue-collar traditionalists who sang wistfully of hardscrabble lives and a simpler rural past. In reality, Bakersfield country drew extensively from urban Angeleno rockabilly, honky-tonk, and western swing traditions, heavily influenced by vocalists and guitarists who had lived or set up shop in the region, such as Lefty Frizzell, Jean Shepard, Merle Travis, and Speedy West. Despite its nostalgic imagery and efforts to preserve older stylistic elements, the Bakersfield “sound” also flaunted tradition, especially in its use of the electric guitar: “Turning up the volume on their Fender Telecaster guitars to an almost ear-splitting pitch, the guitarists played a single-string style that often featured sharp, staccato phrases known as ‘chicken picking.’ The overall result was a crisp, sparkling, electronic sound with an infectious beat.”13 To this mix, Haggard added a rich lyricism, replete with historical allusions and a bleak realism, while reintroducing elements of Jimmie Rodgers’s blue yodels, Emmett Miller’s stylized jazz vocals, and TexasOklahoma idioms of Frizzell and Bob Wills. Even though Bakersfield spawned small independent labels like Tally and Mosrite, artists remained dependent on Los Angeles for production and promotion, becoming “country music commuters” who, like Haggard, recorded at Capitol’s cylindrical high-rise or enjoyed exposure at area nightclubs or in L.A.’s lucrative broadcasting market.14 Stemming from a working-poor background and representing the musical tradition marginalized by the Nashville establishment, Haggard, at first glance, seemed the perfect candidate to articulate the kind of oppositional liberal-populism promoted by Woody Guthrie, who had even cut a similarly titled “Skid Row Serenade” on his first known recording. Indeed, Haggard’s “Skid Row” on Tally, as well as most of his earliest recordings for Capitol, reflected an outsider’s consciousness and seemed to invoke the Guthrie spirit with their tales about poverty, migration, and prison. Often writing his own songs, Haggard made a conscious effort to produce music that spoke for the people around him about issues they had faced. Country lyrics are “just journalism put to music,” he later told Time.15 Although his songs rarely ventured into policy, popular tracks such as “Hungry Eyes” (1968) and “California Cottonfields” (1969) were rooted in Haggard family experiences and offered moving Guthrie-esque portraits of migrant poverty. “Hungry Eyes”—a song about the emotional toll of living in “a canvas-covered cabin in a crowded labor camp,” while “another class of people put us somewhere just below”—spent four weeks at number one on the country charts. Though alluding to Steinbeck’s Joad imagery,

186

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

the song was rooted in Haggard family history. “When Merle sings ‘Hungry Eyes,’ almost every word of it really happened like that,” Haggard’s mother, Flossie, told a reporter in 1971.16 Haggard never engaged in the kind of social activism Guthrie championed. There were no United Farm Worker rallies or benefits for blacklisted writers, but he did use his celebrity to highlight criticisms of the American prison system. In “The Fugitive” (1966) and “Branded Man” (1967), he merely hinted at his incarceration, but by 1968 Haggard publicly acknowledged his stint in prison.17 “Sing Me Back Home,” a song from the era about a condemned inmate’s last wish, even appeared to be at least tacitly positioned against the death penalty. Haggard himself had befriended prison anti-death-penalty activist Caryl Chessman while serving time in San Quentin.18 Haggard was most vocal, however, about the human rights of prisoners, expressing particular outrage at a system of abuse and killings that had begun to come to light in Arkansas state prisons in the late 1960s. Not only did investigators there unearth three prisoners’ bodies from an unmarked grave, but a former superintendent told reporters he believed there to be at least two hundred similar unmarked graves.19 “Twelve hundred inmates buried down there that they killed,” Haggard told one reporter, exaggerating figures or getting the numbers wrong. “Right here in America.”20 Haggard’s emphasis on the plight of inmates and the poor drew kudos from left-leaning listeners and the institutions that were beginning to emerge within 1960s youth counterculture. Rolling Stone, then a fashionable antiwar magazine connected to San Francisco’s acid and folk rock scene, ran laudatory articles about Haggard’s prison and poverty numbers, linking him with Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl refugee” legacy.21 The Great Speckled Bird, an underground Atlanta newspaper, praised Haggard for speaking out against the brutality of “sadistic” guards, prison administrators, and youth authority officials.22 Longhaired musicians connected with Los Angeles’s country-rock scene began covering Haggard compositions and singing his praises at counterculture nightspots such as the Ash Grove and the Troubadour.23 Even Guthrie’s former employer, the Communist People’s World, offered its praise.24 Despite praise from the old and new Lefts, Haggard’s biggest career breakthrough came with the release of two seemingly jingoistic numbers: “Okie from Muskogee,” which hit record shelves in September 1969, and “Fightin’ Side of Me,” a song released several months later, which seemed to borrow its overriding sentiment from the “America: Love It or Leave It” bumper sticker. “Okie,” the more popular of two, expressed a proud,

Fightin’ Sides / 187 working-class “Okie” identity, but seemed to assail war protesters. After its memorable first line “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” the song offered a list activities that a typical Okie from Muskogee shunned: LSD use, the wearing of sandals and beads, participation in casual or free love relationships, growing one’s hair “long and shaggy” like the counterculture youth in San Francisco, taking part in violent or unruly campus demonstrations, and setting one’s draft card ablaze in protest over the war.25 Haggard’s Okie narrator was instead a traditionalist living in a moral utopia, a rural “city on the hill” or a vestige of Frederick Jackson Turner’s democracy-enhancing frontier that produced hardworking, no-nonsense citizen-workers. Distinct from the deficient counterculture types the song described, the Okie in “Okie from Muskogee” took the moral high ground by waving the flag at the town square and dressing appropriately masculine in leather work boots. Even the local college students deferred to their administrators in the song. A man “proud to be an Okie” and not afraid of being called a square, the narrator’s only vices appeared to be drinking moonshine and quaint courtship rituals such as hand-holding and “pitching woo.” After the release of “Okie,” the biggest commercial success so far in his career, Haggard’s average net for a one-night concert quadrupled, to nine thousand dollars and his gross annual income tripled to $1 million.26 The dominant interpretation of the song, and the one that much of the country music industry supported, was that the song was an all-out excoriation of pacifists and political dissenters of any stripe. On the recorded version, protesters seem to be assailed, patriotism extolled, and cultural dissent discouraged. From a financial point of view, it made good sense for Haggard to invoke these points of view. The country music industry had profited from earlier alliances with the military, which had helped country music gain an international audience through its Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, and a portion of the country music audience was already supporting similar kinds of uncritical patriotic fanfare. A rash of songs supporting American intervention—including several by politically liberal country songwriter Tom T. Hall—had already done moderately well on the charts. Although Barry Sadler’s 1965 pro-war hit “Ballad of the Green Berets” did not fit musicologically with the country music oeuvre, consistent play on country stations introduced the song to tens of thousands of country music fans. This interest would later translate into ticket sales for John Wayne’s pro-war cinematic adaptation, The Green Berets, which used Sadler’s tune as its theme song.27 This is not to say that all country musicians, or even all of the Nashville establishment, towed the pro-war line. Artists as diverse as Skeeter Davis,

188

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

George Kent, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings recorded songs that questioned the reasoning behind the war, mourned the loss of life and limb, or called for the return of servicemen. Later reassessing the war, Tom T. Hall wrote a biting antiwar song, “Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken),” in which a disabled veteran bemoans the loss of his legs.28 Despite these inroads, however, mainstream country and the Nashville establishment had increasingly become, as Bill C. Malone argues, a vehicle for “songs of antidissent,” those that “protested the protesters.”29 Capitol had already achieved moderate success with the patriotic spokenword conservatism of Tex Ritter. Building on the relationship that had been established between the local country musicians and armed forces radio during World War II, the West Coast country music industry extended its reach over the military network in newer and more complete ways during Vietnam. Now delivering television programming to thousands of servicemen, the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service became increasingly engaged with the Los Angeles country music elite as well. Some four months before “Okie” came out, the Academy of Country and Western Music (ACWM) selected the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service’s Master Sergeant Bill Boyd to serve as chairman of its board. Boyd’s position as chairman was particularly powerful because the board included ranking officials from Los Angeles’s largest recording companies. As chairman, Boyd helped establish a weekly ACWM country music broadcast on Armed Forces Radio and was later elected to three terms as the ACWM’s president.30 The ACWM signaled its support of the war effort as early as 1968 by touting a string of sentimental soldier ballads and editorializing against the protesters in the pages of its newsletter. “My Brother,” written by serviceman Dave S. McNaught about a brother who died fighting in Vietnam was especially stirring, the Academy of Country and Western Music News reported, because McNaught himself was killed in combat before the song was released. The newsletter also proclaimed “Mama, Apple Pie, the Bible, and the Flag,” released by the local performer Hal Southern in February 1969, an “excellent reading on the illnesses that beset our present day America. Though somewhat lengthy, it starkly portrays what’s ‘buggin’ all of us who work hard and pay our taxes and ‘boil’ at the incessant protesters in the news and on television.”31 In a similar fashion, the ACWM used “Okie from Muskogee” to justify the war and convince listeners that protesters were troublemakers who assailed the very foundations of American society. In January 1970, ACWM officials joined the conservative singing cowboy Roy Rogers and KRAK,

Fightin’ Sides / 189 Sacramento’s juggernaut country radio station, in a campaign supporting the Nixon Administration’s National Week of Unity, an effort to drum up support for the Vietnam War. “Okie from Muskogee” was selected as the soundtrack for radio announcements publicizing the campaign, which involved distributing some ten thousand American flag-bearing bumper stickers in California, Washington, Iowa, and Oregon. The ACWM News ran a letter from the KRAK general manager on its front page: “In addition to the plaudits from local civic officials, KRAK is proud to assert its posture as the voice of the American people in Northern California. Slightly corny? Not when the silent majority is out-shouted by those far from representative of what most us believe about our country.” No mention was made of Haggard’s involvement or feelings about the effort, but, according to newsletter accounts, the performer never complained. In 1970, the ACWM made “Okie” its single of the year.32 Audience reception at live performances of “Okie” suggest that the ACWM and others were successful in using the song to criticize the antiwar movement. When Haggard performed at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles a few months after the song’s release, the audience erupted into thunderous impromptu handclaps. “Almost every phrase of ‘Okie from Muskogee’ brought applause from the crowd,” an enthusiastic reviewer from California Country, a Covina-based fan tabloid, reported. As the song climbed the charts and received more publicity, live performances elicited even greater response. The Atlantic Monthly described the scene at a Dayton, Ohio, concert: You can sense the crowd’s restlessness. They have come for one thing this night. “ ‘Okie,’ ” “ ‘Okie,’ ” they are pleading. Personal-sized American flags begin coming out of purses. . . . Finally having teased long enough, Haggard lays it on them . . . and suddenly they are on their feet, berserk, waving flags and stomping and whistling and cheering, joining in on the chorus: “. . . we still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse . . . ”; and for those brief bombast moments the majority isn’t silent any more. “It will,” a liberal friend had promised, “scare the living hell out of you.”

Performing “Okie” and “Fightin’ Side of Me” at the Anaheim Convention Center Arena in 1971, Haggard got a standing ovation from a full house of ninety-one hundred people. “The audience roared its approval several times during each song, particularly when the title lines were sung,” reported the Los Angeles Times reviewer.33 Early press reports suggested that Haggard approved of these bouts of flag-waving. In the live performance recording of a Philadelphia appearance,

190

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

Haggard quickened the tempo, verbally encouraging the audience to sing along with the chorus and speaking during an interlude about how disrespect for the flag somehow might lead to a form of authoritarianism not articulated by Haggard, but seemingly modeled on Stalinism or Maoism. The timing of his follow-up release, “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” in early 1970 made it clear to many that Haggard disapproved of antiwar demonstrators to the point where he advocated unleashing one’s “fightin’ side.”34 Buoyed by this enthusiasm, pro-war fans and artists flooded the local country music press with attacks on dissenters. Writing in California Country, Hal Southern of “Mom, Apple Pie . . . ” fame blasted protesters and proclaimed himself “Mr. Hill Billy,” perhaps as a means of capitalizing on Haggard’s success with the unlikely “Okie” moniker: “Realizing that being pro-American offends some people, I am pro-American and I am prepared to battle with all of the fuzzyhead, pink cheeked, ultraliberal, ivory tower socialistic dreamers who continue to live here in spite of our imperfections.”35 Another fan writing in Universal City’s Town and Country fan magazine, defended Second Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., the leader of a platoon that—under pressure to maintain a weekly “body count”—was involved in the massacre of an estimated three hundred to five hundred Vietnamese women, children, and elderly men at My Lai. Echoing public opinion polls of the time, she claimed that, as a patriotic American soldier, Calley was no murderer but simply had “made a split second decision.”36 Attacks on the antiwar movement and defense of the mass murder at My Lai suggest that the dominant interpretation of “Okie” included at least some venting of blue-collar angst about the purportedly privileged and effete members of a middle-class counterculture who appeared to be immune from the draft. Key words such as “leather boots” and “white lightning” mark the “Okie” narrator as a small-town, working-class man, while other aspects suggest his anger at the members of an urban collegiate culture that used marijuana and LSD, burned its draft cards, and disrespected the college dean. Haggard, who never went to college and who finished high school in prison, endorsed such a view in a 1971 Look interview, relating his childhood poverty and time spent in prison to his dislike of purportedly wealthy protesters: I don’t think the average kid has had to work hard enough to appreciate how we live. The ones that bitch are usually the rich kids who get tired of having everything. The people who work don’t have time to riot or protest. Too busy working. These kids that came up easy don’t appreciate freedom because they never experienced not having it. They never lost the freedom I have. Ain’t no 16-year-old kid gonna solve the world’s

Fightin’ Sides / 191 problems. A man out working gotta a right to bitch. Not someone paying their dues.37

Haggard’s argument that only a working man has “gotta right to bitch” and the affinity of the song “Okie” for boot-wearing “squares” were not necessarily out of step with institutions traditionally associated with the working class. Recent studies, for instance, have shown that, while the workingclass poll responders tended to be more skeptical of the war than wealthier polling groups, many labor unions supported the war effort.38 Southern’s vitriol toward “ivory tower socialistic dreamers”—presumably well-paid liberal academicians of the eastern Establishment—suggests a similar conservative working-class populism, although this must be tempered by the fact that country music itself was a genre becoming increasingly popular among middle-class listeners. Such dominant interpretations and uses then worked to reinforce larger and generally erroneous media stereotypes that war opponents were naïve, coddled, unpatriotic meddlers who disrespected returning veterans.39 Assaults on masculinity, often cloaking a larger and more rampant homophobia, were another weapon used to scapegoat and excoriate dissenters. The “Okie” narrator’s preference for leather boots as a form of “manly footwear” linked Haggard with the strictly enforced dress codes of both rural working-class Southern masculinity and “the hardhats,” the pro-war urban construction workers who at times fought with war protesters. In contrast, male protesters were depicted as unnaturally feminine men who wore their hair long like women and donned such unmasculine garb as sandals and beads. In “Fightin’ Side,” pacifist men were described as “squirrelly,” a zoological reference that not only meant both eccentrically energetic and effeminate but also rhymed with the ultimate macho put-down—girly. Hawkish fans followed suit, often lampooning political adversaries in similarly dandyish terms. Although Southern’s choice of the adjective “pink cheeked” hinted at left-wing leanings of his “ivory tower socialistic dreamers,” its stronger implication was that comfortable lives—or perhaps even the deliberate application of rouge—had made male dissenters sissified and feminine. Other fans drew from an older tradition of stereotyping radicals and reformers as mentally unstable conspirators. Writing in California Country, Elizabeth Horton praised songs such as Haggard’s and Southern’s, invoking the specter of a Communist, or possibly nihilist, takeover should the American people not take a hard line on Vietnam: “Come on you country music fans—let’s raise our voices and drown out the racous [sic] obscenities of the anarchists!”40

192

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

The dominant reading of “Okie from Muskogee” also carried an important, though less obvious, racial subtext, associating the song with a conception of whiteness based on an idealization of white small-town America, an ostracism of urban blacks, as well as a misunderstanding of rural Oklahoma’s formidable history of racial strife. Haggard never once mentioned the race of any character in the song, but his decision to set the song in Muskogee is important. In one of his earliest interviews after the release of “Okie,” Haggard told a Los Angeles radio and arts publication that he conceived of the line “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee” while driving through Muskogee, Oklahoma: And a week or so later I was listening to Garner Ted Armstrong—he’s the fellow who represents Ambassador Religious College out of Pasadena. Anyway, he was saying how the smaller colleges in smaller towns don’t seem to have any problems. And I wondered if Muskogee had a college, and it did, and they hadn’t ever had any trouble—no racial problems and no dope problems. The whole thing hit me in two minutes, and I did one line after another and got the whole thing done in 20 minutes.41

Although the real Muskogee had a large black population, Haggard bought into the conception that cities and towns in the southern plains and the Jim Crow South were free from racial strife, while invoking a equally salient stereotype that urban blacks instigated social disorder—a point made seemingly more prescient in Haggard’s later lyrical criticisms of “big city” Los Angeles, especially as some residents tried to heal the wounds that had sparked the Watts riots.42 In actuality, tensions were bubbling under the surface in Muskogee, exacerbated by decades of Jim Crow laws and customs that even extended to how a local hospital handled the dead. Rules about segregating black bodies from white bodies sometimes kept black undertakers waiting in the rain to pick up bodies in the 1950s, because hospital elevators were off-limits, the dominion of whites.43 White residents may have been unaware of tension, but blacks were generally quite cognizant of the strife, often being the targets of an active antibusing movement that sought to keep black and white schools separate. African American television actor Regina Taylor recalled the hostility she endured in Muskogee in the early 1970s as she matriculated in a junior high that had recently integrated: “The teacher sat us in alphabetical order, and I was seated next to a little white girl. My classmate turned to the teacher and said, ‘I don’t want this nigger sitting next to me.’”44 Not incidentally, the Muskogee U.S. District Court was later the site

Fightin’ Sides / 193 at which litigators launched a major federal lawsuit to contest the segregation and abuse of black inmates in state prisons.45 Hawkish fans similarly racialized the debate about the war. Southern, for instance, used the California Country piece “Mom, Apple Pie, the Bible, and the Flag” to criticize minority groups, lumping them together with the countercultural war dissenters and traditional liberal defenders of the social safety net: “The nation wasn’t made great by unwashed lazy hippies, crybaby welfarism or racial minorities begging for a handout.” Asians, in particular, were often demonized, suggesting some backlash against recent changes in immigration law. The apologetic California Country fan editorial on My Lai and Calley was paired with a picture of a Japanese general and a photo of a mass grave in the World War II–era Philippines—a combination that implied that Calley’s acts were insignificant compared to atrocities carried out by Asians. The pairing argued subtextually that the brutal but often military-focused guerrilla tactics of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during the war were morally equivalent to the civilian-oriented genocide practiced by Imperial Japan. Grouped with the fan’s defense of Calley, the photographs suggested Southeast Asians were prone to forms of violence unconscionable to “normal” white men.46 Such attitudes also drew from actual political shifts in migrant voting patterns. A few migrant politicians, such as the San Fernando Valley assemblyman Tom Carrell, a former east Texan, and Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, originally from west Texas, subscribed to a populist liberalism that often favored African Americans and the poor. But more often than not, migrant politics veered toward the new populist right that embraced forms of neosegregationism that later became apparent among some elements in country music culture.47 Although not a migrant, the politician Lawrence E. Walsh represented blue-collar Huntington Park, a heavily “Okie” district peopled by what Walsh admiringly called “red neck Democrats.” While Walsh promoted the interests of area trade unions, he simultaneously scapegoated the African American communities in neighboring Florence and Watts. As mayor of Huntington Park during the Watts riots, Walsh organized an effort to literally contain the black community by pressuring the railroad companies to place empty boxcars along the intersections of Alameda Street that divided white working-class suburbs in southeast Los Angeles County from the impoverished black neighborhoods of the central city. “That kept the traffic from coming over,” he told an interviewer in 1990. Later representing the largely Okie areas of Bell Gardens, Downey, and Huntington Park in the state assembly, Walsh joined Ronald Reagan in

194

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

championing Proposition 14, a state referendum that overturned elements of a state fair housing act and temporarily legalized some forms of housing discrimination.48 On some level, the rise of this “red neck” conservatism signaled wealthy New Right activists’ success in uniting middle-class voters and the white working class behind a program that included “backlash against integrated housing (1964–65), abolition of the death penalty (1965, 1976), the rights of farm labor (1972), school busing (1979) and property taxes (1978).”49 But it also reflected the rising affluence of many individual migrants, changes that could occasionally produce enormous ideological gaps between generations. In one migrant family later profiled by the Los Angeles Times, the mother was a lifelong advocate for impoverished farmworkers, while her son became a wealthy and prominent Orange County Republican. Organizing workers during a strike in the Central Valley in 1934, the woman had been arrested and labeled a “Communist” by the local newspaper. In the 1960s, while her son went door to door to endorse the New Right icon Barry Goldwater, she was out in the fields helping Cesar Chavez establish his nascent Mexican- and Filipino-American farmworker union.50

proud to be an okie: “okie from muskogee” as a statement of migrant pride Although the local country music industry used “Okie from Muskogee” to back a pro-war agenda, other groups read and reread the song in different ways and used its popularity to suit their own causes and purposes. Migrants could read the song as an expression of group pride akin to Guthrie’s and Cooley’s compositions. Counterculture youth disarmed the song’s apparent chauvinism with irony and parody, often using it as a framework on which to create new forms of protest and group self-expression. These divergent readings of the song “Okie” did not substantially counter the powerful industry-dominated usages of the song, but they did offer opportunities for the alternate forms of reception and use. Although many migrant country music listeners and other fans understood the song as a paean to gunboat diplomacy and a celebration of an uncritical nationalism, for many others “Okie from Muskogee” had very little to do with the war. Unlike the “curious one-timers” who turned out at his appearances to hear him play “Okie,” such fans read the song as part of the whole of Haggard’s career, a larger body of work that has involved a great deal of musical experimentation, attention to issues surrounding poverty,

Fightin’ Sides / 195 and most important, an articulation of identity for migrants as well as the second generation growing up in California.51 “Okie from Muskogee” and the larger social milieu of Haggard’s recording and songwriting contained several threads that linked the song with the social isolation and hardscrabble life experienced by rural migrants. The mention of work boots and of a hometown in Oklahoma suggested the narrator was from the same class as the song characters in Haggard’s earlier poverty recordings, including the self-written “Hungry Eyes,” Dallas Frazier’s “California Cottonfields,” and Haggard’s post-”Okie” single “Tulare Dust,” all songs that explored the experiences of rural Depression-era Okies. Like Guthrie’s and O’Dell’s Okie numbers, these songs expressed indignation at antimigrant prejudice, but looked back with much more nostalgic eyes, building individual acts of perseverance into almost epic Steinbeckian displays of fortitude. Such songs eulogized and lionized rural migrants’ hard work, lack of materialism, and simple values, painting these as traits only the chosen Depression generation seemed to possess. In “Tulare Dust,” the narrator, a child, bravely resolves to hold his head up even though his family’s occupation—stoop labor—places them at the bottom of the social ladder, a position where a bent back also signifies a crumpled ego: “Mom and Dad with shoulders low, / both of them picking on a double row.”52 By the time Haggard recorded the song, however, its depiction mainly offered nostalgia to migrants. Migrant farm labor had either become mechanized, supplanted by what one farmworker called the “big green and red Okies,” the motorized John Deere and Farmhaul cotton harvesters, or replaced by Mexican, Filipino, and, later, Central American workers who hand-harvested the state’s berry, grape, and lettuce crops.53 Aside from these farmworking themes, Haggard also touched on themes that seemed to speak specifically to migrants from the southern plains and blue-collar workers. Some compositions, such as 1968’s “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde,” celebrated the same southern plains outlaws that migrant musicians had been trumpeting since the 1930s. Wearing gangster garb and toting a Thompson submachine gun, Haggard even appeared on the album cover photographed in black-and-white, with a vintage roadster and female models dressed as gang molls. Other works, such as “Workin’ Man Blues” (1969), “If We Make It through December” (1973), and “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today” (1975), discussed debt, layoffs, and other travails of blue-collar life. Though the narrator of “Workin’ Man Blues” seemed to embrace Southern’s conservative-populism by suggesting that acceptance of welfare was shaming, these songs also spoke sensitively

196

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

about concerns shared by many ex–Dust Bowlers still living among what Mike Davis has called “the déclassé and deindustrialized layers of the [Los Angeles] white working class.” In later work, Haggard also turned a more general fascination with the Depression, especially its train and hobo culture, into a career-defining attribute, invoking motifs and imagery from the 1930s in songs discussing contemporary problems such as homelessness, healthcare issues and poverty among veterans, and the decline of the American auto industry.54 Because Haggard’s songwriting universe was immersed and would continue to be immersed in the culture of the 1930s and the virtues of the Dust Bowl generation, “Okie from Muskogee” could be read as yet another expression of these passions, only this time a significant contemporary display of Okie pride. The most memorable line, after all, had nothing to do with Vietnam: “I’m proud to be an Okie.” When I interviewed Haggard in 1993, he claimed to have written “Okie” with an emphasis on fostering group pride and honoring those who had made the westward journey. He said the song was especially dedicated to his father, a man who eked out a meager living in California and may have once borne the sting of anti-Okie prejudice. For Haggard, the song simply reclaimed the dignity of that one migrant life and, by extension, hundreds of thousands of others. “No one had ever said those words before: ‘I’m proud to be an Okie,’” he told me. Read as a statement that was akin to a manifesto of ethnic pride, the song had antecedents in other Haggard compositions. Haggard’s earlier “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” for instance, talked about a train-hopping transient who, as the title suggested, celebrated his outcast identity, perseverance, and freedom.55 Swept up by the “Okie from Muskogee” chorus, many migrant fans made their own declarations of pride. Often this manifested itself in accoutremental forms of Okie allegiance, such as “Okie Pride” bumper stickers, belt buckles, and trucker’s caps. Taking note of Haggard’s success, fellow Bakersfield artist Buck Owens inserted Okie self-references in his own song “California Okie.” Part of a new flowering of Okie writing, writers such as Gerald Haslam, Ken Kesey, James Houston, and Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel began publishing manuscripts and poems about the migrant experience. Occasionally this enthusiasm also found root in politics that emulated the larger Black and Chicano Power movements of the era, putting some migrants in touch with the New Left and the youth counterculture. Secondgeneration Okies in Oregon, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes, helped launch the biregional left-wing “Young Patriots” in conjunction with poor Appalachian youth elsewhere in the hopes of rekindling the working-class rad-

Fightin’ Sides / 197 icalism—Socialist, Wobbly, and anarchist—that had once swept the southern plains.56 For its part, the Okie-saturated suburb of El Monte spawned Country Joe McDonald, one of the leading folk-rock performers of the antiwar movement.57

switchin’ sides and standing up for what they believe in: “okie from muskogee” as counterculture icon Although “Okie” had a dramatic effect on migrants’ willingness to adopt outward expressions of group identity, the song also became a canvas upon which to offer messages that countered the dominant usages of the song. Nowhere was this more apparent than within the nascent country-rock culture developing around a series of countercultural folk-rock clubs and mainstream country nightspots in Los Angeles. Such spaces allowed younger musicians to see “Okie from Muskogee” as not simply a symbol of pride but also as a tool that could be reshaped to fit their own particular political and social purposes. Parodies of the song abounded, suggesting that on some level the song had become so much a part of national culture that it had lost some of its ability to provoke offense. While many country-rock artists were more concerned with producing an alternative aesthetics than an alternative politics, there were very clear signs that a number of both artists and fans of country-rock were using “Okie” to forge a culture critical of the war. Country-rock had deep ties to area counterculture, bridging some of the gaps that existed between generations and between the rock, folk, and country scenes. Although the People’s Songs Movement, the local outlet for political folk music in the mid-1940s, had withered under the weight of McCarthyism, by the late 1950s political and nonpolitical forms of folk music had returned to local youth spots such as the Unicorn, the Ash Grove, and Cosmo Alley. By the early 1960s, bluegrass groups such as the Kentucky Colonels and the Dillards launched a back-to-basics sound and movement that caught the attention of television programmers, country music listeners, and the folk-listening coffeehouse crowd. As others experimented by blending genres, new folk-rock bands such as the Hillmen, the Beefeaters, and the Hollies emerged. At the same time, older country guitar virtuosos such as Joe Maphis began to make lasting impressions on the local rock and surf rock scene. By the mid-1960s, local folk- and country-rock groups such as the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield began to show up on the pop charts,

198

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

often also dipping into Bob Dylan’s well of existentialist references, apocalyptic metaphors, and political themes. While the local scene veered toward a folk-rock sound, the Byrds’ 1968 lineup began a full-scale experiment with a more classical country-western sound.58 Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, two of the 1968 Byrds lineup, later formed their own straight country band, the Flying Burrito Brothers. As Burritos, the pair mixed the area’s long tradition of migrant music with soul and Motown influences, creating a new and sometimes political country music sensibility that Parsons deemed “Cosmic American Music.”59 Although Parsons came from Southern wealth and Hillman grew up in rural San Diego County, the longhaired pair linked themselves with Okie country identity by recording honky-tonk numbers penned by migrant magicians and by donning rhinestone Nudie suits—albeit adapted by the tailor Manuel Cuevas to feature embroidered cannabis leaves, at least on Parsons’s suit (figure 7). Hillman had actually grown up watching migrant acts such as Spade Cooley and Cal’s Corral on television, and the pair made frequent jaunts out to see Nashville West, the house band at the El Monte Okie country music hotspot of the same name. While still in the Byrds, Parsons and Hillman had recorded the seminal 1968 country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, a title likely honoring former local vocalist Patsy Montana of “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” fame. Though originally intended to be a much longer chronological history of country music from its old-time beginnings to its space-age future, the version of Sweetheart Hillman and Parsons actually released read like a history of Southern California Okie music with dollops of Nashville, Dylan, and soul. The album not only included a version of Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma bad man ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd” but also “Blue Canadian Rockies,” a song written by Texas-born California transplant Cindy Walker and originally recorded by Gene Autry. Also on the album were Merle Travis’s religious number “I Am a Pilgrim” and Haggard’s inmate-themed “Life in Prison.” Sweetheart never broke the Top 40, peaking at number seventy-seven, but it did land the Byrds a hallowed place in rock history, serving as an essential “trigger for a distinctly California brand of country-rock.”60 In Parsons and Hillman’s next major project, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin (1969), the pair chose Bakersfield-influenced numbers that paid homage to Haggard and Owens, but they relied on the same country music moorings to counter the sort of views Haggard seemed to express. In “My Uncle,” a song written after Parsons received his draft card, Parsons and Hillman advocated migration to Vancouver, Canada, or any other “foreign border” to avoid conscription. The song invoked several cen-

Fightin’ Sides / 199

figure 7. While partial to the California country traditions of Travis, Owens, and Haggard, Gram Parsons (right) looks like Haggard’s hippie doppelganger in this marijuana-leaf-adorned suit designed by Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors. Parsons and his songwriting partner, Chris Hillman (in peacock suit), posed with female models and fellow Flying Burrito Brothers Sneaky Pete Kleinow (in pterodactyl outfit) and Chris Ethridge in this 1969 shot at Joshua Tree National Monument. Reprinted by permission of the photographer, Barry Feinstein. Courtesy of Universal Music.

tral thematic tenets of the country canon including country’s familial “uncle” and “aunt” terminology, a distaste for sycophants and palm greasers, an overall reclusion from invasive modernity, and a mistrust of authority (in this case, of “Uncle” Sam—the federal government). Hillman and Parsons portrayed British Columbia as a draft dodger’s paradise free of the type of legal authority that might keep a “good man underground” or perhaps “under ground,” as Parsons vocal emphasis seems to suggest. The song also focused its ire on the draft questionnaire, which “asked me lots of things about my Mama and Papa / Now that ain’t exactly what I call fair”— a follow-up line lumping a left-wing populist criticism on the sons of the wealthy and connected who used influence to elude the draft.61 Other tracks on Gilded Palace of Sin praised the hippie culture Haggard maligned, often equating counterculture bohemians with the hillbilly and hobo types that Haggard celebrated. “Hippie Boy” was a Tex Ritter–style spoken word number with a pacifist edge, a ghost story about a dead child, a good-natured nonmaterialistic “little hippie boy,” killed perhaps by police

200

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

as he wandered through the turmoil outside the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Another, “Sin City,” lampooned country’s sober religiosity (and the narcissism of a despised former manager) by painting almost cartoonish fundamentalist visions of an apocalypse in which the greedy avaricious city of Los Angeles succumbs to earthquake, mass insanity, raining fire, and impending doom. Gilded Palace of Sin acted, in the words of country-rock historian Peter Doggett, “as a Gothic critique of the city which gave it birth.”62 By sporting embroidered cannabis leaves, praising hippies, and singing openly of avoiding the draft, the Burrito Brothers seemed to assume the very stance that “Okie”’s dominant readings railed against, despite the esteem which Hillman and Parsons held for Haggard and the region’s country music heritage, and despite the stories that Haggard had considered serving as producer on the Burrito album. Perhaps the only overt areas of agreement between Okie from Muskogee and Gilded Palace of Sin were a shared economic populism and a shared criticism of the city. But even in these there were differences. For the Burritos, carping on L.A. as “Sin City” was a way to critique exploitive easy-payment schemes, ruthless capitalism (a town that “will swallow you in / if you have some money to burn”), and the insiderism of the entertainment industry (i.e., a “gold plated” palisade as an industry office door and stingy gatekeepers in “green mohair suits”). Parsons, who had left the Byrds partly because he objected to the band’s plans to tour apartheid South Africa, even nodded toward racial harmony in Gilded Palace, by converting soul classics such as Aretha Franklin’s “Do Right Woman” and James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street” into effective honky-tonk ballads.63 Haggard’s Okie, on the other hand, appeared to pit a dystopian urban culture—signified by the counterculture, liberal politics, and black protest—against the purported good life of “Muskogee,” imagined as a virtuous ordered working-class utopia in a predominately white, agrarian, and conservative Okie homeland.64 Other rock and country-rock bands followed the Burritos’ cue by attaching new lyrics and parodying “Okie from Muskogee” during performances or playing the song sarcastically straight as a tongue-in-cheek rouse. Originally from the Bay Area, the longhaired country-rock band Commander Cody and His Lost Pilot Airmen were, in 1970, among the first. Cody and the Airmen not only reconfigured the song’s Okie narrator as a countercultural dropout but also ridiculed the original’s puritanism by mocking Haggard’s quaint references to “pitchin’ woo” and distaste for the free-love arrangements of the hippies. Instead they offered more shockingly sexist fare about how difficult it was to be a hippie from Mississippi: “We

Fightin’ Sides / 201 still flash the peace sign to the truckers on the highway / And a gang bang’s still the greatest thrill of all.” By mid-decade, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, a half-serious, half-novelty, mixed-race country act known for wry social commentary and a mocking ethnocentrism, came out with a parody aimed at a Texas hometown. In it, the singer proclaimed that his neighbors neither participated in love-ins, watched pornographic films, nor swapped their spouses with the neighbors. Friedman’s chorus was instructive: “I’m proud to be an asshole from El Paso.” Fans who linked themselves with the counterculture also found irony an effective tool in remaking the song. Woody’s son, psychedelic folk-rocker Arlo Guthrie, placed the song’s original words in a new, more incongruous context when he opened a 1970s concert at the Hollywood Bowl with an unmodified version of “Okie,” to the delight of his longhaired, hippieish fans. So many country, rock, and country-rock groups rereleased versions of “Okie” that Rolling Stone writer Charlie Burton kept a running tally. By March 1971, the song had been recorded 20 times: “Honkies, 12, hippies, 8.”65 Some have suggested that the propensity to read, reread, and concoct parodies out of “Okie from Muskogee” was an outgrowth of Haggard’s relative silence about his politics or his contradictory explanations of the song’s origins and meaning. When initially released, many were not quite sure whether the song was to be taken literally. Even scholars were a bit perplexed. Folklorist Archie Green’s notes from late 1969 suggest he originally interpreted the song as “a negative postulate,” in which the meaning was inverted from its actual intention. “Okie” may have actually been an antiwar song that mocked small-town hawks, Green’s notes suggest, but like “Yankee Doodle” a British parody of the American revolutionary army, the song was reinterpreted as a positive, and in this case pro-war, message. Along the same lines, reviewers of early performances often observed subtle hints that suggested the song was something of a lark. Typical of these was a Variety review of a Reno, Nevada, concert that held that the song was “delivered with a barely perceptible tongue in cheek.”66 Although Haggard’s earliest media interviews seemed to suggest that he meant the song be read literally, many took his stage demeanor and his personal marijuana use as indications that he did not offer the song as a personal creed. Paul Hemphill observed in 1971: “Haggard and his strangers have modishly long hair (‘I think it’s all right as long as there isn’t nothing growing in it’) and when they come to the line in ‘Okie,’ Haggard usually does a double take over his shoulder at mop-headed guitarist Bobby Wayne.” Twelve years later when singing the same line, Haggard poked fun at fellow “outlaw” performers Johnny Paycheck and Willie Nelson while

202

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

the pair provided harmony for a live concert recording of “Okie.” “As Haggard launched into the verse beginning ‘We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy,’ he rolled his eyes in mock disgust at Paycheck, whose greasy locks hang past his shoulders, and at Nelson, whose braid is now longer than Bo Derek’s,” reported Quarter-Notes magazine.67 Perhaps more important, many were privy to the fact that Haggard had used marijuana. “Son,” he told a reporter in Michigan in 1974, “the only place I don’t smoke is in Muskogee.”68 Some twenty years later, Haggard’s criticism of the drug seemed even less credible. Haggard appeared on the cover of Hemp Times in 1997 (figure 8) to support legally restricted lowTHC hemp as an environmentally friendly replacement crop for financially strapped cotton and tobacco farmers seeking to produce durable fibers for textile production. The performer most associated in the public mind with the line “We don’t smoke marijuana” had now come full circle to grace the front of a magazine that advertised products with names like Grassworks, Body Dope, and Manastash.69 Although the hippieish rockers were the most likely to publicly mock the hawkish and even paranoid sensibilities that could be read in the song, more traditional fans of country music were among those who criticized the Vietnam War. Before the magazine California Country shifted ownership in late 1969, it ran criticism of the war and stateside social problems alongside a monthly column honoring returning vets. In her August–September column, Jerri Blake attacked Nixon by calling him “Tricky Dick” and writing that he was “more concerned with good press” than ending the war and eliminating poverty. A month earlier, she had complained that Beverly Hills residents were oblivious to the poor, suggesting they switch places temporarily with those in Watts. “Let them live each others’ lives for a week and see if anything changes,” she wrote. “A program like this would make more sense to me than a slew of $25 a plate ‘charity’ dinners.” Blake even linked her idea to a country song—Bill Anderson’s “Get a Little Dirt on Your Hands.” Although coverage of country-rock’s “Cosmic Cowboys” was rare, California Country occasionally ran news about their affairs. By December, however, the paper was acquired by a new owner. Blake’s column stopped appearing, country-rockers all but disappeared, and a new icon featuring an American flag and the slogan “america—love it . . . or leave it!” became a regular addition to the tabloid-style fan periodical.70 Although many in the country-rock scene and the wider counterculture lauded Haggard’s early portraits of poverty and prison inmates, most were stunned when “Okie” first hit the airwaves. Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird

Fightin’ Sides / 203

figure 8. A long way from his “Okie from Muskogee” days, Merle Haggard appeared on the April–May 1997 cover of Hemp Times to promote hemp as an alternative crop for struggling tobacco growers. Reprinted by permission of High Times magazine. Photograph by Malcolm MacKinnon.

summed up the dismay of many when it argued, “Somewhere some night, some guys are going to sit around in a tavern, prime themselves with beer, ‘Okie’ and ‘Fightin’ Side’ and go out and get some hippies.”71 For the most part, the reaction among the counterculture was tempered. Some even hoped for conciliation. As Bernie Leadon, a onetime Burrito who helped found the Eagles, perhaps the most successful local country-rock band, put it, “Merle ticked us off extremely when he did ‘Okie.’ But we forgave him for that.”72 Nashville folkies such as Kris Kristofferson, a former Texan who had once attended college in Southern California, also did not want to throw Haggard out with the bathwater. “To brand him for those songs [“Okie” and “Fightin’ Side”] is wrong, man, because he’s writing some of the best folk

204

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

songs that’s ever been written,” Kristofferson told the Atlantic Monthly in 1971. Kristofferson suggested Haggard produce a new album based on The Grapes of Wrath. “That’d bring ’em back to roost.”73 Such tolerance was not always reciprocated by radio industry insiders and mainstream country opinion leaders, reflecting the overall clash of generations and cultures that was beginning to mark discussions of country and country-rock. When the Byrds traveled to the Ryman Auditorium to perform on The Grand Ole Opry, the powerful Nashville disc jockey Ralph Emery lambasted them on the air, arguing their presence desecrated a sacred country music icon. The Byrds retaliated by lampooning Emery as a Ku Klux Klan member in the track “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man.” Bruce Morrow, a pop disc jockey who also sat on the Nixon administration’s drug policy panel, pronounced judgment on the entire rock field, claiming in almost Manichean terms that country was “clean” and rock was “dirty.” “On the one side we have country music that preaches purity, love of country and the flag,” wrote California Country summing up Morrow’s argument. “On the other we have rock musicians telling fans all about the glories of LSD and other assorted mind blowers.” The piece acknowledged country’s purportedly morally deteriorating “‘lush’ and ‘cheating’ types of songs,” but argued rather disingenuously that both were “rapidly diminishing.”74 Trying to maintain appeal across deep generational and political gaps, Haggard avoided such pronouncements and began expressing misgivings about the song’s tendency to brand him as a reactionary. “Boy, I tell you, I didn’t realize how strong some people felt about those things,” Haggard told one journalist. Time noted in 1974 that “Okie” made Haggard rich, something he did not “seem to mind,” but it “also earned him a reputation as a spokesman for the right wing, which he did.” The song, Haggard later confided, “made me appear to be a person who was a lot more narrow-minded, possibly, than I really am.”75 Haggard also began to publicly express doubts about the war and make amends to younger listeners turned off by the dominant interpretation of the song. During his 1971 Atlantic Monthly interview, Haggard chastised his hawkish manager Fuzzy Owen: “‘Fella here’—nodding toward somebody [else] at the table—‘says he’s got about thirty books on Vietnam, and he’s been there, and says all that stuff might not be right.’” When Owen, a Korean War veteran, pressed Haggard about what he thought, Haggard responded, “Tell you the truth, Fuzz, I don’t know.” After being collared by angry college students while on tour a year later, Haggard tried to quell some of their outrage with the release of “Farmer’s Daughter,” a song about a curmudgeonly older farmer who slowly and lovingly grows to accept his

Fightin’ Sides / 205 daughter’s marriage to a city boy with “hair a little longer than we’re used to.”76 Haggard’s public comments and songwriting also began to emphasize a populistic critique of the right. A self-proclaimed critic of both the Democratic and Republican parties, Haggard painted a harsh portrait of Nixon in his autobiography, impugning the president’s entourage for failing to applaud or even acknowledge him until his fourth number during a private 1970 concert at the White House. “I felt like I was coming out for hand-tohand combat with the enemy,” he wrote. “The least I thought he could do, on behalf of simple politeness, was lead his flock of sheep in some hint of appreciation.” In a later composition, Haggard stated flat out that “Nixon lied to us all on TV.”77 Countercultural youths were not willing to write off the performer solely on account of “Okie,” because Haggard seemed to champion issues that many rock enthusiasts held dear. While on the surface “Okie” might be read as supporting a certain brand of militarism inimical to the general pacifism of the era’s rock culture, other compositions made country rockers willing, as Leadon suggested, to forgive him or simply look the other way. Although later Haggard songs could assert a conservative-populist whiteness that hinted or suggested that welfare recipients were monolithically lazy or had minority backgrounds (for example, “I’m a White Boy”), Haggard was also one of the first, if not the first, major country artist to record a song promoting tolerance of black-white intermarriage. Haggard, in fact, initially hoped to pair the “Okie from Muskogee” single with “Irma Jackson,” a song he wrote after viewing Sidney Poitier’s groundbreaking 1967 interracial romance film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Perhaps one of the most sensitive and carefully crafted country songs on the subject, “Irma Jackson” celebrated a love affair between two young people of different races and bemoaned social proscriptions that kept them apart. Although trysts between white men and Latina, Asian, and Native American women had become common fodder for country music by the early 1970s, Haggard’s contribution avoided the exoticization of the Other that was often apparent in such songs. Although the title hints that the woman is African American and the song is told from a male point of view, the lyrics do not explain whether it actually is the man or the woman who is black.78 Despite such good intentions, “Irma” never became “Okie”’s B side. Capitol held up the song’s release, believing that it would be detrimental to Haggard’s image and radio play, especially in the conservative South. Finally released on 1972’s Let Me Tell You about a Song, “Irma” was prefaced by a short spoken explanation: “Of all the songs I’ve written, this may be

206

/ Rhinestones and Ranch Homes

my favorite because it tells it like it is.”79 Haggard’s stand on “Irma” was not an isolated incident. Immediately after “Okie” gained national attention, the segregationist George Wallace, who had begun using country music in the political arena, invited Haggard to perform during his Alabama gubernatorial campaign with country performers Hank Snow and Marty Robbins. Haggard turned him down. Rock outfits such as Rolling Stone noted his stand approvingly: “ ‘Okie’ notwithstanding, Haggard is no racist cracker spewing Johnny Reb songs for the segs. Shy and sometimes brooding, he comes across as being tolerant of other men’s freedom—a value of far greater significance to him than color.”80 Ultimately researchers will remain intrigued by issues such as Haggard’s original intent in the song, the possibility that he may have changed his mind about the war, and the probability that he concealed his true intentions or shaped his responses to interview questions according to audience in an effort to sell more records. But what should matter most to researchers of migrant identity and country music cultural politics is not Haggard’s vision but who the song reached and what effect it had on them. Most of Haggard’s audience listened over country radio and heard about him through the conventional promotional institutions. Such listeners were undoubtedly familiar with successful songs such as “Okie” and “Fightin’ Side”—the latter spent more than three weeks at the top of the charts—and would have been exposed over the radio to the ACWM’s jingoistic rhetoric. Fewer listeners had access to songs such as “Irma Jackson,” which failed to get the same kind of backing from the wider industry and were only available on albums. Although country-rock audiences and bands and the migrants familiar with Haggard’s earlier numbers could rearticulate and reimagine the song in oppositional or alternative ways, their readings and reshapings could not compete with a whole country music broadcasting-recording-publicity machine posed to support the dominant interpretation. By sheer volume alone, the industry had already won the battle over public memory. Though critically acclaimed, lauded by the likes of the Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, and later celebrated as a central founding document of the California country-rock style, the Flying Burritos album featuring the “My Uncle” sold forty thousand copies, peaking at only no. 164 on the Billboard charts, while Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” a product consistently promoted by the production, distribution, and publicity sectors of the country music industry, dominated the country charts, sold well over a million, and would appear in different versions on other top-selling Haggard albums for years. One must conclude that it was the marketing and distribution system of the music industry, and not necessarily always the musicians or the fans, that

Fightin’ Sides / 207 supported messages advocating the nation’s continuing military involvement in Southeast Asia.81 Nevertheless, in this day when Beltway pundits would divide the nation into fictive Red and Blue Americas, it must be understood that the cultural politics of Haggard’s career and the proclivities of his listeners since “Okie” are not so neatly organized. Haggard did not initiate the turn to the right within Southern California country. Though he profited from the New Right’s growing power and unknowingly contributed to the erasure of earlier configurations of Okie identity, he was ambivalent about supporting any single political stance or entity from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, probably making his most consistent stand as a supporter of small farmers and as an environmentalist.82 Most of this time, he subscribed to an amorphous form of populism, critical of elites but wavering between targets favored by the Left and Right. Despite Haggard’s occasional antiwelfare rhetoric, his more recent attacks on flag burners and officials who would deny housing to the homeless suggest that this son of the Dust Bowl never strayed too far from the superpatriotic everyman once idealized by New Deal populists and sentimentalized by Frank Capra and Jack Warner’s Hollywood.83 Even his views on music have been populistically inclined. In the years since “Okie,” Haggard has repeatedly used the press to criticize what he saw as the safe middlebrow country-pop approach of Nashville while using his concerts to break down the boundaries of contemporary country with crowd-pleasing country-hybrid experiments in Dixieland, 1960s jazz, and more recently, harder forms of jazz improvisation.84 Although today Haggard retains a smaller audience that is nevertheless composed of the Red-, Blue- (and even Purple-) minded, his populist expressions—linked to Okie pride and Depression nostalgia—have contributed to a certain sharp-edged style of star rhetoric that can be used effectively against those who would abuse office and power. One could argue that, without Haggard and “Okie”’s media-heightened, indeed hypermediated, mix of satire, political zeal, collective remorse, and entertainment, there would be no Springsteen, Gretchen Wilson, Toby Keith, or Dixie Chicks and, for that matter, no Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Keith Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly, or Michael Moore. Though the Okie pride phenomenon that Haggard helped spark in the 1970s never grew into a bona fide movement, and though tangible signs of a cultural Okieness have weakened substantially, Haggard’s antielitism, his kudos to jazz and interracial relationships, and his recent recordings on a Los Angeles punk label, continue to oppugn the potential narrowness of the country field.

Reprise: Dueling Populisms The Okie Legacy in National and Regional Country Music

In the years following “Okie from Muskogee,” Southern California remained influential in the world of country music, but more as a site for consumption than one of production. In the mid-1970s Capitol Records began conducting its country music studio sessions in Nashville, a trend that finally became obvious in the 1990s when the West Coast giant, in a conspicuous, symbolic gesture, renamed its country music division Capitol Nashville.1 Also during the 1990s, as audiences aged and times changed, legendary country music nightspots such as Nashville West, the Palomino, and the Foothill Club fell victim to economics and closed their doors.2 Still, some commentators continued to consider Los Angeles the strongest retail market for country music in the nation, and country music continued to be an important part of the regional radio culture, broadcast over powerful FM stations owned by national media conglomerates such as Emmis Communications’ KZLA in Hollywood and the CBS Corporation’s KFRG in San Bernardino. But the recordings played on both stations were produced almost exclusively in Nashville.3 Cable and digital television also offered Angelenos a new medium for country spectatorship: the Scripps Networks’ GAC channel (Great American Country); and Viacom’s more prominent CMT (Country Music Television) and VH1 Country channels. But these corporate subsidiaries were headquartered outside of Los Angeles, the first two in Nashville and the latter in New York.4 One area where local country’s legacy still figured predominately was the Southern California rock world. In the 1970s, English rock chronicler Peter Frame went so far as to draw up a genealogical chart showing personnel connections between the Byrds, Burritos, and their ilk and hit makers such as the Eagles and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, omitting, however, important country-rock women such as Gram Parsons’s duet partner Emmylou 208

Reprise / 209 Harris.5 The Eagles, a band deeply indebted to the Parsons-Chris HillmanBurrito tradition, was perhaps the most illustrious example of the influence Los Angeles country was beginning to have on rock. Led by a singersongwriter transplant from Texas, the Eagles introduced the country-rock subgenre to millions of fans with their multiplatinum 1977 album Hotel California, and their later retrospective collection, The Eagles: Their Greatest Hits, 1971–1975, narrowly beat out Michael Jackson’s Thriller as the best-selling album in twentieth-century America.6 The Eagles, however, were only one of a number of folk- and country-flavored acts, ranging from Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, who adopted Los Angeles as a home base. Settling in the city’s rustic high-priced foothills, these wealthy country-influenced rock stars constituted what Barney Hoskyns later described as a “new Laurel Canyon aristocracy.”7 Surges of country influence also later found their way into the region’s famed punk and indie rock scenes. Blending country, hardcore, and punk, the so-called cowpunk bands of the 1980s, such as the Beat Farmers, Rank & File, and Lone Justice, as well as punk and rock bands with some country influences, such as X and Social Distortion, and a whole host of neorockabilly performers ranging from the Blasters and Los Lobos to Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, participated in covering classic country songs and performing their own Okie-influenced honky-tonk numbers.8 Southern plains rhythms still occasionally showed up in unusual places too, such as the steel guitar whine of a recent sample-laden hip-hop-influenced album put out by Los Angeles funk-rock performer Beck.9 Local production of mainstream country music, on the other hand, has been increasingly pushed to the margins. Some survivors have persisted, but even these have kept their distance from the Nashville-dominated hot country and country Top 40 markets, often considered too traditional or not traditional enough for FM radio success. Gram Parsons—whose fate, Manuel Cuevas swears, Parsons had sewn into a hypodermic- and flameadorned Nudie suit—died of a drug and alcohol overdose in 1973, his body bizarrely kidnapped and cremated in the desert near Joshua Tree National Monument. Parsons, belatedly acknowledged as the unofficial godfather of Southern California country-rock, has become “exponentially more popular and influential in death than in life.”10 Band mate Chris Hillman, however, went on to gain some recognition among bluegrass and mainstream country fans in the late 1980s with his well-received Desert Rose Band.11 Other country and country-folk artists influenced by the Hillman-ParsonsHarris sound, such as Lucinda Williams and Rosie Flores, spent years in Los Angeles before finally heading to Nashville.12

210

/ Reprise

The region also attracted some notable and commercially successful iconoclasts, such as Dwight Yoakam and Canadian honky-tonk torch songstress k.d. lang, both of whom appear to reside primarily in the area. Scoring a number one spot with the 1986 album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., the Bakersfield-influenced Yoakam has continued to produce high-octane honky-tonk and rockabilly hits, becoming, as Jonny Whiteside has noted, “the only post-Haggard California-based performer to sustain national success.”13 Influenced by Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris, and others, lang gained national visibility in the late 1980s but found more formidable obstacles in reconciling her gender-bending, lesbianism, and animal rights activism with the expectations of conservative country radio programmers.14 The region also produced influential neotraditionalists such as Iris DeMent, originally from Buena Park, and Gary Allan, raised in La Mirada, both of whom succeeded in mainstream national markets despite their challenges to Music Row’s country-pop and “hot country” orthodoxy. But neither DeMent nor Allan continued to call Southern California home.15 Although some talented but lesser-known groups such as the Burritosinfluenced alternative country band Beachwood Sparks managed to find a niche, live performance in the area continued to encounter difficulties, becoming a ghost of what it had been.16 Surveying the local scene in 2000, ethnomusicologist Amy Corin found several line-dancing venues, a “funkybut-hip alternative-country club in the Heart of Hollywood,” and a country nightclub in exurban Chatsworth with a tightly controlled, Top 40 coverband atmosphere. One might add to this list a cowboy-themed dance and music club in San Dimas, as well as a Mexican restaurant in Glendale and a Culver City tavern that both occasionally featured live country bands. One bright spot among the sometimes meager offerings has been Ronnie Mack’s Barn Dance, which held court in a Hollywood rock club when Corin surveyed the scene in 2000. Hosted by veteran performer Ronnie Mack, the weekly show provided a live performance option to rockabilly and roots performers while offering some exposure through AM radio and Internet broadcasts.17 Nevertheless, with the opening of Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace museum and live performance venue in 1996, Bakersfield may ultimately prove better suited than Los Angeles to hatching new artists. While local recording and live performance has ebbed, women’s visibility as consumers and listeners has increased significantly. Women were a major force all along, constituting a majority of the Woody and Lefty Lou audience in the late 1930s and more than three-quarters of KBBQ’s daytime audience in the late 1960s.18 But only recently have the captains of local radio begun to take women seriously. In a 2002 Los Angeles Times article,

Reprise / 211 no less than the programming director of KZLA, the region’s flagship country station, admitted that today’s target listener is a middle-class, middleincome woman in her twenties, thirties, or forties. In the same article, Grant Alden, editor of alternative country’s influential No Depression magazine, derided such developments as an effort to divorce country from its hardscrabble origins: “Country music now, I suppose, is the music of the suburbs. It used to be blue-collar. Clearly country music doesn’t want a working-class audience.”19 Although correct in noticing contemporary country’s disconnect with the genre’s traditional economic populism and focus on blue-collar life, Alden’s comment glosses over the fact that the suburban realignment dates back to the 1950s. Furthermore, the increasing prominence of women audiences in Los Angeles and other major markets has helped foster the more recent feminist leanings of Nashville icons Shania Twain, Martina McBride, Gretchen Wilson, and the Dixie Chicks, developments that even his magazine’s readers appear to find compelling.20 Indeed this feminization of the listenership and the introduction of feminist themes has coincided with other forms of liberation locally, notably the emergence of two gay and lesbian country music and dance nightclubs and a gay clogging group that Amy Corin noticed in her 2000 study, as well as k.d. lang’s now largely aborted struggle to frame her outspokenness and gender-bending as a natural outgrowth of hard country’s male outlaw tradition.21

making the eagle scream: the post-9/11 world and the national legacies of okie populism So what of Okie country music’s importance in maintaining Okie identity and fomenting populist dissent? To one who surveyed the national scene, especially in the wake of September 11, the Iraq war, and the Dixie Chicks uproar, it seemed that the hawkish conservative-populism of Ritter and the 1960s-era Academy of Country and Western Music had come to dominate Nashville and the field. In some ways, recent manifestations of country populism called to mind the profit-oriented World War I–era jingoism John Dos Passos described in his acclaimed 1930 novel The 42nd Parallel. Swept up in the fight to save Wilsonian democracy and the Morgan trust, Dos Passos argued, large sections of the American public began to embrace Napoleonic and tsarist fantasies about empire. The first attacks were leveled at the immigrant and left-wing elements who had opposed the war, but soon, “at American legion posts and business men’s luncheons” across the land, it be-

212

/ Reprise

came “worth money to make the eagle scream.”22 Although comparisons between the Wilsonian New Democracy of Dos Passos’s day and the contemporary neoconservative Bush Doctrine of preemptive war may be debated by foreign policy scholars, it is quite clear that the post-9/11 country music industry realized there was money to be made in making the eagle scream. Although overt references to Okie identity in country music largely dissipated in the 1970s, some observers have connected the spate of eaglescreaming ballads about the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Haggard’s late-1960s configuration of migrant identity in “Okie from Muskogee.” In 2003, Darryl Worley, a performer who openly backed George W. Bush, had a hit with “Have You Forgotten?” a song that seemed to suggest that a failure to support the Bush administration was tantamount to overlooking the devastation of the 9/11 attacks—a strange claim considering that New York and Washington, the two metropolitan vicinities actually affected by the tragedy, voted overwhelming against Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections.23 Worley even found himself clutching for the language of an earlier era, using the Nixonian phrase silent majority in a 2004 interview when referring approvingly to the conservative-populist jingoistic grasp over country radio.24 Though less tied to the Bush administration, country hit maker Clint Black recorded his own flag-waver in 2003, “Iraq and Roll,” a song that drools over a cornucopia of high-tech weapons and takes populist jabs at purportedly anti-American U.S. war protesters, claiming the invasion of Iraq was an act of defense against an immediate threat— an assertion the administration itself has come to discount as I write.25 Part populist attack on elite intellectuals and purportedly leftish urban dissenters, these songs were also part establishmentarian, seeking to uphold and champion an entrenched center of power as closely connected to corporate boardrooms and extravagantly funded neoconservative think tanks as its liberal opponents were purportedly connected to entertainment figures, free-thinking academics, and trial lawyers. But if there were a poster boy for this new wave of conservative-populist hawkishness, Toby Keith would probably be it. A former oil worker and semipro football player who continued to live in Oklahoma, Keith had several Top 10 singles in the 1990s, but his career reached a new pinnacle in summer 2002 with the release of Unleashed, an album featuring the revenge-themed hit “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American).” Celebrating a massive retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan (“Man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July”) and threatening more, the song garnered unprecedented publicity when ABC refused to let Keith

Reprise / 213 perform it during an Independence Day special. Media buzz over the ABC controversy, listener enthusiasm, and corporate radio support kept Unleashed at the top of the country charts for over a year.26 Like Ritter’s “God Bless America Again,” Keith’s “Courtesy” featured traditional and newly created anthropomorphized symbols of American identity. In the song, walking, talking versions of Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, and “Mother Freedom” shake their fists and threaten more firepower. “Courtesy” elicited praise and controversy, quickly nudging Keith and the chief country dove Natalie Maines into a verbal feud worthy of gangsta rap. Maines bemoaned that Keith made country sound “ignorant” and insulted him with an “F.U.T.K.” T-shirt, while Keith attacked her songwriting ability, allowed fans to brand her “anti-American” on his Web site, and briefly displayed a doctored image of her cavorting with Saddam Hussein for laughs during stops on his tour. Armed on stage with his American flag-emblazoned electric guitar (a nod to Okie singer-songwriter Buck Owens’s trademark red, white, and blue acoustic?), Keith followed up with a second nationalistic album, Shock’n Y’all, a thinly veiled reference to Bush’s “shock and awe” rhetoric, that poured more fuel on the fire.27 Keith and Worley’s commercial successes eventually drew the inevitable comparisons to Merle Haggard and the “Okie from Muskogee” phenomenon. But even before September 11, the country press found similarities, noting that the overextended, underpaid modern-day factory worker of Keith’s 1998 “Tired” sounded like “the son of Merle Haggard’s construction crews and the grandson of Merle Travis’s coal miners.”28 After the release of “Have You Forgotten?” and “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” however, the Haggard comparisons came barreling in. The term Haggardesque was bandied about by several writers, especially the author Alanna Nash, who found the Worley album Have You Forgotten? to be the work of “a honky-tonk master very much in the vein of Merle Haggard— even if he lacks the Hag’s irony and understatement in matters of war.”29 Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman noted that in concert Keith had taken to playing Haggard’s “Fightin’ Side” before each performance of “Courtesy.”30 More significant however was the new version of Keith’s biography that appeared on the All Music Guide, an important online resource for fans and industry insiders. The revised biography led by assessing “Courtesy” as “one of the country’s most highly charged political statements since Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee.’”31 Though some industry leaders and observers were beginning to worry that country’s new, in-your-face patriotism and its sandbagging of strong female superstars like the Dixie Chicks hurt country records sales, which

214

/ Reprise

had plummeted by 2004, a few also began to express concern about the chilling effect all this flag-waving had on artistic freedom in Nashville.32 Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one prominent music executive told Newsweek in 2004 that many young country artists “are scared to death of saying anything that might sound the least bit liberal. There’s this fear that if you say anything, conservative radio companies like Clear Channel won’t play your records. It kind of reminds me of the McCarthy era.”33 Perhaps reneging on some of his earlier criticism of the Chicks, even the CMT.com editorial director Chet Flippo noted that the “country audience has always been intensely patriotic, but it didn’t refuse to listen to dissenting voices before. I think they were tolerated, and I think that tolerance is evaporating in society at large.”34 Facing a slightly different demographic, KZLA, Los Angeles’s flagship country station, was one of the few country stations nationwide that continued playing the Dixie Chicks. Listeners, many of them Republicans who disagreed with Maines’s comments, nevertheless protested against the idea of censoring any artist, noted Willman in his recent book Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. Playing it safe, the station nevertheless stuck to “fun, frothy oldies from the group’s baggage-free first two albums,” effectively limiting opportunities to question policy or tactics.35 Although the silencing of war critics and left-of-center opinion continued to worry some, several country artists, especially among an older generation, fought back by attempting to inject Nashville with what they saw as a necessary dose of liberal-populist dissent. Counted among the members of the Music Row Democrats, an organization first formed in 2003 to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, were Nanci Griffith, Pam Tillis, Emmylou Harris, and Raul Malo of the Mavericks. In an online Newsweek piece, the veteran songwriter and Music Row Democrats member Bobby Braddock even framed the group’s objectives in the New Deal–like language of patriotism, coalition building, and populist, antielitist, working-class dissent: “Democrats are just as patriotic as Republicans. The Democrats are the party of the middle class and the blue-collar people, while the Republicans are the party of big corporations. The MRD’s 500plus membership is a garden variety of all kinds of Democrats, including a few lefties and also some moderate conservatives who favor the war in Iraq.”36 There was even some evidence that a liberal country populism might be successful on the campaign trail. In 2001, Democratic campaigner Dave “Mudcat” Saunders used country music to help Democratic Virginia governor Mark Warner win rural votes and the election by recording a version

Reprise / 215 of “Dooley,” a moonshining song made familiar by the 1960s-era Southern California bluegrass band the Dillards on The Andy Griffith Show. Rewritten into an anthem touting Warner’s campaign, and recorded by Virginia’s own Bluegrass Boys, the song became popular, getting exposure on area bluegrass and country stations, local television, and CNN. “That song was a way of getting to rural culture,” Saunders told Newsweek of his success.37 Liberal and leftwing brands of populism were not absent from recent country recordings either. Most commentators who focused on the verbal gymnastics of the Dixie Chicks overlooked the antiwar tone of their 2002 “Travelin’ Soldier,” a song that subtly links current concerns about combat fatalities with the story of a young everywoman grieving her teenage beau, a serviceman killed in the Vietnam War.38 Less subtle were the political proclivities of Texas performer Steve Earle, a Gram Parsons fan who blended his characteristically edgy brand of country-rock with honky-tonk and postrockabilly in his 2004 album The Revolution Starts Now. One song on the compact disc reworked the traditional country music trucker song into a darkly comic populist critique of the Bush administration by portraying a cash-strapped blue-collar narrator who can make ends meet only by driving a big rig as a military contract driver amid the bombings and kidnappings of Iraq. Another song lamented that poor Palestinian youths and working-class teenage American soldiers are sent off to fight and die in their respective versions of “a rich man’s war.” The album even extended an olive branch to conservative listeners with Earle’s funny, though indelicate, love song to Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser.39 Although his politics are always difficult to pin down, Merle Haggard’s recent public statements suggest that even he may have been switching sides and standing up for what he believes in. Haggard’s larger worldview, which often appears to be at odds with what is considered fashionable among his generation, in fact seems to have moved in the opposite course of Autry, Rogers, and the conservative singing cowboys. Before 9/11, if Haggard took a stance, he was likely to criticize big agribusiness or appear at environmental rallies with the actor and activist Woody Harrelson.40 More recently, Haggard has not only defended the Dixie Chicks, but launched several populist-leaning volleys at the Bush administration, especially targeting the curtailment of speech and other freedoms that he argued occurred under John Ashcroft’s unpopular reign as attorney general. In November 2002, Haggard told one audience that the only good thing that comes out of war is the soldiers and sailors: “I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand [pause] right in the mouth. The way things are going I’ll probably be thrown in jail for saying that, so I hope y’all will bail me out.”41

216

/ Reprise

Haggard also broke ranks with anti-Chicks momentum by posting an editorial on his Web site that defended Maines while also embracing Keith on the grounds that dissent is the highest form of patriotism: “I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in the past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witchhunt and lynching.”42 Haggard’s assessments of the Maines controversy have been particularly astute in their analysis of the gender bias that appears to belie the media industry’s “shut up and sing” attitude toward war critics. “It seems to be more damaging to the females,” he told one reporter. “Seems like people don’t want them to say anything.”43 By 2004, Haggard seemed to have edged farther left, making full-fledged criticisms of Bush and the Iraq war in his appearances and recordings. “The only one who’s been damaged by the war is us,” he told an audience in Arkansas March 2004. “We need to get back some of arrogance like the president’s got.”44 In terms of his songwriting, Haggard has also expressed concerns about the war. His “That’s the News” on the 2003 compact disc Haggard Like Never Before took the media to task for burying the plight of the U.S. soldier under a barrage of celebrity news and for not questioning the administration’s illusory “Mission Accomplished” rhetoric upon the initial fall of Baghdad. Other songs on the album walked a fine line between pro-soldier flag-waving and populist criticism, saluting the sacrifices of servicemen in the bittersweet singsong of “Yellow Ribbons,” but also rehashing the antielitism of Woody Guthrie’s “Reno Blues” in a duet with Willie Nelson and warning of ominous government agents who seize outspoken “guitar-playing outlaws,” leaving them “spread eagle on the floor.”45 Still, Haggard is a hard one to peg. It is tempting to try to assign the present-day Haggard a genomelike chain of political labels—perhaps calling him an anti-imperialist, libertarian, Christian traditionalist; or perhaps a pro-hunting, hardcore environmentalist; or perhaps even a pro-soldier, First Amendment absolutist who favors economic nationalist trade policies and a strong military, as well as tying the national currency to metal, building New Deal–like employment programs, strengthening Social Security for the elderly, researching alternatives to oil, and providing assistance (but not necessarily handouts) for the homeless and veterans. There are certainly important liberal-populist tendencies here, but even they only go so far. A fan of Ronald Reagan’s governing style but not necessarily his politics and a personal friend of George H. W. Bush, Haggard warmed to neither George W. nor Democratic opponents Al Gore and John Kerry, telling one reporter

Reprise / 217 he felt “bumfuzzled” about deciding between the two parties’ selections in the 2004 election and another that he’d feel better if W.’s “daddy” were in charge right now.46 Haggard, for the record, told one reporter that he does not vote, having never picked up the habit again even after he was pardoned for his youthful felony.47 In late 2005, as I prepared this manuscript for print, Haggard had released a new album that harshly attacked the Bush administration on poverty and the war but seemed to applaud cultural conservatives’ efforts to introduce and preserve elements of religion in the public sphere. One track demanded that troops be pulled out of Iraq, the savings spent instead on rebuilding crumbling American roads and infrastructure, and another, “Where’s All the Freedom,” wondered whether returning soldiers would ever see any of the freedoms for which they had fought overseas, so quickly evaporating were these freedoms under the Patriot Act. In typical Haggard fashion, that song staked out a liberal or even leftist civil libertarian stance in bemoaning the war and police-state-like intrusions into personal life while also echoing conservative Christian thought by supporting the display of the Ten Commandments on public buildings and property.48 Though Haggard’s antiwar stance, Earle’s criticisms, and the Music Row Democrats’ activism might foreshadow future outgrowths of liberal populism in the genre, they do not make up for the fact that those on the conservative end of the spectrum, such as Toby Keith and Darryl Worley, have achieved far more exposure for their views. Worley has even acknowledged this in an interview with the Nashville Tennessean, noting that neither Haggard nor his fellow war critic Willie Nelson have broke through the charts with hits in recent years.49 But is the modern country music industry simply restaging an old drama? Are we simply reconfiguring the disputes of the Vietnam era by positing Keith and Worley in the limelight as the right-wing, rabblerousing “Merle Haggards.” and placing the antiwar artists such as Earle, the Dixie Chicks, and now even Haggard in underappreciated but critically acclaimed roles as today’s “Gram Parsons”? And what of the future? Perhaps radio programmers will give in to market forces, or perhaps back down somewhat, by allowing Earle and the Chicks to rejoin Worley and Keith on the air. Or perhaps the seemingly conservative “hot country” artists themselves will orchestrate a new direction. Though reveling in his stage persona as a diehard redneck, even Keith has indicated some change of heart by recording duets with doves Haggard and Nelson and admitting to the Tennessean that he is a “conservative Democrat” who has begun to have mixed feelings about the war.50 Only time will tell.

218

/ Reprise

ballads for the other los angeles? performer autonomy, economic populism, and social justice What history can tell us, however, is that Okie music and Okie culture have had a lasting effect on the social and racial climate of Southern California and the nation. The Los Angeles country music industry did not, as Adorno and his colleagues predicted for the entire pop music field, completely standardize cultural presentation, nor did it turn audiences into a passive listenership by depriving them of mentally stimulating phenomena and distracting them from real life social problems. During a significant period after country music’s start in Los Angeles, it served as canvas upon which working-class migrant performers and listeners could challenge political structures and gender roles, as well as remake themselves into members of a cosmopolitan, ethnically heterogeneous democracy of style. By the 1950s, significant external as well as internal changes within the industry began to push the music in a conservative-populist direction that tended to reflect a new suburban set of mores concerned with preserving property, claiming whiteness, and achieving status. Since then, the centralization of radio ownership into a few national media chains and the consolidation of much recording into the handful of firms on Nashville’s Music Row—which themselves are mostly owned by an small coterie of multinational media corporations based in Tokyo, London, and New York—have left listeners and performers less empowered, but not disempowered. As the rise of the country-rock counterculture and its eventual influence within the pop, country, and rock market suggests, the characteristics of capitalist agglomeration are anything but predictable, especially when it comes to issues of listener taste. Listeners can become producers and shapers of the culture by participating in fan magazines and producing their own music. It should be emphasized that the introduction of the star system, a phenomena that has overtaken nearly every form of commercial cultural production, has paradoxically also produced coteries of aspiring second- and third-tier artists such as Guthrie, Jean Shepard, Parsons, Earle, and now Haggard who themselves are simultaneously audiences, critics, and cultural shapers. This, however, should not be overstated. The commercial culture industry has repeatedly found ways of co-opting, changing, reincorporating, and even disarming liberal-populist ideological challenges. It was, after all, the Eagles’ largely apolitical Greatest Hits and not the Flying Burritos’ Gilded Palace that became the number one best-seller of the century, and it did so

Reprise / 219 only after the once-brazen subculture of country-rock had been safely absorbed into a larger, safer milieu of 1960s and 1970s nostalgia. The history of Okie identity within Southern California country music reflects these larger trends, but it has also been a powerful force in itself, producing notions of whiteness that have transcended recording industry trends and affected race relations in Los Angeles. During its early years in Southern California, country music encouraged liminal forms of whiteness as a response to the stereotyping migrants had endured. In this way, musicians encouraged the cross-fertilization of cultural ideas and began to suggest some kinship between themselves and certain oppressed racial and cultural minorities. Indeed, the history of Okieness in Los Angeles cannot be told without noting its relationship to the history of blackness or the histories of Native American, Asian American, and Mexican American identity. Changes brought by the cold war, however, dramatically transformed how migrants and migrant musicians asserted their identity. Once achieving some level of material comfort, many migrants found it easier to selfidentify with a middle-class suburban consumer culture. Migrant musicians and fans were encouraged to conceal themselves within a new, amorphous middle-class form of whiteness, rather than defend themselves and their social group. This new middle-class form was symbolized by the acquisition of consumer goods—ranging from scientific vitamins to cars and homes— as well as a move away from the more ethnically and culturally diverse inner tier neighborhoods. Only during the social disruption of the late 1960s did a substantial proportion of the populace even begin to question these norms. It was then that artists with a variety of political views and personal experiences began to take a second look at the groups left at the socioeconomic margins. Some responded by promoting forms of whiteness that ignored social realities or that borrowed from country music’s nativist and antistatist streaks to deliver attacks on minorities and the nation’s already weak social-security net (i.e., Haggard’s comments about inner-city turmoil and Hal Southern’s attacks on “cry-baby welfarism” and “minorities begging for a handout”). Others such as fan magazine writer Jerri Blake and performer Gram Parsons began to connect the powerless in real life with the fictive powerless that have always held a special place in country song. Parsons went only so far with his antiwar hippie heroes, his refusal to tour apartheid South Africa, and his musical homages to Aretha Franklin and James Carr. In suggesting that Beverly Hills residents switch places with those in Watts, Blake, on the other hand, proposed reviving something more revolutionary—an earlier

220

/ Reprise

form of liminal whiteness that, in Woody Guthrie’s vein, challenged audiences to imagine how they might bridge cultural gaps and overcome racial, ethnic, and class disparities. Such issues are especially pressing at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In 2000, researchers from the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy argued that 72 percent of the students attending classes in the Los Angeles Unified School District came from families who lived in poverty.51 That same year the alliance released The Other Los Angeles: The Working Poor in the City of the 21st Century, a scathing fifty-seven-page report which concluded that one in four workers in the city had fallen into the ranks of the working poor, those who work but don’t make enough to transcend eligibility requirements for government assistance, because of factors such as economic globalization and transformations in the local marketplace. According to the report, only about half the Angelenos of working age had employer-based health insurance. The report confirmed growing levels of poverty among Latino and Asian immigrants, but also noted an expansion of black, white, and Mexican American poor. While African American workers had found some success in moving into slightly higher paying jobs, Latinos and Asians, groups that included large numbers of immigrants, saw a 52 percent increase between 1990 and 1999 in those working full-time but unable to meet basic needs for themselves and their families. While the percentage of whites among the working poor remained comparatively small, more 140,000 still remained among the ranks of the employed poor. Women workers were disproportionately more likely to be among the poor, no matter what nationality or ethnicity.52 While country music and Okie identity have been used at times to stigmatize minority racial and cultural groups, they paradoxically also provide a powerful counternarrative for building bridges and addressing the kinds of issues raised by The Other Los Angeles. At the height of a wave of antiimmigrant hysteria in the early 1990s, for instance, Lisa A. Lawson, a member of the L.A. County Commission on Women, wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times comparing the Okie migrants of the 1930s to the more recent Latino and Asian immigrants. “Like many of California’s new immigrants of the last decade, the Okies came to California in response to desperate times and economic deprivation,” she wrote. “They came vulnerable and disoriented. They were vilified, socially rejected and economically exploited.” Lawson went on to compare present-day exclusionary movements to the those that vilified the Okies and to suggest that the new Asian and Latino immigrants, like the Dust Bowl exiles, were “ambitious and hard

Reprise / 221 working” newcomers who would help ensure the future prosperity of the state.53 Precedents for this kind of reframing of Okie identity even exist in the California country canon. In 1978, “The Immigrant,” a somewhat obscure B side of the Haggard album I’m Always on a Mountain When I Fall, criticized the exploitation of Mexican immigrant fieldworkers in California and the seemingly senseless cycle of deportation and return they face. Mexican immigrants, the song claimed, were helping the United States prosper and yet were treated abysmally: “This ‘Good Neighbor’ takes all his labor / And chases him back over the border again.”54 Dismissing the usual claims that immigrant workers contribute little to American society, the Haggard composition acknowledged that immigrants were “helping America grow.” Haggard’s rendering of this cyclical pattern of migration and resulting economic exploitation corresponds with contemporary scholarly interpretations.55 Haggard even attacked the role whiteness played in the exploitation, identifying a “smart aleck gringo” who speaks in legalese as the villain of the song.56 Songs such as “The Immigrant,” as well as Southern California country music’s even richer tradition of probing the distress of the scorned Okie outsider, pose new possibilities for highlighting and perhaps even alleviating the region’s growing disparities. Dwight Yoakam’s suggestion that the cultural ethnicity of country music is the Grapes of Wrath culture, and that country is most eloquent when it speaks about the uneasiness and insecurity of the poor, might be applied to more recent transnational migrations. While country music as a format still dominates numerically among stations nationwide, recently declining ratings in certain markets suggest that country music might increase its own prospects by reviving a Guthrieesque economic populism and aspects of the hybrid culture that once swept Southern California dance halls. It might also expand by making a special pitch to its growing listener base among immigrant Asians, Latinos, and other minority groups, especially as more of the nation’s demography comes to resemble that of multiethnic twenty-first-century Los Angeles.57 Such changes might even prove profitable for the country music industry. Don Cusic notes that CMT has already built up an audience base in Latin America. And Latino performers, especially those who are bilingual, such as Grammy award winner Rick Treviño, have proved lucrative investments for labels in recent decades, particularly with the growing demand in the United States for Mexican American tejano music and rural-themed Mexican sounds such banda and the narcocorrido.58 Mike Dungan, chief ex-

222

/ Reprise

ecutive of Capitol Nashville and president of the CMA, goes so far as to say that Nashville now needs someone with the ability to reach across cultural barriers. “All we need is a hero, somebody the Hispanic community would relate to and who wants to play country music and get a song on country radio,” he recently told Reuters. “We know that there exist Hispanic fans of country music. We see them at our shows. I believe that a bona fide star that comes from this community could have a huge career.”59 By reaching such audiences and bridging gaps between cultural and economic groups, Southern California’s refugee-outcast tradition might be a powerful tool for highlighting and even combating poverty and political marginalization.

Notes

abbreviations ACWM AFRS

CFCH CMFL EPIC GLC

HC IOH JEMFQ RRP

SFC

Academy of Country and Western Music (now the Academy of Country Music) Armed Forces Radio Service Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee End Poverty In California (1930s political movement) Gilbert Louey Country Music Collection, Division of Cultural History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington: I viewed photocopies of this collection in the possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 223

224

/ Notes to Pages 1–2

WGFA WGM

Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, New York Woody Guthrie Manuscripts, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

introduction 1. Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, telephone interviews by author, 11 November 1999 and 2 February 2001, Carson City, Nevada; Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, field notes, 14 June to 18 June 1968, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter RRP). Sources for the Woody and Lefty Lou radio program include Woody Guthrie and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection of Old Time Hill Country Songs: Being Sung for Ages, Still Going Strong (Gardena, Calif.: Spanish American Institute Press, 1937); Woody Guthrie, “The Songs of Woody Guthrie,” ca. 1937–1940, 200-page folder, carbon copy of typescripts, 17, 197, in box 2, Writings, Woody Guthrie Manuscripts, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter WGM); Woody Guthrie, “Original Songs,” hand and typescript songbook pages, 23 February 1939, notebook 1, folder 4, Woody Guthrie Archives, Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, New York; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, RRP; and “Hillbillies Like Broadcastin’ Better ’n Stayin’ on the Farm,” Billboard, 21 December 1940, p. 6. 2. Quote from Woody Guthrie, letter to Alan Lomax, 15 February 1941, Los Angeles, in box 1, Letters, WGM. Also see Woody Guthrie, $30 Wood Help! (Los Angeles: Self-published pamphlet, 1939), Woody Guthrie Papers, Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 3. See “Thirty Bucks Wood Help,” Hollywood Tribune, 24 July 1939: and Woody Guthrie, “Dustbowl Refugees,” in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM. This phenomenon will be discussed in further detail in chapter 2. 4. See Robert Santelli, “Beyond Folk: Woody Guthrie’s Impact on Rock and Roll,” and other contributions in Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, ed. Santelli and Emily Davidson (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). 5. Robert Hilburn, “Haggard Acclaimed in Anaheim,” Los Angeles Times, 22 March 1971, sec. D, p. 1. 6. Jean Lekrone, “Los Angeles Scene,” California Country 4 , no. 6 (December 1969): 3. 7. Hal Southern, “Mom, Apple Pie, the Bible, and the Flag,” California Country 5, no. 1 (June 1970): 35. 8. Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, conversation with author at the opening of This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a traveling

Notes to Pages 2–4

/ 225

Smithsonian-sponsored exhibit at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles, June 1999. 9. “California’s White Man Blues,” Rolling Stone 36 (28 June 1969): 28. 10. Richard A. Viguerie and David Franke, “Alternative Media: The Big Winners,” Washington Post, 24 October 2004; Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 6. By the 1970s, not only did country music performers identify with workingclass backgrounds, but their audience was predominantly white and working class, earning five thousand to fifteen thousand dollars a year and generally represented in lower-prestige occupations (unskilled, service, and blue-collar semiskilled and skilled occupations) compared to the more affluent listeners of radio stations playing music other than country. Richard A. Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, “From Region to Class: The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis,” Social Forces 53 (March 1975): 501. 11. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 61–109; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). See also Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the WorkingClass Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 12. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994). 13. Lipsitz, Possessive Investment; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; Larry May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 14. Okie foodways are significant in the work of the California poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Known as the “Okie poet laureate,” McDaniel has also been dubbed the “Biscuit and Gravy Poet” on account of her acclaimed poem “Gravy Says a Lot.” See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (London: Verso, 1997), 219–24; and William Lockwood, “Present Trends in Western Poetry,” in A Literary History of the American West, ed. Thomas J. Lyon (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1986), 1202–32, also found at www2.tcu.edu/depts/prs/amwest/html/wl1202.html, accessed on 1 July

226

/ Notes to Pages 5–6

2006. On Okie religion, see James N. Gregory, “Special to God,” chapter 7 of American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 191–221; and Eldon G. Ernst, with Douglas Firth Anderson, Pilgrim Progress: The Protestant Experience in California (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Fithian Press, 1993), 93–95, 101–102, 105–108. I use the phrase revivalistic Protestantism here to include members of Okiedominated Pentecostal, holiness, Baptist, fundamentalist, and evangelical churches. 15. My argument here builds on the outline offered by Gregory in American Exodus, chapter 8, “The Language of a Subculture,” and the biographical sketches and commentary offered by Gerald Haslam in Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), but I differ with the interpretations of Gregory and Haslam in key areas, as I discuss in this book. 16. Wording here stems from Avila’s insightful, original dissertation “Reinventing Los Angeles: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 31. To his credit, Avila has revised this argument significantly in his book version, Popular Culture, by reassessing the extent of contestation possible, but nevertheless he asserts that postwar popular culture remained “a highly contested terrain” (19). 17. Avila, Popular Culture, 19, 73–88, 113–44, 145–84. 18. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 399–410. 19. See Charles Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1997). 20. The two classic book-length treatments of the migration are Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973); and Gregory, American Exodus. Other important works include Dan Morgan’s journalistic saga, Rising in the West: The True Story of an ‘Okie’ Family in Search of the American Dream (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), and two books focusing on rural migrants: Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 21. On the Frankfurt School in Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 46–51. Also see Theodor W. Adorno’s wartime tract Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951; reprint, London, Verso, 1974). 22. My understanding of Los Angeles and its history of urban development after the crash is gleaned from my readings of William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Point Arena, Calif.: Solano Press Books, 1997); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992); Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; reprint, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1995); Arthur C. Verge, Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second

Notes to Page 7

/ 227

World War (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1993); Patricia Carr Bowie, “The Cultural History of Los Angeles, 1850–1967: From Rural Backwash to World Center” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1980); and the various books in Kevin Starr’s “Dreams” series by Oxford University Press. 23. Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues, 25–30, 40–41, 51–52. For detailed information on the Crockett Family, see John Harvey (“Dad”) Crockett Sr., interview by Gene Earle and Norm Cohen, tapescript, 7 January 1966, John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (hereafter JEMFQ) 1, no. 1 (n.d.): 2, 19–22. On McClintock, see Hal Rammel, Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 104–38; On the Hill Billies, see Ken Griffis, “The Beverly Hill Billies,” JEMFQ 57 (Spring 1980): 3–17; “KMPC Finds New Billy: Takes Hubert’s Place,” Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1930. 24. On blues, jazz, corridos, and Latin dance music, see Clora Bryant et al., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Bette Yarbrough Cox, Central Avenue—Its Rise and Fall (1890–c. 1955): Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: BEEM Publications, 1993); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 171–87; David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ’n’ Roll from Southern California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1998); Elijah Wald, Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Immigrant European musical influences are mentioned in, among other places, Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). The quote is from Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996). 25. Marc Landy, “Country Music: The Melody of Dislocation,” New South (Winter 1971): 67–69. 26. Gregory, American Exodus, 139–71; McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 46–49, 103, 241–42, 341n120; and Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 43, 258, 276. McGirr and Nicolaides both stick to the plain-folk Americanism/southernization thesis, with some caveats. Like Gregory, McGirr argues that, while not all southern and southwestern migrants imported conservatism to Orange County, religious institutions associated with the migrants certainly did. Nicolaides argues that growing conservatism of the community of Bell Gardens, California, “dovetailed” with migrants’ homegrown and seemingly inherent social and racial conservatism. 27. Walter Goldschmidt, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (1947; reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1978), 70–74, 185; Stuart M. Jamieson, “A Settlement of Rural Migrant Fami-

228

/ Notes to Pages 8–12

lies in Sacramento Valley, California,” Rural Sociology 7, no. 1 (March 1942): 59–60. 28. Here I align myself with authors of recent work that reassess poor white migrants’ impact on urban culture, particularly that of Appalachian and Southern migrants on midwestern cities, including Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis, 212, 240–41; Roger Guy, “A Common Ground: Urban Adaptation and Appalachian Unity,” in Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, ed. Phillip J. Obermiller et al. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), 55–58; and Chad Berry, Northern Migrants, Southern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 6–7, 135–206. While Berry argues that the record of the urban-bound working-class migrant is one marked more by “diversity, not universality,” Sugrue and Guy find that such migrants do not appear to have necessarily harbored or imported the predominant political or racial attitudes of their Southern home regions. 29. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 105; also see 45–46, 152, 410–12, 420. 30. Gregory, American Exodus, 37–52, 150–54. 31. Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt, 9–19; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “One or Two Things I Know about Us: ‘Okies’ in American Culture,” Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 4–34. 32. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 13–17. On the New Deal’s segregationist underpinnings, see Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 24. 33. Important exceptions to this general emphasis on country’s apoliticalness are Tex Sample’s White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996); and Jock Mackay’s “Populist Ideology and Country Music,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993), especially 289, which is discussed later in the footnotes. Some early works also gave more credence to political underpinnings; see, for example, Robert Shelton and Burt Goldblatt, The Country Music Story: A Picture History of Country and Western Music (1966; reprint, Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1971), which devotes almost as much text to Woody Guthrie as to hard-luck icon Hank Williams Sr. 34. Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas, 1985), 130, 319; Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 211, 252, 219. 35. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6, 211. 36. Inducted in 2000, Charlie Pride was the first African American to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Despite efforts of Alcyon Beasley and Minnie Pearl to have DeFord Bailey admitted in the 1980s, Bailey was neglected until I was in the final stages of writing this book. Bailey was one of the most popular early performers on the Grand Ole Opry, rivaling only Uncle Dave Macon, and

Notes to Pages 12–13 / 229 is said to have helped inspire the barn dance’s name. See Reginald Stuart, “Death of Black Opry Pioneer Leads to Disharmony in Nashville,” New York Times, 22 August 1982, final ed., sec. 1, pt. 1, 22. Political singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie also remains untapped despite figuring significantly as a “country singer” in such early histories as Shelton and Goldblatt, Country Music Story, 85–89. A full list of Hall of Fame inductees is available online at www.countrymusichalloffame.com/inductees. Some changes, however, have occurred in the museum’s approach to race in recent years. For example, a 2004 exhibit, Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm and Blues, 1945–1970, honored several black Tennesseans’ influences on country music. 37. Richard A. Peterson, “Class Unconsciousness in Country Music,” in You Wrote My Life: Lyrical Themes in Country Music, ed. Melton McLaurin and Richard Peterson (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 35–62. Also see Dorothy Horstman, Sing Your Heart Out Country Boy, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press, 1986), 293. 38. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 209; and Malone, Don’t Get Above, 215. 39. See photograph caption and text in Daniel Cooper, “Johnny Paycheck: Up from Low Places,” Journal of Country Music 15, no. 1 (n.d.): 45. 40. Montana, Parton, McIntire, and other women are discussed in, among other places, Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); and Bufwack and Oermann, “Women in Country Music,” in Popular Culture in America, ed. Paul Buhle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 91–101. Yearwood, the Dixie Chicks, and Twain’s feminist-leaning video performances are discussed briefly in Monica Kendrick, “Reel Live Women: A Video Essay,” Journal of Country Music 21, no. 3 (n.d.): 32–37. 41. Mackay, “Populist Ideology,” 289. 42. Sample, White Soul, 126–27. 43. ACLU advertisement “I Am Not an American,” The Nation 278, no. 20 (24 May 2004), back cover. See discussion of antistate activism in chapters 5 and 6. 44. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 1–7. 45. On Ford, see Malone, Don’t Get Above, 27; On the Klan, see Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 214. For an in-depth treatment of the Klan fiddle contests, see Patrick J. Huber, “The Modern Origins of an Old Time Sound: Southern Millhands and Their Hillbilly Music, 1923–1942” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000), 34–44. 46. Colin Escott, Lost Highway: The True Story of Country Music (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2003), 126–29. 47. Paul Hemphill, The Good Old Boys (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 127; Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 317–18. 48. See the lyrics to Charlie Daniels, “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag.” The song includes the line “This ain’t no rag, it’s a flag / And we don’t wear it on

230

/ Notes to Pages 14–16

our heads / It’s a symbol of the land where the good guys live.” Not only guilty of an oversimplified, black-and-white understanding of world affairs, the songwriter vilifies hundreds of thousands of headgear- or turban-wearing peoples across the world, including Arabs, Indian Sikhs, and others, demeaning ancient religious or cultural traditions by equating such garments with rags and rubbish. 49. Dave Ferman, “Like No Other Genre, Country Music Rallies in Wartime,” Associated Press, 18 April 2003; Chet Flippo, “Nashville Skyline: Shut Up and Sing?” CMT.com, 24 March 2003, www.cmt.com/news/articles/1470672/032023003/dixie_chicks.jhtml, accessed on 5 July 2006 50. On the Dixie Chicks controversy, see Paul Farhi, “The Spoils of Antiwar,” Washington Post, 22 May 2003, pp. C1, C4; David Segal, “Dixie Chicks Bare Their, Uh, Souls,” Washington Post, 25 April 2003, pp. C1, C3; Chris William, “Stars and Strife,” Entertainment Weekly, no. 708, 2 May 2003, pp. 22–29; Anne Hull, “Uncowed Cowgirls,” Washington Post, 8 August 2003, pp. C1, C8; and Randy Rudder, “In Whose Name? Country Artists Speak Out on Gulf War II,” in Country Music Goes to War, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 208–26. 51. On Laura Ingraham’s assessment of the Dixie Chicks, see “Shut Up and Entertain Us,” chapter 4 of Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2003), 75–112. Ingraham appears to have lifted the book title from an earlier anti-Chicks column penned by Chet Flippo, CMT.com editorial director and country music author, a self-described liberal and critic of George W. Bush who nevertheless supported the initial outcome of the Iraq War. See Flippo, “Nashville Skyline: Shut Up and Sing?” 52. Hull, “Uncowed Cowgirls,” pp. C1, C8. 53. Quote from Adorno, Minima Moralia, 204, 207. On Adorno’s time in Los Angeles, see Davis, City of Quartz, 46–51; and Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 36–43. Also see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 29–43; Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music (1941),” in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 211–23. 54. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. from the German by E. B. Ashton (1962; reprint, New York: Continuum, 1989), 17. 55. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill, introduction to The Place of Music (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 6. This book also informs my analysis. 56. Explorations influenced by cultural studies and other methodologies concerned with music politics have not only thrown light on previously ignored musical traditions but also have consistently argued that musical cultures have an impact on the distribution of social power, holding the potential to both reinforce the status quo and disrupt the efforts of those who wield cultural and

Notes to Pages 16–18 / 231 political power. This strand of culturally aware music scholarship, which originates with the yin of the Birmingham school’s sometimes indulgent and celebratory 1976 study of British youth music subcultures and the yang of Jacques Attali’s more somber 1977 assessment of Western music’s political economy, has culminated more recently in excellent contributions, such as historian Suzanne E. Smith’s important work on civil rights and Motown, and musicologist Susan McClary’s exemplary feminist explorations of classical and blues composition. Pioneered by scholars at the University of Birmingham interested in British working-class culture, the classic cultural studies approach to music mentioned in the above paragraph is best exemplified by the work collected in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976; reprint, London: Routledge, 1990). Other important works mentioned that are influenced by or that share the same concern with polity and music cultures are Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1977; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Contemporary cultural studies is not without blame in underestimating the cultural politics of country music, as Barbara Ching, notes in Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture: “While noted scholars such as John Fiske readily grant sophisticated powers of cultural contestation to such practices as wearing torn jeans or following the well-publicized antics of Madonna, few have turned their attention to country music” ([New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 13). 57. There are some exceptions. Country music researchers have produced a few cultural studies–style works on fandom, stardom, and auteurs, and some feminist writers have produced some interesting inquiries into country music’s female demographics and women’s readings of country music “texts,” but much of the field seems more concerned with a musicology-like emphasis on the music as a language above concerns of economy, polity, and society. See Ching, Wrong’s What I Do; Curtis W. Ellison, Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995); Bufwack and Oermann, “Women in Country Music,” 91–101; and Pamela Fox, “Recycled ‘Trash’: Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography,” American Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 1998): 234–66. 58. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race, and the Postmodern World (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1995), 4–6. The bulleted list is my adaptation of one that Jordan and Weedon provide in their book 59. Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (1974; reprint, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991), 52–53, 60, 302–3, 348–49, 383–84, 386. 60. Jonny Whiteside, “Hollywood Country,” LA Weekly.com, 6 January

232

/ Notes to Pages 18–23

2005, www.laweekly.com/general/features/hollywood-country/1074/, accessed on 5 July 2006. 61. Quoted in Colin Escott, Tattooed on Their Tongues: A Journey through the Backrooms of American Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 206.

1. at the crossroads of whiteness 1. As quoted in Stanley Bailey, “Migrants: It’s Up to U.S. to Settle Them,” San Francisco Chronicle, 17 February 1940. 2. The reference is to Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1894), 66. 3. The major proponents of this theory are Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 58–64; and Leonard Joseph Leader, “Bum Blockade,” chapter 10 in “Los Angeles and the Great Depression” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972). James N. Gregory stresses conflict over relief, but also notes the antisouthern prejudice of much of the scapegoating, in American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 95–103. Here I align most closely with Kevin Starr’s interpretation in Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 240–42. 4. Although the literature on white Californians’ treatment of other groups up to the mid-1930s is too vast to list here, some important milestones include Tómas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Lawrence B. de Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1962); Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1796–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 5. Here my analysis parallels John Hartigan Jr.’s recent work on Appalachian migrants in Detroit, which argues that migrants were stigmatized because they “disrupted a broad set of assumptions about how white people appeared, spoke and behaved.” See Hartigan, “ ‘Disgrace to the Race’: Hillbillies and the Color Line in Detroit,” in Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, ed. Phillip J. Obermiller et al. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), 145. If there was a difference between the stigmatization of the Appalachians in De-

Notes to Pages 23–24 / 233 troit and the Okies in Los Angeles, my research indicates that the vilification of the Okies was more severe. 6. For a treatise on a poor white population’s descent into a marginal or liminal whiteness contemporary to the Dust Bowl migration, see W. E. Garnett, “Approaches to Virginia’s Marginal Population Problem,” Eugenical News 22, no. 4 (1937): 59. 7. My understanding of Southern California’s various “mythologies of whiteness” (my term) is informed by my readings of Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 49–90, 207–49; Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 20–32; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 24–25, 54–60; and Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; Reprint, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1995), 67, 70–83, 161–82. By the 1940s, whiteness myths were already beginning to coalesce around a middle-class identity that Avila aptly labels “suburban whiteness” (Popular Culture, 15). 8. The specifics of these incidents are discussed later in this chapter. 9. Important historical works among a growing body of scholarship on “whiteness” are Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990); David Roediger, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 10. Statistics stem from Donald J. Bogue, Henry S. Shryock Jr., and Siegfried A. Hoermann, Subregional Migration in the United States, 1935, vol. 1, Streams of Migration between Subregions (Oxford, Ohio: Scripps Foundation, 1957), table 1, lxi–cxxvii. I cite Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Country (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 15, 35, 204–5; David Roediger, Toward the Abolition, 189–90; and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 13–15, 176–81. Although the poorest whites of the greater Dust Bowl region were frequently maligned as “white trash,” the low- to lower-middle-income EuroAmericans who would make up the bulk of the migration lived relatively free from the harsher forms of harassment, phenotypic ridicule, and segregation regularly encountered by people of color. See Peter La Chapelle, “ ‘Shadows of the Dust’: The Expectations and Ordeal of California’s African American Dust

234

/ Notes to Pages 25–27

Bowl Migrants” (master’s thesis, California State University, Bakersfield, 1996), 39–41; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 3–11; Jimmie Lewis Franklin, Journey toward Hope: A History of Blacks in Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 133–35, 143–45, 150–51. Some sources also suggest that the poorest of poor whites often could not afford to make the journey in the first place: Gregory, American Exodus, 6–19; Glenn W. Sudmeier, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 16 April 2001, Hesperia, California. 11. Blaise Cendrars, Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies, trans. Garrett White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 61, originally published as Hollywood, La Mecque du Cinéma (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1936). Cendrars’s writings first appeared in Paris-Soir before being collected in Hollywood. 12. I refer here to Ishi, a Yahi Indian who lived on display in a San Francisco museum after his tribe had been decimated by white scalp hunters. See Orin Starn, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of the Last “Wild” Indian (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). Also see Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 244–45. 13. Takaki, Strangers, 79–131; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 59, 76, 201–12, 229–34, 258–84; Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 251–57, 289–90. This segment and the much of the rest of this paragraph is also informed by Almaguer’s aforementioned excellent history of white supremacy in California, Racial Fault Lines. 14. Haas, Conquests, 2, 51, 56–68; Sanchez, Becoming, 55–62, 69, 96, 209–26, 267–69. 15. Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the WorkingClass Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 156–68; Davis, City of Quartz, 160–64; McWilliams, Southern California, 324–26. 16. Frank J. Taylor, “Labor on Wheels,” Country Gentleman 58, no. 7 (July 1938): 12–13. 17. Ibid., 12, 13. 18. Alice Reichard, “California’s Adult Children,” Country Gentleman 110, no. 2 (February 1940): 35. 19. Here I agree with Gregory, who notes that the prevailing “refugee image” invites inaccurate comparisons with Jewish evacuees of the Holocaust and “even more devastating sagas of human misery which have so often plagued the third world.” But I take issue with his rather vague assertion that the migration was “a tragedy in the rather privileged American sense of the term” (American Exodus, 10). 20. Kenneth L. Roberts, “The Docile Mexican,” Saturday Evening Post (10 March 1928): 43. Also see Sanchez, Becoming, 95–96; and Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 59.

Notes to Pages 27–28 / 235 21. See Ray Zeman, “Squatter Army Wages Grim Battle for Life,” Los Angeles Times, 21 July 1937; “Save California,” editorial, 4 August 1938, and “Send Them Back,” editorial, 4 January 1939, both in “Organizations, Concerned Citizens Association,” Los Angeles Examiner files, Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter Los Angeles Examiner files, HC). 22. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 68–77; Lonnie G. Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue: The Afro-American in Los Angeles,” in 20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, Calif.: Regina Books, 1990), 114. 23. Gregory, American Exodus, 95–100. 24. Louis Adamic, “Cherries Are Red in the San Joaquin,” The Nation (27 July 1936): 5; and Carey McWilliams, “California Pastoral,” Antioch Review 2, no. 1 (March 1942): 120. 25. On chief Davis’s actions, see Utopian News (Los Angeles), 26 March and 6 April 1936; Los Angeles Herald-Express, 4 February 1936; and Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1936. Cendrars, Hollywood, 55, 61, offers an interesting period analysis of the border blockade. For secondary source material on antimigrant actions, see Leonard Joseph Leader, “Los Angeles and the Great Depression” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), 194–218; Stein, California and the Dust Bowl, 58–64, 238–39; Gregory, American Exodus, 78–113; and Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 167–79. 26. Nancy Taniguchi, “California’s ‘Anti-Okie’ Law: An Interpretive Biography,” Western Legal History 8, no. 2 (1995): 280–82; “Edwards v. California: 314 U.S. 160 (1941),” The Politics of California, ed. David Farrelly and Ivan Hinderaker (New York: Ronald Press, 1951), 32–39. 27. “Hobo Village Burned,” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1938. 28. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, Vol. 84, pt. 1, 63; “L.A. County Joins Fight to Bar Indigent Migrants,” 22 June 1938, CCA folder, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 29. Lockheed Star (Los Angeles) 7 (12 April 1940): 15; American Aeronaut (Los Angeles), 2, no. 38 (27 April 1942): 1, 8, 5; and vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1944): 1. 30. Bailey, “Migrants: It’s Up to U.S. to Settle Them.” The idea that migrants would be difficult to elevate to “even a degree of responsible citizenship” was also forwarded by Reichard, “California’s Adult Children,” 9. On disaster literature, see Davis, Ecology, 282–300. 31. On McManus and Harrell’s relationship, see letter from Thomas W. McManus to Senator Hiram W. Johnson, 4 October 1933, Thomas McManus folder, box 54, Hiram Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. On McManus and Hearst see “Kern Leader Blasts Perils of New Deal,” 22 May 1940, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 32. On the descriptions of migrants as insectlike, see San Francisco Chronicle, 17 February 1940; Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1939; and Mae Saunders,

236

/ Notes to Pages 28–30

series on Dust Bowl migration, Bakersfield Californian, 3 August–24 August 1939. On Asian scapegoating, see Davis, Ecology, 285–90. 33. Daily Alta (San Francisco), 17 June 1869, as quoted in Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 59. 34. “Migrants Are Becoming Voters,” California—Magazine of the Pacific (San Francisco) 28, no. 10 (October 1938): 21. In “ ‘Shadows of the Dust’: The Expectations and Ordeal of California’s African American Dust Bowl Migrants” (master’s thesis, California State University, Bakersfield, 1996), I further explore the issue of black Dust Bowl migrants, as did Mark Arax’s three-part series in the Los Angeles Times, 25–27 August 2002. 35. McWilliams, “California Pastoral,” 116; Robert Williams, interview by author, transcript of tape recording, 20 June 1996, Buttonwillow, California. 36. Stuart M. Jamieson, “Settlement of Rural Migrant Families in the Sacramento Valley, California,” Rural Sociology 7, no. 1 (March 1942): 50. 37. McWilliams, “California Pastoral,” 116. 38. Antimigrant campaign supporters included land companies such as Miller and Lux, labor-intensive industries such as clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss and Company, Pacific Gas and Electric, the Associated Farmers, the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Standard Oil of California, and Associated Oil. See “Committee of 43, Fascist Organizations,” March 1938 file, carton 12, Simon J. Lubin Society Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Also see People’s World, 2 August 1938. For background on the reasoning behind business antimigrantism, see Robert E. Burke’s account in Olson’s New Deal for California (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1953). On the Associated Farmers, see Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 174–75. 39. “Labor Asks U.S. for Aid on Migrants,” 24 September 1938, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 40. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 76th Congress: 1st Session, Vol. 84, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), 62, 63. Also see Louis B. Perry and Richard Perry, A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 399. 41. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), ix–xx, 3–33, 63–76, 332. Also see Lewis Corey (née Louis Fraina), The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Convici Friede, Publishers, 1934), 281, 511–14. 42. On the California new middle class and Progressive politics, see Daniel J. Johnson, “ ‘No More Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1911,” Labor History 41, no. 1 (2000): 28–30, 35, 37–39; Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 210–16; and Royce Deems Delmatier, “The Rebirth of the Democratic Party” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1955), 26, 39, 81–82, 85–87. 43. Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940: Popu-

Notes to Pages 30–32 / 237 lation: Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870–1940 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 187, 192–93. 44. Davis, City of Quartz, 37. 45. On the right-ward drift of middle-class Progressives, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 304–28; Jurgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940 (London: Sage Publications, 1980), 1–33; and Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 109–33, 168, 180–83. On the phenomenon in California, see Luther Whitman and Samuel L. Lewis, Glory Roads: The Psychological State of California (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936), 253–69; McWilliams, Southern California, 281–83; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 275–82; and Davis, City of Quartz, 36–40. 46. On Lubin, see Starr, Endangered Dreams, 231–32. On Burke, see articles in “J. Frank Burke” envelope, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. On Hiram Johnson, see “Hail and Farewell,” California Progressive Leader (Los Angeles), 10 October 1939, 4; Starr, Inventing the Dream, 264–66, 276–68; McWilliams, Southern California, 160. 47. Letter from Thomas W. McManus to Senator Hiram W. Johnson, 10 November 1938, “27 letters 1922–38” file, Thomas McManus folder, box 54, Hiram Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 48. See U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 84, pt. 1, 61–64, and various items in “27 letters 1922–38” file, Thomas McManus folder, box 54, Hiram Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 49. Percentages derived from “Endorsements,” U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 84, pt. 1, 63. 50. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 181. 51. “Growing Fascist Spirit Alarms Liberal Forces,” Utopian News, 6 May 1935, pp. 1–2; Walter Goldschmidt, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (1947; reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun and Company, 1978), 61. 52. Los Angeles Times, 21 March 1936; Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1939; Burke, Olson’s New Deal, 6–22. It should be noted that not all social workers took this stand. The California Conference on Social Work decried the attempts to deny transients relief in an official resolution at their 1938 meeting. See editorial, “Dare We Provide Decent Care for Transients?” Social Service Review 10 (September 1936): 505–8. 53. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, Vol. 84, pt. 1, 63; Stein, California and the Dust Bowl, 96–99. 54. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, Vol. 84, pt. 1, 62; “ ‘Reds’ Called U.S. Menace,” 26 March 1935; “Prosperity Loan Gains New Support,” 7 September 1931; “Legion Picks Detroit for 1931 Meeting,” 9 October 1931; “Resolution Opposes Soviet Recognition,” 5 October 1933; “Ca-

238

/ Notes to Pages 32–33

reers,” 12 March 1936; “Wirin Endorsers Are Revealed,” 18 December 1935; “Kern Leader Blasts Perils of New Deal,” 22 May 1940; and “Thos. McManus Found Dead,” 3 January 1945; all in Thomas W. McManus folder, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. Other information gleaned from the following items in “27 letters 1922–38” file, Thomas McManus folder, box 54, Hiram Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: letter from Thos. W. McManus to Frank R. Havenner, 4 February 1924; letter from McManus to Havenner, 11 February 1924; letter from McManus to Hon. Hiram W. Johnson, 1 November 1930; letter from McManus to Johnson, 3 November 1930; letter from McManus to Johnson, 25 June 1931; letter from McManus to Johnson, 14 October 1933; letter from McManus to Johnson, 10 November 1938; telegram from McManus to Johnson, 6 December 1938. Also see interview of McManus in Loring A. Schuler, “The Dust Bowl Moves to California,” California—Magazine of the Pacific 28, no. 8 (August 1938): 33. 55. On McManus’s radio and oratory background and tactics in the campaign against migrants, see “Reds Called U.S. Menace,” 26 March 1935; “Women Landon Aids to Meet,” 30 April 1936; and “Vets Warned on Migrants,” 24 August 1938, all in Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. On McManus and Harrell see letter from McManus to Hiram W. Johnson, 4 October 1933, McManus folder, box 54, Hiram Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. On McManus and Hearst see “Kern Leader Blasts Perils of New Deal,” 22 May 1940, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 56. For an analysis of the Depression’s impact on familial gender relations and the resulting crisis in masculinity, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 37–57; and Lois Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 196–97. Unidentified quotations are from Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 27. Antonio Gramsci quote is from Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1997), 165. 57. Treatments of the middle-class mind-set during the Depression include the interviews in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1986); William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 250–51, 259; Albert U. Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), especially chap. 5, “Banking: Cash, Credit, and Confidence.” On the midwestern origins of much of the “native” white population of California, see William T. Cross and Dorothy E. Cross, Newcomers and Nomads in California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1937), fig. 1, p. 8. Period pieces on the middle-class California mentalité include journalist Edmund White’s The American Earthquake (1958; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1996), 379–96, 414–20; and McWilliams, Southern California, 281–83.

Notes to Pages 34–35 / 239 58. My gratitude to Lynn Sacco, who suggested I pursue an examination of eugenics in this section. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Human Faculty and Its Development (1869; reprint, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 1–2, 325–37, 345, 352; Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 3–19, 64; Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 18, 19. 59. Edwin Black discusses the rise and consequences of American “negative,” “applied,” or “hard” eugenics in War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), especially chaps. 4–6, 9, 10, 13. For an alternative view of a noninvasive, “soft,” birth control–oriented feminist eugenics, see Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 74–161. 60. See especially Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 56–103. 61. Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 13–17. 62. Richard L. Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 13–14, 18, 49, 62, 69–70, 113. Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1913), iv–v, 12, 15–18, 34, 60, 63, 70–71, 77–78, 101, 107. 63. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 70–72, 89–95; Rafter, White Trash, 26. See, for instance, Thurman Rice, Racial Hygiene: A Practical Discussion of Eugenics and Race Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 93–95; Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169, 184–85. 64. The phrase white trash appears in, for instance, Ray Zeman, “Squatter Army Wages Grim Battle for Life,” Los Angeles Times, 21 July 1937; “Migrants are Becoming Voters,” California—Magazine of the Pacific 28, no. 10 (October 1938): 21; and Ben Hibbs, “Footloose Army,” Country Gentleman 110, no. 2 (February 1940), 8. 65. Orlo M. Rolo, “The Place of the Study of Heredity and Eugenics in Some High Schools of Long Beach, California” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, June 1940), 18–20, 22, 43. 66. On the Los Angeles elite’s fixation with whiteness and racial superiority, see Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 136–39. On the region’s sanitariums and medico-scientific experimenters, see John E. Baur, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1959). 67. Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 235–38.

240

/ Notes to Pages 35–37

68. On Gosney and eugenics, see Carey McWilliams, “Sterilization: Millionaire’s Version,” United Progressive News (Los Angeles), 16 March 1936, p. 3; E. S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment (New York: Macmillan, 1930); Paul Popenoe, “Eugenic Sterilization in California” Journal of Sexual Hygiene 13 (1927): 257; Paul Popenoe, “Trends in Human Sterilization,” Eugenical News 22, no. 3 (May–June 1937): 42–43; Popenoe and Gosney, Twenty-eight Years of Sterilization in California (Pasadena, Calif.: Human Betterment Foundation, 1939), 39–40; Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 137; F. C. S. Schiller, Social Decay and Eugenical Reform (London: Constable and Company, 1932); E. S. Gosney and Human Betterment Foundation, “Twenty-Eight Years of Eugenic Sterilization in California,” Eugenical News 22, no. 5 (September–October 1937): 86–87; Paul Popenoe, “Institute of Family Relations,” Eugenics 3, no. 4 (April 1930): 134–37; Paul Popenoe, “Eugenics and Family Relations,” Eugenical News 25, no. 4 (December 1940): 70–74. 69. On University of Southern California, see Joseph P. Widney, The Greater City of Los Angeles: A Plan for the Development of Los Angeles City as a Great World Health Center (Los Angeles: n.p., 1938); and Joseph P. Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1907). 70. Gosney and Human Betterment Foundation, “Twenty-Eight Years of Eugenic Sterilization,” 86–87; Popenoe, “Trends in Human Sterilization,” 42–43. 71. “Forum on Sterilization: Three Eugenicists and One Catholic,” Eugenics 3, no. 5 (May 1930): 180–81; Schiller, Social Decay, 3–32. Other experts mentioned are listed in the editorial frontispiece, Eugenics 3, no. 5 (May 1930). 72. Donald J. Bogue, Henry S. Shryock Jr., and Siegried A. Hoermann, Subregional Migration in the United States, 1935, vol. 1, Streams of Migration between Subregions (Oxford, Ohio: Scripps Foundation, 1957), table 1, lxi–cxxvii; Gregory, American Exodus, 15, 39, 42. 73. Reichard, “California’s Adult Children,” 9. 74. Gretchen Palmatier Couch, “An Analysis of School Attendance and Child Welfare Services in Glendale City Schools” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, June 1939), 144. Emphasis is mine. 75. “Californians Planning War on Migration,” 16 September 1939, and “Send Them Back,” 4 January 1939, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Ray Zeman, “Squatter Army Wages Grim Battle for Life,” Los Angeles Times, 21 July 1937. 76. Goldschmidt, As You Sow, 61. 77. Rafter reprinted several of these lesser-known studies in White Trash; on p.8, he makes reference to their racialization of poor white bodies. 78. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 2nd ed. (1918; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970), 17–18, 76–77, 85, 87. 79. Jordan, Popenoe, Bogardus, Goddard, and Grant are listed in the editorial frontispiece, Eugenics 3, no. 5 (May 1930).

Notes to Pages 37–40 / 241 80. Paul Taylor, “Again the Covered Wagon,” Survey Graphic 24, no. 7 (July 1935): 348. 81. Frank Taylor, “Labor on Wheels,” 12. 82. Dugdale, The Jukes, 69–70; Schuler, “The Dust Bowl Moves to California,” 5; Reichard, “California’s Adult Children,” 35; Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. 1935. Reprint, Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1978), 323; Davis, Ecology, 289–90, 292–93. 83. Schuler, “The Dust Bowl Moves to California,” 5, 27. 84. “Filthy Roadside Squatters Quarters Are Near,” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1937. Also see the editorial “Send Them Back,” 4 January 1939, CCA folder, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Goldschmidt, As You Sow, 61. 85. Ronald Takaki, Race and Culture in 19th Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 109–28; McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 323. 86. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, 77th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942–1944), 245; Schuler, “The Dust Bowl Moves to California,” 30. 87. Gladys de Lancey Smith, letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times, February 1938, as quoted in Joseph P. Zeronian, “A Narrative History of Migrating Oklahomans in California, 1935–1940” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1965), 68. 88. John Steinbeck, Their Blood Is Strong (San Francisco: Simon J. Lubin Society, April 1938), 3, 30. 89. Sue Sanders, Our Common Herd (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1939), 54–55, 62; Sanders, The Real Causes of Our Migrant Problem (Los Angeles: Self-published, 1940), 7–8; Sanders, “Woman Finds Migrants Clean, Ambitious Folks,” Los Angeles Times, October 1939. 90. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 174; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 83–85, 94. 91. My analysis is based on issues of California—Magazine of the Pacific from 1938 to 1940 and issues of the Country Gentleman from 1937 to 1940. 92. Reichard, “California’s Adult Children,” 9. Also see “Migrants Are Becoming Voters,” California—Magazine of the Pacific 28, no. 10 (October 1938): 20–21. For an example of FSA-like photographs shot by magazine staffers, see Country Gentleman 108, no. 7 (July 1938): 12. On Lange and the FSA, see “Migrant Workers” and “The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleischauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 93. Donald J. Bogue and Calvin L. Beale, Economic Areas of the United States (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), lxx–lxxiii. Examples of Californians mistaking migrants of the southern plains for poor whites from the Deep

242

/ Notes to Pages 40–41

South appear in Los Angeles Times, 21 July 1937 and 22 July 1938. For background on Byrd and other genteel Southerners’ depictions of poor whites, see Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), 4, 21; and Jack Temple Kirby, The Countercultural South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 60–61. 94. Californians’ portrayals of white male “tramps” in the Progressive era, for instance, had emphasized them as a natural, relatively benevolent, and even slightly romantic part of the pastoral landscape, not as symptoms of deep economic peril. For background on the relatively benign attitude toward transient white men in California, see Starr, Material Dreams, 57; and Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 16–17. Regarding the image of the “tramp,” I am thinking especially of the enthusiasm for Charlie Chaplin in the silent movies of the 1920s. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and trans. from the French by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 39–40; and Steven J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 81. 95. Compiled from statistics on men and women who earned their own wage as farmworkers and men and women who worked as part of a family agricultural wage structure in Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, table xii, 28. 96. My analysis of the connection that early chroniclers made between poor white gender relations and those purportedly employed by Native Americans is informed by McIlwaine’s discussion in The Southern Poor White: From Lubberland, xxi–xxii; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 27–61. 97. In one memorable sequence, the reader is invited to journey into the past to see Mammy as a tender infant. In the synopsis that follows, Mammy looks much younger, but her ever-present smoking pipe, rough clothing, gaunt form, and willingness to engage in fisticuffs remain unchanged. Li’l Abner, Sunday comics section, Los Angeles Times, 2 January 1939. Also see W. K. McNeil, “ ‘Hillbilly’ Image,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 504–5; Thomas Inge, “Comic Strips,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 914–15, and articles on Capp and Li’l Abner in Maurice Horn, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1976), 99–100, 154, 198–99, 450–51. 98. For this survey I also relied on photos that accompany other Country Gentleman and California articles throughout this chapter, clippings in the Examiner files, HC; clipping from “Migrants” folder, Carey McWilliams Collection, Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; as well as my own examination of the microfilm reproductions of the Times and Chronicle during this period. 99. Robert E. Girvin, “Workers Live in Filth and Ugliness in a Land of Gold and Beauty,” newsclipping from migrants folder (identified as “Chronicle 17 March 1938”), Carey McWilliams Collection, Special Collections, University

Notes to Pages 42–43 / 243 Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. See also Kenneth Crist, “Career Men—in Relief,” Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine (14 May 1939): 4–5, 8. 100. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: J. Cape, 1930); “Faulkner, William” in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1942), 438–40; Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor White: A Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 188–90; the last one is the published portion of McIlwaine’s dissertation. 101. See for instance Oakland Tribune, 11 April 1933; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 291; “Send Them Back,” 4 January 1939, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 102. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1992); Guy Logsdon, “The Dust Bowl and the Migrant,” American Scene 12, no. 1 (1971): n.p.; Sue Sanders, The Real Causes of Our Migrant Problem (Los Angeles: Self-published, 1940), 7–9; Martin Staples Shockley, “The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma,” American Literature 15, no. 4 (January 1944): 351–61; Gregory, American Exodus, 111, 294n106–7. 103. On Caldwell’s father’s eugenic work, see “Next Month,” Eugenics: A Journal for Human Betterment 3, no. 5 (May 1930): 192; and I. S. Caldwell, “The Bunglers: A Narrative-Study in Five Parts,” pts. 1–5, Eugenics: A Journal for Human Betterment 3, no. 6–10 (June–October 1930): 203–10, 247–51, 293–99, 332–36, 377–83. The study was also later reprinted as the book I. S. Caldwell, The Bunglers (New Haven, Conn.: Galton Publishing, 1930). The elder Caldwell attacked the poor white women of Georgia as oversexed and described a “religious fakir” who at “the age of fifty odd years . . . married a school boy about sixteen years old.” In the younger Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, Sister Bessie joyfully services the men at an inn and then marries a sixteen-year-old boy. Decades later, Erskine acknowledged that his father introduced him to the people “who make up the characters of Tobacco Road” [New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1932], 58, 125–26), See Kay Bonetti, “Interview with Erskine Caldwell,” Saturday Review 9 (July–August 1983): 8–11. 104. Schuler, “The Dust Bowl Moves to California,” 5, 27, 30, 31. Also see “Filthy Roadside Squatters Quarters Are Near,” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1937; Starr, Endangered Dreams, 241; Publishers Weekly (14 May 1949): 1960–61; Edwin T. Arnold, Conversations with Erskine Caldwell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), xix; “Tobacco Road,” Variety, 26 February 1941. 105. On Davis, see W. A. Ransom, “E. E. Davis, Gentleman, Scholar, Friend,” Texas Outlook 30, no. 9 (September 1946): 16–17, 38; Edward Everett Davis, The White Scourge (San Antonio: Naylor Company, 1940), 70, 89, 104, 116, 133, 153. 106. Quoted in “Migrants Are Becoming Voters,” 21. Also see J. Donald Fisher, “A Historical Study of the Migrant in California” (1973; reprint, mas-

244

/ Notes to Pages 43–46

ter’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1945), 54; Ronald E. Chin, “Democratic Party Politics in California, 1920–1956” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1958), 56. 107. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 148. The newsreels appear as part of Our Daily Bread and Other Films of the Great Depression, DVD (Image Entertainment/Blackhawk Films, 1999), black-and-white, 3 hrs., 14 min. 108. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 148; Chin, “Democratic Party,” 82–86. 109. “Save California,” 4 August 1938, CCA folder, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; “Send Them Back,” 4 January 1939, CCA folder, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Chin, “Democratic Party,” 82–86. Also see Goldschmidt, As You Sow, 169. 110. Al C. Joy, “A Dream in Crackpot Corners,” California—Magazine of the Pacific 28, no. 10 (October 1938): 22. On the Ham and Eggs initiatives, see Perry and Perry, History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 422, 494; and Burke, Olson’s New Deal, 26. 111. For an example of this, see Modesto Bee, 9 March 1938.

2. refugees 1. Kenneth Crist, “Career Men—in Relief,” Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine (14 May 1939): 4–5, 81. 2. Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 23 May 1939, p. 4; 27 May 1939, p. 4; and 3 June 1939, p. 4; Woody Guthrie, “Chapter 9999. . . ,” On a Slow Train through California, mimeograph copy, n.p., in the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, New York, hereafter WGFA. As a matter of simplification, I have left Guthrie’s original self-styled folk grammar and spelling intact and without “sic” designations in all his quotes throughout this chapter. 3. Woody Guthrie, $30 Wood Help! (Los Angeles: Self-published, 1939), 36–42, in Woody Guthrie Papers, Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 4. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (London: Verso, 1997), 9–19; Dunbar-Ortiz, “One or Two Things I Know about Us: ‘Okies’ in American Culture,” Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 4–34. 5. See Gerald W. Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 71–72. While not outright dismissing Guthrie’s country roots, Bill C. Malone argues that Guthrie “occupies an unusual position in American country and folk music and is admittedly difficult to characterize (Country Music, U.S.A. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985], 132).” Malone’s more recent accounts, however, do more to show the process through which Guthrie’s repertoire of commercial and noncommercial “hillbilly” songs was transformed into a more urban-oriented folk tradition, but he nevertheless improbably claims that the urban folk singers “only

Notes to Pages 46–47 / 245 rarely acknowledged or even realized the existence of the sources from whom [Guthrie] borrowed.” Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002), 233–35. Michael Denning briefly mentions Guthrie’s time on KFVD, but fails to acknowledge its importance as a period of songwriting that would eventually culminate in his seminal Dust Bowl Ballads album (The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century [London: Verso, 1996], 269–72). The sociologist Richard A. Peterson omits Guthrie altogether in his overview, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 6. Peterson, Creating Country, 198–99. 7. Crissman is mentioned by name merely as a coperformer in Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.,, 132–33; Malone, Don’t Get Above, 233; and Denning, Cultural Front, 269, and is not mentioned at all in Robert Shelton and Burt Goldblatt, The Country Music Story: A Picture History of Country and Western Music (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1966). Even Bryan Carman’s excellent assessment of Guthrie’s hypocritical gender politics in A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen mentions Crissman offhandedly and only by her stage name ([Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000], 86, 110). 8. Carman, Race of Singers, is the best study of the mythology surrounding Guthrie, especially chapters 5 and 6. A more well-rounded portrait of Guthrie the person is Ed Cray’s authoritative biography, Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 90–172. Others include Charles McGovern, “Woody’s American Century,” 124; David R. Shumway, “Your Land: The Lost Legacy of Woody Guthrie,” 128–37, Ronald D. Cohen, “Woody the Red?” 138–50, all in Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson, eds., Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999); Joe Klein’s classic Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980; reprint, New York: Delta, 1999), 76–142; and Shelton and Goldblatt’s out-of-print Country Music Story, 84–89. 9. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Folk Song U.S.A. (1947; reprint, New York: Plume Books, 1975), vii, 311; Pete Seeger, introduction to Woody Guthrie Folk Songs, by Woody Guthrie (New York: Ludlow Music, 1963), 6; Pete Seeger, foreword to Woody Guthrie and Me: An Intimate Reminiscence, by Edward Robbin (Berkeley: Lancaster-Miller, 1979), ix. Seeger, however, offers a factladen and rather unemotional account of his interaction with Guthrie in “Hobo’s Lullaby,” written with Robert Santelli, in Santelli and Emily Davidson, Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 22–33. 10. H. R. Stoneback, “Rough People . . . Are the Best Singers: Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and Folksong,” in The Steinbeck Question, ed. Donald R. Noble (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing, 1993), 161–62, argues Guthrie was “a clever opportunist,” while Stephen J. Whitfield’s examination of Guthrie in The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University

246

/ Notes to Pages 47–48

Press, 1996), 200–203, argues that Guthrie was “unabashedly Stalinist.” Combining these two is R. Serge Denisoff’s depiction, which identifies Guthrie as part of the “Stalinist scene” and suggests he was, “in left-wing jargon[,] . . . an ‘opportunist’ ” who used his popularity “to further his own aims.” Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 136–37. Newer works such as the essays in Santelli and Davidson’s excellent Hard Travelin’ collection have done a better job of uncovering the nuances in his life and music. 11. Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially 224–51 and 252–70. Also see Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 1–11, 65–92, 125–53. 12. Here I build on Susan J. Douglas’s general work on Depression radio in Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 100–123; and especially on Pamela Grundy’s assertion that commercial hillbilly radio was not simply “a potent advocate of political and moral conservatism” but also a mirror that reflected the ways listeners “believed their own determination could bring a portion of dignity and stability to extremely difficult lives” (“ ‘We Always Tried to Be Good People’: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933–1935,” Journal of American History 81, no. 4 [March 1995]: 1594–95, 1619). My conclusions, however, differ from Grundy’s in that I find that the “meanings” of Guthrie and Crissman’s music did not “lay submerged beneath words of accommodation,” but were presented forthright. 13. The first group includes Grundy, “Good People,” 1591–1620; Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Patricia Averill, “Esoteric-Exoteric Expectations of Redneck Behavior and Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 4, no. 2 (1973): 34–38; Shelton and Goldblatt, The Country Music Story. While careful to acknowledge that stylistic changes emerged from a variety of participants in country music subculture, other studies suggest that the ideology, format, and content of country music production have remained largely under the command of an industry elite composed of promoters, sponsors, managers, scouts, station owners, record company executives, and a select few “star” performers. Among these studies are Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 114; Peterson, Creating Country Music, 6–10, 108–9, 190–92, 228–29; Edmund Morris, “New, Improved, and Homogenized: Country Radio since 1950,” 88–107; and Charles K. Wolfe, “The Triumph of the Hills: Country Radio, 1920–1950,” in Country: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Paul Kingsbury and Alan Axelrod (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 52–87; Ivan M. Tribe, “The Economics of Hillbilly Radio: A Preliminary Investigation of the ‘P.I.’ System in the Depression Decade and Afterward,”

Notes to Pages 48–50 / 247 John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (hereafter JEMFQ) 20, no. 17 (Fall–Winter 1981): 76–83. 14. Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, field notes, 14 June to 18 June 1968, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter RRP), 10–11, 21, 32; Woody Guthrie, “My Life,” in Pastures of Plenty: A Self Portrait, by Woody Guthrie, comp. and ed. Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 7; “Hillbillies Like Broadcastin’ Better ’n Stayin’ on the Farm,” Billboard, 21 December 1940, p. 6; Edward Robbin, Woody Guthrie and Me: An Intimate Reminiscence (Berkeley: Lancaster-Miller, 1979), 31. 15. Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999, Carson City, Nevada; Woodrow W. Guthrie, “Application for Employment, Form 375,” U.S. Department of Interior, 12 May 1941, 2, in Woody Guthrie Corporate File, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 16. Donald J. Bogue, Henry S. Shryock Jr., and Siegfried A. Hoermann, Subregional Migration in the United States, 1935–1940, vol. 1, Streams of Migration between Subregions (Oxford, Ohio: Scripps Foundation, 1957), table 1, pp. lxxxiii–cxxxiii; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and Seymour J. Janow, “Volume and Characteristics of Recent Migration to the Far West,” Tolan Committee, Hearings, pt. 6, table 16-A, 2307. Studies of the migration include Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979): and Gregory, American Exodus. Details about the families’ travails stem from Dempsey, interview by author, November 11, 1999; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss; Matt Jennings, interview by Richard Reuss, typed notes from tape recording, March 1972, RRP; Mary (Guthrie) Jennings Boyle, interview by Ed Cray, typed transcript, 19 August 1998, in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 17. Guthrie, “Application for Employment, Form 375,” ; Matt Jennings, interview by Ed Cray, typed transcript, December 29, 1998, 12, in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Matt Jennings, interview by Richard Reuss, 4; Minnie Barrett and Bob Barrett, interview by Richard Reuss, field notes, June 8, 1968, Pampa, Texas, RRP, 1, 3, 5; Mary (Guthrie) Jennings Boyle, interview by Ed Cray. 18. Dempsey, interview by author, November 11, 1999; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, field notes, Sun Valley California, 14 June to 18 June 1968, RRP. 19. Louis B. Perry and Richard S. Perry, A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 241, 405–6, 422, 427, 431, 439–41, 501–2; “Strikers Seize Douglas Plant,” 24 February 1937; “385 Douglas Strikers Jailed,” Los Angeles Examiner, 26 February 1937; “Plane Chief

248

/ Notes to Pages 50–51

Calls Strike a Revolution,” 3 March 1937, Los Angeles Examiner files, Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter Los Angeles Examiner files, HC); James Richard Wilburn, “Social and Economic Aspects of the Aircraft Industry in Metropolitan Los Angeles during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971), 114–18. 20. “Plane Chief Calls Strike a Revolution,” 3 March 1937, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Perry and Perry, Los Angeles Labor Movement, 241, 405–6, 422, 427, 431, 439–41, 501–2. 21. “Growing Fascist Spirit Alarms Liberal Forces,” Utopian News (Los Angeles), 6 May 1935, pp. 1, 2; Luther Whiteman and Samuel L. Lewis, Glory Roads: The Psychological State of California (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936), 4. 22. Whiteman and Lewis, Glory Roads, 4. 23. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 41; Bogue, Shryock, and Hoermann, Subregional Migration, table 1, pp. lxxxiii–cxxxiii. 24. Crist, “Career Men—In Relief,” 4–5, 8; Residential Security Maps of Metropolitan Los Angeles, California, 1939, and City Survey Files, U.S. Home Owners Loan Corporation Papers, Record Group 195, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; reprint, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1995), 14; Miriam Luise Gaertner, “A Study of Transient Girls in Los Angeles, Including Fifty-eight Case Digests” (M.S.W. thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939), 55–62, 186–88; Charles B. Spaulding, “The Development of Organization and Disorganization in the Social Life of a Rapidly Growing Working-Class Suburb within a Metropolitan District” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939), 55, 58, 61, 74–75, 52–53, 86, 103–4; David Bricker, “Ranch Homes Are Not All the Same,” Preserving the Recent Past 2, ed. Deborah Slaton and William G. Foulks (Washington, D.C.: Historic Preservation Education Foundation, National Park Service, 2000), 112–223; Becky M. Nicolaides, “ ‘Where the Working Man Is Welcomed’: Working-Class Suburbs in Los Angeles, 1900–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 6 (November 1999): 533–49; Don Pierce, interview by author, 15 September 2000, Hendersonville, Tennessee; Wilburn, “Aircraft Industry,” 94–97, 99, 100. 25. Crist, “Career Men—in Relief,” 8; Linda Nueva España Maram, “Negotiating Identity: Youth, Gender, and Popular Culture in Los Angeles’s Little Manila, 1920s–1940s” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996), 197, 191–92, 200, 208; Woody Guthrie, “Skid Row,” p. 7, and “Hollywood Boulevard,” p. 7, Hollywood Tribune, 31 July and 7 August 1939. 26. Harry Hay, interview by author, 16 February 1999, West Hollywood, California. 27. Radio Daily staff, The 1938 Radio Annual (New York: Radio Daily, 1938), 101; “Week’s Best in Radio,” Light: The Democratic Leader (Los Angeles), 17 June 1938, p. 12; “Your Radio Today,” Los Angeles Times, 3 January

Notes to Pages 52–54 / 249 1939; advertisement, “Listen to J. Frank Burke,” Progressive Leader, 25 October 1939, p. 6; letter from Woody Guthrie to Alan Lomax, 15 February 1941, Woody Guthrie Manuscripts, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter WGM); Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 6 (handwritten note in margin), 24. 28. On the National Barn Dance, see Violet Gooch Stone, “Children’s Preferences for Radio Programs” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1937), 62. On the Hollywood Barn Dance and the Cowtown Boys, see Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 4, 5, 14, 31; Radio Daily staff, 1938 Radio Annual, 564. On the Beverly Hill Billies see Ken Griffis, “The Charlie Quirk Story and the Beginning of the Beverly Hill Billies,” JEMFQ 8, pt. 4, no. 8 (Winter 1972): 174. 29. Guy Logsdon, “Jack Guthrie: A Star That Almost Was,” Journal of Country Music 15, no. 2 (1993): 32–38; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 3, 5, 6; George Sanders, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 8 (October 1950): 16. 30. Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999. 31. Ibid.; Dempsey, interview by Reuss, 6; Richard L. Capistrant, “Carson Woman Remembers Radio Days with Woody Guthrie,” Nevada Appeal (Carson City), 19 June 1988, Lifestyle, p. 8. Figures computed from annual salaries are listed in Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940: Population: Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870 to 1940 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), table xxiv, 181. 32. Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999; Dempsey, interview by Reuss, 6; Capistrant, “Carson Woman,” 8. 33. Woody Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” typed manuscript, 2, in manuscript set 1, box 4, folder 31, WGFA; Guthrie, “People of the United States vs. Woodrow Wilson (Woody) Guthrie,” 3; Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999; Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001, Carson City, Nevada. 34. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 36; “March of Progress,” California—Magazine of the Pacific (May 1938); 29; EPIC News (Los Angeles), 29 April 1938, p. 5; EPIC News, 27 September 1937, p. 2; EPIC News, 26 July 1937, p. 3; “Microphone Hi-Lites,” Light: The Democratic Leader, 9 September 1938, p. 12; McWilliams, Southern California, 171, 304–5; “Your Radio Today,” Los Angeles Times, 3 January 1939, p. 6; “Listen to J. Frank Burke,” advertisement, The Progressive Leader, 25 October 1939, p. 6; “Radio Log,” advertisement, Utopian News, 29 November 1934, p. 7. 35. On the elder Burke’s early life, see Oliver Thornton, interview by Richard Reuss, notes on conversation, n.d., RRP, box 8, folder 3, pp. 1–2; “Santa Ana Newspaper Deal Echoed in Court,” Los Angeles Times, 11 October 1932; and “Obituaries,” Orange County Register, 4 August 1966. On Burke’s oratory see John Fante, diary entry, 23 January 1940, reprinted in John Fante: Selected Let-

250

/ Notes to Pages 55–56

ters, 1932–1940 (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991), 321–22. On Burke’s life in California, see “Radical Case Handling Hit,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1934; Joseph Timmons, “Burke Blocks Harwood Job,” 28 November 1935, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. Other biographical material from Thornton, interview by Richard Reuss, 2. 36. Joseph Timmons, “Burke Blocks Harwood Job,” 28 November 1935, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; “Kenny Favors Burke as Party’s State Chief,” Los Angeles Times, 9 September 1938; “Democratic Leaders Meet Tonight to Draft Platform,” Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1938; “Olson Appoints Four to Boards,” Los Angeles Times, 1 March 1939; “Radio Station Zone Variance Request Opposed by Citizens,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1941; Thornton, interview by Richard Reuss, 1–4; “Five Here Ask for New Dry Law,” 17 May 1939, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Radio Daily staff, The 1938 Radio Annual, 101; and “J. F. Burke Quits Control Board,” 13 January 1940, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 37. Dempsey, interviews by author; Woody Guthrie and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection (of) Old Time Hill Country Songs: Being Sung for Ages, Still Going Strong (Gardena, Calif.: Spanish American Institute Press, 1937), 10. 38. Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Couch, letter to Woody and Lefty Lou, 30 December 1937; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 8, 15, 25; Matt Jennings, interview by Victor and Judy Wolfenstein, typed notes, January 1972, Victor Wolfenstein Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopied materials in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 4; Notes to “More Purty Gals Than One,” 45, and “Be Kind to the Boy on the Road,” 100, in Woody Guthrie, “Original Songs,” handwritten and typescript songbook pages, 23 February 1939, notebook 1, folder 4, WGFA. This songbook, according to Dempsey, included anecdotes, stories, and jokes that the two read over the air. 39. Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 11, 14; Woody Guthrie, “The People of the United States versus Woodrow Wilson (Woody) Guthrie,” 6 July 1949, 3, manuscripts box 7, folder 21, WGFA; Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001. 40. Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001; Robert D. Heinl, “Mexico Menaces American Radio,” Tower Radio 1 (May 1934): 16–17, 90, clipping in Fred Hoeptner name file, Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee; W. W. Bauer, “Menace from Mexico!” Rural Radio 1, no. 2 (March 1938): 7–8; Gene Fowler, “Border Radio,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 45; Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1998), 160–68; 205–13. 41. Dempsey, interviews by author; Woody Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” 3, WGFA.

Notes to Pages 56–57 / 251 42. Guthrie, “Songs, People, Places,” WGFA, 2–3; Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999. This is not to say that Guthrie entirely purged their broadcasts of western material. Guthrie, for one, was known to call listeners “pardner,” and the pair sang Guthrie’s later-famous somewhat-western-themed songs “Oklahoma Hills” and “Reno Blues (Philadelphia Lawyer).” 43. This analysis is based on three sources: Guthrie and Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection; Woody Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” carbon copy of typescript, box 2, WGM; and the aforementioned Guthrie, “Original Songs,” hand and typescript songbook pages, 23 February 1939, notebook 1, folder 4, WGFA. Songs appearing in more than one of these sources were not counted more than once unless the lyrics of the second version had been changed enough to suggest a wholly independent song. My primary method of analyzing these songs was by cross-checking titles, lyrics, and notations with songs found in commercial hillbilly music sources such as Guthrie T. Meade’s exhaustive four-volume The Annotated Discography of Traditional Music: Commercial Country Music Recordings: 1921–1942 (manuscript, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, n.d.); Tin Pan Alley sources such as Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); minstrelsy sources such as Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of American Minstrel Stage (1930; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971); and Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); and folk song sources such as G. Malcolm Laws, Native American Balladry: A Descriptive Study and a Bibliographical Syllabus, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1964); William A. Owens, Texas Folk Songs, 2nd ed. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1976); Ethel and Chauncey O. Moore, Ballads and Folk Songs of the Southwest: More Than 600 Titles, Melodies, and Texts Collected in Oklahoma by Ethel and Chauncey O. Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964); and Vance Randolph’s four-volume Ozark Folksongs (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980). Jeff Place of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage was particularly helpful in locating and analyzing these works. 44. Analysis also based on sources in note 43. Songs appear in Guthrie, “Songs off Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 52, 96, 103, 124. For background on the origins of “After the Ball,” see Hamm, Yesterdays, 291, 305. On their minstrelsyorigin songs, see Meade, Annotated Discography, 485; Nathan, Dan Emmett, 425, 455–56; Wittke, Tambo and Bones, 195. On the commercial country figures mentioned, see “Otto Gray and His Oklahoma Cowboys,” insert in JEMFQ 7, pt. 2, no. 22 (Summer 1971); Walter Darrell Hade, “Vernon Dalhart: Commercial Country Music’s First International Star,” JEMFQ 2, pt. 2, no. 38 (Summer 1975): 95–103; Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Charles Wolfe, “Delmore Brothers,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 141.

252

/ Notes to Pages 57–60

45. Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 291. 46. This also refers to sources in note 43. On Guthrie’s do-it-yourself style, see McGovern, “Woody’s American Century,” 124–25. 47. Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 12, 15, 23–24, 34; Guthrie and Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection; Woody Guthrie, On a Slow Train through California, mimeograph copy, WGFA; and Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 158–59. On a Slow Train through California is mentioned in James Forester, “Slow Train thru California,” Hollywood Tribune, 3 July 1939, p. 10. Such promotional gimmicks were plentiful on Los Angeles radio during the Depression and occasionally offered inadequate but desperately needed services to the unemployed and poor. See Douglas Duff Connah, How to Build the Radio Audience (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1938), 172, 216, 218–19; Radio Art, May 1937; Variety, 27 January 1937. 48. Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001; also see Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 120. 49. See for instance, [Woody Guthrie], “Cornbread Philosophy,” Light: The Democratic Leader, 1 July 1938, p. 4; Woody Guthrie, “Production for Use Will Save the Taxpayer,” cartoon, California Progressive Leader, 1, no. 2 (18 October 1939): 1; Guthrie, “Skid Row” and “Hollywood Boulevard,” Hollywood Tribune, 31 July and 7 August 1939; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 1 June 1939, p. 4. 50. Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” WGFA, 6; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 12 June 1939, p. 4; Carman, Race of Singers, 117. 51. Dempsey, interviews by author. 52. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940), 22n18, table 3, 22, 23–24, 192–93; Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Patricia L. Kendall, Radio Listening in America: The People Look at Radio Listening—Again (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948), 37–41. Recent work seems to back this up. See Richard A. Peterson and Paul J. DiMaggio, “The Early Opry: Its Hillbilly Image in Fancy and Fact,” Journal of Country Music 4 (1973): 42–43; Peterson, Creating Country, 75. 53. Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1935), 85–93, 97, 103. 54. Spaulding, “Working-Class Suburb,” 173–74. 55. Handscript inventory of fan letters, in “Original Songs,” WGFA, 176–77. In a note in the margin on p. 177, Guthrie explains that he must have received “20,000 good old honest letters. Wish I hadn’t burnt them up.” 56. Forester, “Slow Train thru California,” 10; Robbin, Woody Guthrie and Me, 31; Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999. 57. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6–7. 58. Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 11, 15, 17; text accompanying “Woody and Lefty Lou’s Theme

Notes to Pages 61–63 / 253 Song,” in Guthrie, “Original Songs,” WGFA, 28; Charlie Quirk quoted in Griffis, “Charlie Quirk Story,” 174. 59. Connah, How to Build the Radio Audience, 89; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 15–17; Dempsey, interview by author, 11 November 1999. 60. “Woody and Lefty Lou’s Theme Song,” “Dollar Now and a Dollar When We Meet,” and “Better Stay in the Livery Barn,” in Guthrie, “Original Songs,” WGFA, 28, 68, 91; “A Dollar Ninety Seven,” in Woody Guthrie, “The Songs of Woody Guthrie,” ca. 1937–1940, 200-page folder, carbon copy of typescripts, 17, 197, in box 2, Writings, WGM; Woody Guthrie, “Big City Ways” on “Air Check” recording, ca. 1939, four sides of two 10-inch 78-rpm disks, Harry Hay Phonograph Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles. After interviewing Harry Hay, I uncovered these disks in the library’s collection, where they had remained unknown. Hay recalls that he made the disks by recording Guthrie’s broadcasts over the air. While scholars appear to not have known about their existence, Hay said he played them at cocktail parties and left-wing functions for years. The lyrics to the four tracks match lyrics in Guthrie’s songbooks from the period and, when compared with Dust Bowl Ballads, give some idea about the development of Woody’s social and political consciousness. 61. Maxine Crissman, “Another Word or Two from Lefty Lou,” in notes accompanying “Original Songs,” WGFA, 54. Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 32; Woody Guthrie, “Dust Bowl Blues,” 12, in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM. 62. Woody Guthrie, “Do-Re-Mi,” 30, in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM. Guthrie’s notes in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, also identify the song as being written in 1937. The ballad, which appeared in print more than a year before the appearance of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and several months before the novelist’s political pamphlet on the Okies, proves overwhelmingly that Guthrie was not merely a clever musical emulator who drew from Steinbeck’s literary depictions of migrants, as H. R. Stoneback has argued, but had developed an independent, humorous, and yet potent, early critique of the injustice suffered by migrants when Los Angeles police attempted to blockade state borders. See Stoneback, “Rough People,” 61–62. 63. Guthrie and Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection, 1; Woody Guthrie, “Do-Re-Mi,” in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 30; Woody Guthrie, “Do-Re-Mi,” notebook 1, folder 5, p. 43, WGFA. 64. Guthrie and Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection, 17, 20, 24; Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001, 3. 65. Guthrie and Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection, 20; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World (San Francisco), 27 May 1939, p. 4. Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001. 66. Woody Guthrie, “Desert Sun, Rr. ‘Bulls’ Harass Workers,” Light: The Democratic Leader (Los Angeles), 9 September 1938, pp. 1, 9. 67. The first of these was “Cornbread Philosophy,” Light: The Democratic

254

/ Notes to Pages 63–65

Leader, September 1938, p. 4. “Woody Sez” ran in the People’s World and later the East Coast Daily Worker. 68. Woody Guthrie, “Blowing Down This Road,” “Ain’t Got a Cent,” and “Dustbowl Refugees,” in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 5, 17, 100. 69. Guthrie, “Ain’t Got a Cent,” in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 17; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 7 July 1939, p. 2; 10 July 1939, p. 4; and 12 July 1939, p. 4. 70. Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 23 May 1939, p. 4; 27 May 1939, p. 4; and 3 June 1939, p. 4; Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 10, 137. 71. Woody Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” WGFA, 5; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 5 June 1939, p. 4. 72. Guthrie, “Dust Bowl Refugee,” “Blowing Down This Road,” “I’m a Dustbowl Refugee,” in “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 1, 5, 100; Guthrie, “you are the dust bowl refugees . . . ” manuscript 2, no. 3, 1940, WGFA; Denning, Cultural Front, 272; Woody [Guthrie], “Thirty Bucks Wood Help,” Hollywood Tribune, 24 July 1939, WGFA. Also see the full 1939 run of “Woody Sez” in People’s World. 73. Norman Pierce, interview by Richard Reuss, 8 July 1967, typescript notes, RRP, 1; Light: The Democratic Leader, 17 June 1938, pp. 1, 4; Jack Y. Quayle, “Spain’s American Fighters Find War No Picnic,” Light: The Democratic Leader, 17 June 1938, p. 1. 74. Ed Robbin, Richard Reuss’s notes on the interview by E. Victor and Judi Wolfenstein, December 1969, box 8, folder 3, RRP; Ed Robbin, letter to Marjorie Greenblatt Guthrie, 20 March 1974, correspondence no. 3, box 1, folder 16.1, WGFA; Robbin, Woody Guthrie and Me, 18–19, 33–42. To some extent Guthrie, a high school dropout, appears to have idolized the educated Jewish Americans and immigrants whom his position as a performer and as a radical newspaper columnist allowed him to meet. In his “Cornbread Philosophy” column in Light, Guthrie argued somewhat simplistically that Jews were “too brilliant” to live in “Greed Ripped and War Torn Europe. . . . All they want is to be Free to Work Hard and to be friendly and at Peace with Everybody (9 September 1938, p. 4).” Guthrie’s own religious faith in the late 1930s was an amorphous combination of an earlier evangelical Church of Christ affiliation, some Eastern religious philosophy he picked up in Oklahoma, and Rosicrucianism, one of several mystical alternative religious movements growing in popularity in Southern California at this time. Although he never converted to Judaism, the singer-songwriter later would raise the children of his second marriage as humanist Jews—holding a hootenanny-type reception for Arlo’s bar mitzvah. See Guthrie, “A Synopsis of the Book ‘Boomchasers,’ ” ca. 1946, 5, in manuscript 1, folder 15, WGFA; Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001; (Richard Reuss), letter to Heidi (?), 16 March 1974, box 2, folder 1, RRP. 75. I do not find evidence of Guthrie using the term Okie even in his personal correspondence until 1940, well after he left Los Angeles.

Notes to Pages 65–68 / 255 76. Frank Wilkinson, interview by author, 14 June 2000, Los Angeles, California. 77. “Obituaries: Ben Reddick: Newsman Coined ‘Okies’ Term,” Los Angeles Times, 28 October 1997, p. A20. On the latter, see, for instance, The Plow Broke the Plains, dir. Pare Lorentz, Resettlement Administration, 1936, available on Our Daily Bread and Other Films of the Great Depression, DVD (Image Entertainment/Blackhawk Films, 1999), black-and-white, 3 hrs., 14 min. 78. On whiteness of European immigrant “ethnics,” see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1998). 79. Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 108–9; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 18. Guthrie discusses early African American influences in a margin note in “Original Songs,” 151, WGFA. 80. Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie Folk Songs (New York: Ludlow Music, 1963), 183; Guy Logsdon and Jeff Place, liner notes to Woody Guthrie, Buffalo Skinners: The Asch Recordings, vol. 4, compact disc, Smithsonian Folkways SFW40103; Woody Guthrie, letter to editor, People’s World, 10 April 1941, p. 5. 81. Woody Guthrie, letter to editor, People’s World, 10 April 1941, p. 5. 82. Matt Jennings, interview by Victor and Judi Wolfenstein, 5. On Lunn, see Charles Wolfe, “Robert Lunn,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 309. 83. Guthrie and Crissman, “The Chinese and the Japs,” in Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection, 2; Cisco Houston, interview by Lee Hays, June 1975, typed transcript, 18, 20, Lee Hays Papers, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Woody Guthrie, notes to “Dust Bowl Refugee,” box 1, folder 2, Woody Guthrie Papers, Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (1943; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 264–69; Guthrie, Woody Guthrie Folk Songs, 183. A colleague has suggested that Guthrie’s Manchurian neighbor story may be a fabrication, because emigrating from the region was highly difficult in the late 1930s. 84. Guthrie, “My Life,” 7; Guthrie and Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection, 9, 18; Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 147, 163; Alice Anderton, Intertribal Wordpath Society, Norman, Oklahoma, personal email correspondence, 14 September 1999; Clara Sue Kidwell, University of Oklahoma, personal e-mail correspondence, 29 September 1999; Guthrie, “Will Rogers Highway,” in “Original Songs,” 198, WGFA. 85. Lambdin Kay, “Along the Way: I Like Hillbilly Music,” Rural Radio 1, no. 3 (April 1938): 119; Kay, “Along the Way: Thank You, Mr. Koos,” Rural Radio 1, no. 5 (June 1938): 9; Peterson, Creating Country Music, 29. 86. Woody Guthrie, letter to Alan Lomax, 15 February 1941, Los Angeles, in box 1, Letters, WGM.

256

/ Notes to Pages 68–70

87. Ibid. 88. Perry and Perry, Los Angeles Labor Movement, vii, 249, 306, 361, 399, 422, 438–41, 522–27, 535. Also see runs of EPIC News and Utopia News. 89. Chris Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (New York: New Press, 2005), 157. 90. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 209, 214; Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 100, 135; Lambdin Kay, “Along the Way,” Rural Radio 1, no. 3 (April 1938); Cary Ginell, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 91–92. 91. Gene Autry, with Mickey Herskowitz, Back in the Saddle Again (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 53. 92. Elbert Haling, “W. Lee O’Daniel,” Rural Radio 1 no. 5 (June 1938): 10; Elbert Haling, “Radio Elects a Texas Governor,” Rural Radio 1, no. 8 (September 1938): 4–5. On Hamblen’s candidacy, see the following clippings from the Los Angeles Examiner files, HC: “Stuart Hamblen and Why He Ran,” 2 September 1938; “Hamblen Splits Democrats,” 14 October 1938; “Stuart Hamblen Lead in Race for Congress,” n.d., “Plummer, Hamblen Split Explained,” 26 October 1938; Joseph Timmons, “3 Congress Districts Buzz with Politics,” 10 September 1941. Jimmie Davis, known for recording “You Are My Sunshine,” likewise used his background as a hillbilly musician to run for public safety commissioner of Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1938 and was eventually elected governor. See Toru Mitsui, “Jimmie Davis,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 136. 93. Woody Guthrie, “Vote for Bloat,” handscript drawing and text on a paper bag, n.d., box 3, WGM. 94. [Woody Guthrie], “Cornbread Philosophy,” Light: The Democratic Leader, 1 July 1938, p. 4; Woody Guthrie, “ About Woody,” On a Slow Train through California, WGFA, n.p; Woody Guthrie, notes accompanying “Original Songs,” 23 February 1939, Woody Guthrie Archive, 4, 74, WGFA. 95. McWilliams, Southern California, 299–303. 96. Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001; Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, 16; Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 36, 77; Guthrie, “Original Songs,” WGFA, 130. 97. Guthrie, $30 Wood Help, 11, 30, 77–79;. 98. Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 6 July 1939, p. 4; Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 36, 77. 99. On Ham and Eggs, see Perry and Perry, Los Angeles Labor Movement, 422, 494; and Robert E. Burke, Olson’s New Deal for California (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1953), 26. My assessment here differs from that offered by Mike Davis, Kevin Starr, and even Carey McWilliams, all of whom see Ham and Eggs as a manifestation of frustrated lower-middle-class chauvinism. In 1938 and 1939, Ham and Eggs’ liberal support ranged from the centrist labor

Notes to Pages 70–71 / 257 leaders to some writers from the Communist Party’s People’s World. The movement embraced the far right conspiracy-mongering of anti-Semites like Gerald L. K. Smith only in the 1940s, after a debilitating power struggle and after much of the Left had abandoned it. See Perry and Perry, Los Angeles Labor Movement, 422; “Ham of Eggs Drive On,” and “Saga of Ham and Eggs Caravan,” People’s World, 20 May 1939, pp. 1, 3. 100. Here, of course, I build on Mike Davis’s work in City of Quartz, 30–54. 101. Disasters and skid rows are discussed in the next paragraph. On traffic, the jail system, finance, and flophouses, see Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 64, 82, 80, 187. 102. On Fante, see John Fante, Ask the Dust (1939; reprint, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980); and Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 71–91, 159–82. Henri LeFebvre defines differential spaces as mental and physical places so contradictory to the ruling elite’s dominant conception of the city landscape that they poke holes in its neatly packaged version of “reality.” The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; reprint, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991), 52–53, 60, 302–3, 348–49, 383–84, 386; also see Henri LeFebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (1970; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 36–41, 139–50; on the dominant Los Angeles myth, see Davis, City of Quartz, 25–30. 103. Guthrie, “Original Songs,” WGFA, 93. Also see Woody Guthrie, letter to Alan Lomax, April 1941. 104. On the floods, see “New Year’s Flood,” in Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 98; “Thirty-seven on Death List in Record 8.27 Deluge,” Los Angeles Times, 2 January 1934; “Seventy-five on Missing List of Tragic Storm,” Los Angeles Times, 3 January 1934, p. 1; Myrtle Esther Silver, “Medical Care for Families on Relief in Glendale District of Los Angeles County” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1937), 23–24; Gretchen Palmatier Couch, “An Analysis of School Attendance and Child Welfare Services in Glendale City Schools” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, June 1939), 144; “Flood Clean-Up Speeded through Coordination,” and “Storm Lesson Pointed Out,” Los Angeles Times, 5 January 1934, pt. 2, p. 1; “Known Deaths Reach Seventy as Storm Flood Waters Recede,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1938, p. 1; and Kevin Roderick, “Deadly Flood of 1938 Left Its Mark on Southland,” Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1999, p. B6. On the Los Feliz fire, see Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 98; and Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” WGFA, 2; Mike Eberts, Griffith Park: A Centennial History (Los Angeles: Historical Society of Southern California, 1996), 155, 171–81. On homelessness, see Woody Guthrie, “Big City Ways,” side 3, and “Skid Row,” side 2, on “Air Check” recording, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles; Davis, City of Quartz, 40–41, 91n39; Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” WGM, 39, 64, 80, 84, 111; Guthrie also

258

/ Notes to Pages 71–73

wrote columns in the Hollywood Tribune describing the skid rows on both Fifth Street and Hollywood Boulevard, 31 July, p. 7, and 7 August 1939, p. 7. 105. Harry Hay, interview by author; Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” 6; Will Geer, interview by Victor and Judi Wolfenstein, audiocassette recording, ca. 1970, Victor Wolfenstein Collection; Woody Guthrie, “High Balladree,” 2E, WGFA; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 17 June 1939, p. 4, 1 July 1939, 4; Woody Guthrie, “This Baby Must Grow,” cartoon, California Progressive Leader 1, no. 3 (10 November 1939): 1; Guthrie, “Production for Use Will Save the Taxpayer,” 1. 106. Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 144–161, 163, 198–199. 107. Woody Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers,” WGFA, 5; Richard A. Reuss, “American Folklore and Left-Wing Politics” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1971), 50–53, 63, 79, 82, 84, 94–95; Cohen, “Woody the Red?” 138–152; Denning, Cultural Front, 4–6. On the official Popular Front ideology, see Earl Browder, Build the United People’s Front: Report to the November Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1936) 31, 34–36, 41–45, 48–49, 51, 58–65. 108. J. Frank Burke, “Your Editor of the Air,” California Progressive Leader, 18 October 1939, p. 8; Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 17 June 1939, p. 4; Harry Hay, interview by author. 109. Woody Guthrie, “Woody Sez,” People’s World, 17 June, 1939, p. 4. 110. Harry Hay, interview by author. 111. See runs for both magazines. For background on the Soviet party’s impact on American Communism, see Randi Storch, “Moscow’s Archives and the New History of the Communist Party of the United States,” Perspectives 38, no. 7 (October 2000): 46. 112. Spaulding, “Working-Class Suburb,” 252, 271. 113. Wilburn, “Aircraft Industry,” 94–96, 117. 114. Whiteman and Lewis, Glory Roads, 22; Utopian News 3, no. 10 (16 December 1935): 4. 115. EPIC News, 15 August 1938, p. 3; EPIC News, 2 November 1936, p. 6; EPIC News, 24 May 1937, p. 5. 116. Chester G. Hanson, “Governor to Call Ham-Eggs Election,” Los Angeles Times, 19 May 1939, p. 1; Hanson, “Ham-and-Egg Band Invades Sacramento,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1939, p. 1; “Ham and Eggs Drive On,” and “Saga of Ham and Eggs Caravan,” People’s World, 20 May 1939, pp. 1, 3; Al C. Joy, “A Dream in Crackpot Corners,” California—Magazine of the Pacific (October 1938): 22. 117. Gregory, American Exodus, 152–53. 118. Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), 365–81; Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt, 10–19. 119. American Guardian (Oklahoma City), 3 September 1937, pp. 1–4; American Guardian, 30 June 1939, p. 3; American Guardian, 6 October 1939, pp. 1, 3; American Guardian, 21 June 1940, p. 2; EPIC News, 17 January 1938,

Notes to Pages 74–75 / 259 p. 6; EPIC News, 11 April 1938; EPIC News, 15 January 1940, p. 4; Lee Hays, interview, typed transcription of audio tape, sides 1–2, June 1975, in “Interviews on Woody Guthrie,” Lee Hays Papers, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. On Ameringer, see Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken, especially 345–446; Richard Oestreicher, “Terence Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and Artisanal Republicanism,” in Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 59; and Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 99. 120. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton, Radio Research, 1941 (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941), especially 110–39. Also see Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page, 16–25; Lazarsfeld and Kendall, Radio Listening in America, 32–33, 35–40. The histories of Lazarsfeld and the Office of Radio Research are discussed in Douglas, Listening In, 125–27. Quote from Denning, Cultural Front, 4. 121. McGovern, “Guthrie’s American Century,” 124–125. 122. McGovern, “Guthrie’s American Century,” discusses examples of doit-yourself in rock. On do-it-yourself in punk, see Andy Bennett, Cultures of Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001), 60; and Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 9, 39–41, 64–65. On Guthrie’s imagery in contemporary culture, see Charles Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1997), 211–16. 123. Jack Guthrie and his Oklahomans, “Oklahoma Hills,” 78-rpm record Capitol 201, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Hank Thompson and His Bravo Valley Boys, “Oklahoma Hills,” Vintage Collections, compact disc, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-36901-2-1; John Rumble, “Hank Thompson,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 537; Maddox Brothers and Rose, “Philadelphia Lawyer,” 78-rpm disc, Four Star 1289, No. SFC78-15673, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Merle Haggard with Willie Nelson, “Reno Blues (Philadelphia Lawyer),” in Haggard, Haggard Like Never Before, compact disc, HAG Records 0005, 2003. 124. See Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Hard-Shell and SoftShell Country Fans,” Journal of Country Music 17, no. 3 (1995): 3–6; Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 125. Haggard’s early career is discussed in chapter 6, and his recent politics in the reprise of this volume. On his recent left-leaning populism, see Merle Haggard, interview by author, 11 September 1993, Palo Cedro, California (portions of the interview appeared in Peter La Chapelle, “Older, Wise,” Bakersfield

260

/ Notes to Pages 77–80

Californian, 26 September 1993, pp. E1, E2); Alexander Cockburn, “Beat the Devil: The Tenth Crusade,” The Nation 275, no. 9 (23 September 2002): 9; Cheryl Burns, “Merle Haggard on Ashcroft,” Counter Punch listserve, 26 August 2002, wwwcounterpunch.org/pipermailcounterpunch-list/2002-August/ 022067.html, accessed on 2 December 2002; “Country Music Legend Merle Haggard against War in Iraq,” Associated Press wire story, 22 March 2004; and Merle Haggard, “That’s the News,” Haggard Like Never Before, compact disc.

3. rhythm kings and riveter queens 1. Glenn W. Sudmeier, interview by author, 8 April 2001, San Dimas, California; Glenn W. Sudmeier, interview by author, 16 April 2001, Hesperia, California. 2. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979; reprint, London: Routledge, 1991), 55–56. Hebdige quotes Albert Goldman’s Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!! (Panther [probably New York: Random House], 1974). 3. “Cooley Arrived Here with Violin, 4 Cents,” Los Angeles Times, 5 April 1961, pt. 1, 26; Catherine Winston, “Musically Inclined Spade Cooley Family Enjoys Valley Life,” Antelope Valley Press (California), 6 November 1960, p. 2. 4. Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery, interview by Jean A. Boyd, 1 June 1992 and 24 January 1998, Dallas, Texas, Arts and Culture Project, Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas (hereafter IOH); Cary Ginell, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 12–13, 29–30, 43, 75; Fred Hoeptner, guest host, “Chuck Taggart’s Down Home,” audiocassette recording of radio program, 24 March 2001, KCSN 88.5 FM, Los Angeles; Charles R. Townsend, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 55. 5. Bob Wills, interview by Buck Wayne Johnston, audiocassette recording, April 1967, El Cajon, California, Johnston personal collection; Knocky Parker, interview by Fred (no last name given), 6 July 1959, Owensboro, Kentucky, no. FT 2682, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter SFC); Fort Worth Doughboys, “Nancy Jane,” on Doughboys, Cowboys, by various artists, compact disc; William Broonzy, with Yannick Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story (New York: Oak Publications, 1964); Ginell, Milton Brown, 4–5, 63–64, 81; Townsend, San Antonio, 105–7. 6. Ginell, Milton Brown, 176–77; Townsend, San Antonio, 88–95; Buck Wayne Johnston, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 27 March 2001, Alpine, California; “Bell Boys,” Oklahoma City Times, 29 October 1937; “Bell Boy Trio to Be Here Monday,” unidentified newspaper clipping, 4 February 1938, Jimmy Wakely name file 2118, SFC; Jimmy Wakely, “My Formative Years,” photocopy of typed manuscript, n.d., p. 3, Jimmy Wakely name file, NF2118, SFC. 7. U.S. Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Popula-

Notes to Pages 80–81 / 261 tion: 1940, State of Birth (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1944), 17–18; U.S. Bureau of Census, United States Census of Population: 1950: Special Reports: State of Birth, vol. 4, pt. 4, chap. A (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), 20–24; James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6, 175; Ernie Pyle, dispatch from May 7, 1941, in Ernie’s America: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s 1930s Travel Dispatches, ed. David Nichols (New York: Random House, 1989), 402–3; Joseph Edward Libby, “To Build Wings for the Angels: Los Angeles and Its Aircraft Industry, 1890–1936” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1990), 224; Patricia Carr Bowie, “The Cultural History of Los Angeles, 1850–1967: From Rural Backwash to World Center” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1980), 282; Nate R. White, “The Country Speaks: California,” Christian Science Monitor, June 12, 1941, p. 9; “Coast Orks Go ‘Billy’: Khaki and Overalled Oakies Make Metropolitan Maestri Feed ‘Em Down Home Tunes,” Billboard, 29 March 1943, p. 25. 8. Charles Emge, “Hillbilly Boom Can Spread Like Plague,” Down Beat, 6 May 1949, p. 1. 9. Quote from “Coast Orks Go ‘Billy,’” 25. On western swing events and the makeup of the audience, see Wesley Tuttle and Marilyn Tuttle, interview by author, 7 February 2001, San Fernando, California; and Lloyd R. Sims, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 29 April 2001, San Bernardino, California; Betty Anderson Wills, interview by David Stricklin, 3 November 1974, Fort Worth, Texas, Arts and Culture Project, IOH. My survey of sixty-seven performers is based on biographical material obtained from oral history interviews; Tophand magazine (Los Angeles); National Hill-Billy News (Derby, Conn.); John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (Los Angeles; hereafter JEMFQ); Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and the name files of the Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee (hereafter CMFL) and the SFC. Trade press reports include “American Folk Tunes and Tunesters” column, Billboard, 24 July 1943, p. 68; “American Folk Tunes and Tunesters” column, Billboard, 21 August 1943, p. 66. On Wills in California, see Charles R. Townsend, “Bob Wills,” in Stars of Country Music, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (New York: Da Capo, 1975), 169. 10. Performer and band names found in issues of Tophand. Also see Sunny Ciesla, “T. Texas Tyler: The Man with a Million Friends,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 2 (August 1946): n.p.; Cooley, signed typescript, July 1969, in Spade Cooley name file, CMFL, 3–4; and Don Pierce, interview by author, 15 September 2000, Hendersonville, Tennessee. Smokey Oakie Rogers also appeared as “Buck” on some of his recordings. 11. C. Phil Henderson, “Spade Cooley Defies Western Music Standards with

262

/ Notes to Page 82

Sensational Band,” Tophand 1, no. 4 (July 1946): 1; “Spade Cooley: Cherokee to His Western Swing,” Billboard, 2 March 1946, pp. 1, 18; Spade Cooley, letter to Thurston Moore, 24 July 1969, Manuscripts Collection, CMFL; “Spade Cooley in Person, Sunday, May 2,” handbill advertisement, n.d., Spade Cooley name file, CMFL; “Cooley Arrived Here with Violin, 4 Cents”; Spade Cooley, “Shame On You,” 78-rpm record, “He Made Hillbilly History: Spade Cooley,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 6 (June 1950): 6. Up until this time, the press and record labels struggled to find a term that fit western swing. Although Wills later detested the use of the term “hillbilly,” his early repertoire was labeled that, as well as “folk music,” “hot string band,” and “western.” As the music moved to California, the trade press seemed to delight in giving it alliterative titles that hinted at its jazz influences, such as “rustic rhythm” and “sagebrush syncopation.” By April 1942, the name western swing appeared regularly in print in the Wilmington Press in a series of advertisements for an unidentified “Western Swing Orchestra” playing a “square dance” at a local nightspot. The phrase “western swing,” however, did not achieve local and national recognition until the winter of that year. Al Jarvis, an influential Los Angeles jazz and swing disc jockey, held a radio contest in which he invited listeners to submit votes for top popular bandleaders. The winner would be named “King of Swing.” When Cooley unexpectedly bested several top national bandleaders in the poll and made the top ten for pop music, Jarvis dubbed him the “King of Western Swing.” Cooley began using the nickname “The King of Western Swing” as a stage nickname, and soon the phrase had become familiar across the country, spread significantly by commentators who pondered whether Cooley or Wills was really the king of western swing. Sunny Ciesla, “Spade Cooley: The King of Western Swing,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 4 (November 1946): 8–9; Billie Green, “Our Cover Cowboy, Spade Cooley,” Trails of the West (October 1945): 1–2; Laurence W. Etling, “Al Jarvis: Pioneer Disc Jockey,” Popular Music and Society (Fall 1999); Townsend, San Antonio, 58, 193; The Billboard 1944 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1944), 218, special supplement to Billboard; Hal Holly “Los Angeles Band Brief,” Down Beat, 1 July 1944, p. 6; Wilmington Press, 11 April 1942, p. 5; Sudmeier, interview by author, 8 April 2001. 12. “Hollywood Now Hillbilly H.Q.,” Billboard, 24 November 1951, pp. 1, 18. 13. Los Angeles programming and label data extracted from Tophand (Los Angeles), National Hill-Billy News (Wheeling, West Virginia), Western Music (Los Angeles), and Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas, 1985), 199. On Nashville comparisons, I consulted Don H. Doyle, Nashville: Since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 3, 26, 143–73; John Lomax III, “The Center of Music City: Nashville’s Music Row,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 386–87; and Richard A. Peterson, “Single-Industry Firm to Conglomerate Synergistics: Alternative Strategies for

Notes to Pages 82–84 / 263 Selling Insurance and Country Music,” in Growing Metropolis: Aspects of Development in Nashville, ed. James F. Blumstein and Benjamin Walter (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975), 349; Don Pierce, interview by author; H. B. Teeter, “Nashville, the Broadway of Country Music,” Coronet 32, no. 4 (August 1952): 75; John Rumble, “Castle Recording Studio,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 88; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 12–32. 14. “Bud DeSylva, John Mercer Form New Record Firm,” Down Beat, 15 April 1942, p. 12; “New West Coast Record Firm ‘Going Strong’ Reports Exec,” Down Beat, 15 May 1942, p. 12; Mike Levin, “Recording Sliced One-Third: Industry Recovers from Shellac Jitters,” Down Beat, 1 May 1942, p. 1; “Capitol Expands Again! Also Celebrates First Anniversary,” The Capitol 1, no. 7 (26 June 1943): 1, 3; “Capitol to Record Again! Negotiations End AFM Ban,” The Capitol 1, no. 13 (October 1943): 1; “Capitol Expands Again! Production Up to New High,” The Capitol 2, no. 6 (June 1944): 5; “Capitol Records’ Fast Rise Belies Early Turbulence,” 22 February 1955, Los Angeles Examiner files, Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter Los Angeles Examiner files, HC); Don Pierce, interview by author; Paul Grein, Capitol Records: Fiftieth Anniversary, 1942–1992 (Hollywood: Capitol Records, 1992), 8–14, 17–28, 39; Ken Nelson, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 16 May 2000, Camarillo, California; John Nielsen, “Gentleman of Western Swing,” Los Angeles Times, valley ed., 16 October 1985, pt. 2, 6. 15. C. Phil Henderson, “’Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 3; Bleeden, “Hollywood,” 18; “Army Broadcasting Selling the World,” Billboard, 5 February 1944, p. 12; “Activities of Armed Forces Radio Service, War Department,” 4, box 1, folder 1, Armed Forces Radio Service Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter AFRS); “Activities and Progress Report,” 4–5, box 1, folder 4, AFRS; Wanda Marvin, “V-Disks Help Hasten V-Day,” The Billboard 1944 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1944), 148–49, special supplement to Billboard; “Armed Forces Radio Service: World-Wide Outlets,” AFRS Playback 3, no. 4 (1 October 1945): 12–13, in box 1, folder 3, AFRS; “Wherever They May Roam,” Overture (Los Angeles) 28, no. 8 (November 1947): 12–13; Richard P. Stockdell, “The Evolution of the Country Radio Format,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 4 (1983): 146–47. 16. Nat Green, “Hillbillies Heat with Helium,” The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1943), 99, 102, special supplement to Billboard; “Phillips Looks Like ‘King Korn’ Tycoon of the West: Barnerys Now Eyeing Rural Calif. Circuit,” Billboard, 24 April 1944, p. 4; “LA Cowboy Band Tries Expansion,” Down Beat, 15 March 1944, p. 6; “Tabbing the Theater Takes,” The Billboard 1944 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1944), 219, special supplement to Billboard; Susan Kresnika Wilbur, “The History of Television in Los

264

/ Notes to Page 85

Angeles, 1931–1952” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1976), 67, 101; Dusti Lynn, “Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 5, no. 2 (November–December 1949): 22; Jeff Kisseloff, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920–1961 (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 170–82; “Spade Cooley Show,” dir. Bill States, KTLA-TV, ca. 1957, videorecording of television program, CMFL; “Spade Cooley—the King of Western Swing,” publicity release, 8 May 1953, 1, Spade Cooley name file, CMFL; Winston, “Musically Inclined Spade Cooley Family,” p. 2; “Cooley Arrived Here with Violin, 26. 17. See Spade Cooley, untitled memoir, typed manuscript, ca. July 1969, 3–5, Manuscripts Collection, CMFL; “Folk Artist Profiles: Spade Cooley,” The Billboard 1944 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1944), 364, special supplement to Billboard; “Spade Cooley: Cherokee to His Western Swing,” 1, 18. Some have recently questioned the degree to which Cooley was Cherokee and even whether Cooley was Native American at all. It is not my purpose here to refute or deny Cooley’s claims, but rather to emphasize that true or not, it was an important component of his stage identity. The author John Gilmore, an acquaintance of Cooley’s, offers this anecdote about an incident in Ojai, California, where Cooley and his wife Ella Mae got to drinking and discussed Cooley’s Indianness: “They were joking about the ‘Indian business’ (talk started by Ella Mae about Indian rugs being sold along Route 66, and her buying same), and the subject got to Spade’s ‘ancestry,’ which he laughed about and said, ‘Oh, hell, that’s so much bullshit but it sounds mighty nice, now don’t it? Plus I got all those redskins out there buying records!’ Hope that answers your question. Still doesn’t answer whether it was true or if he was covering up and showing himself as ‘pure white’ by denying some mixture along the way. My personal feeling is that Spade was such a showman, he’d do anything that would give a little flair to his image” (personal e-mail correspondence with author, 26 July 2005). 18. Cooley, untitled memoir; Duncan, interview by author, 8 April 2001; “Jimmie (sic) Wakely,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 2 (November–December 1948): 12; Jimmy Wakely, liner notes to Spade Cooley, Spade Cooley Columbia Historical Edition FC37467, SFC; Wakely, “My Formative Years”; Jimmy Wakely, Great Hillbilly and Western Swing Rarities, Bronco Buster, CD 9032. 19. “Folk Artist Profiles,” 364; Ken Griffis, “Tex Williams Story,” JEMFQ 15, no. 53 (Spring 1979): 7; Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11–53. 20. Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 1–2, 15–24, 67–77; “Edward Duran Ayres Report,” 20 August 1942, reprinted in Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, Readings on La Raza: The Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 128–29. 21. Charles Townsend, “Bob Wills,” in Stars of Country Music, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (New York: Da Capo, 1975): 169; “Spade Cooley: Cherokee to His Western Swing,” 1, 18; Spade Cooley, signed typescript, July

Notes to Pages 86–87 / 265 1969, in Spade Cooley name file, CMFL, 3–4; Spade Cooley, “Oklahoma Stomp,” 78-rpm record, Columbia 37937. 22. Paul Vanderroort II, “Spade Cooley’s Career in Column Close Up,” Tophand 1, no., 3 (June 1946): 9; “The King of Western Swing,” Jamboree Magazine (Ventura, Calif.) (September 1948): 3. 23. On the historical Geronimo, see Thomas E. Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 92–97, 378–80; and Jason Betzinez, “Geronimo Puts Down the Gun,” in Native American Testimony, ed. Peter Nabokov (New York: Viking, 1991), 112–16. On Geronimo’s image, see C. L. Sonnichsen, “From Savage to Saint: A New Image of Geronimo,” Journal of Arizona History 27 (1986): 5–34; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale, 1998), 160–63; Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 3, 53. 24. “Western Swing in Video Remote,” Overture 28, no. 4 (August 1948): 10. 25. Square Dance Jubilee, dir. Paul Landres, Matinee Classics videocassette (Lippert Productions International, 1949), 60 min. 26. The Silver Bandit, dir. Elmer Clifton, Cometvideo videocassette (Independent United–Spade Cooley Productions, 1949), 54 min. 27. Winston, “Musically Inclined Spade Cooley Family,” 8. Cooley’s Gaspard Duiffopruggar was on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in September 2000. The Hall of Fame exhibit suggested the instrument was a copy, not an actual Duiffopruggar, but Cooley’s interviews during his period of fame suggested that he either believed the violin to be authentic or wanted others to think so. 28. Spade Cooley, “Carmen’s Boogie,” 78-rpm record, Decca 28344, item no. 178-B in Gilbert Louey Country Music Collection, Division of Cultural History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter GLC). 29. Dusti Lynn, “Tall Texan . . . from Illinois,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 2 (November–December 1947): 14; Sunny Ciesla, “Sweetheart of the Saddle: Dusti Lynn,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 8 (May–June 1947): 26; Dusti Lynn, “Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 2 (November– December 1948): 10; Dusti Lynn, “Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 5, no. 2 (November–December 1949): 22. 30. Lorene Wills, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 6 April 2001, Shawnee, Oklahoma. 31. “American Folk Tunes and Tunesters” column, Billboard, 18 September 1943, pp. 68–69; Benny Garcia, interview by author, notes from telephone interview, 4 March 2001, Oklahoma City; “Jack Rivers in Playmore,” Tophand 1, no 6 (October 1946): 15. 32. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States, Working Paper Series no. 56 (Washington, D.C., September 2002),

266

/ Notes to Pages 87–90

www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056.html, accessed on 15 July 2006. 33. Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” Santa Cruz News, 19–25 January 1995, Metro sec., pp. 20–24; Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” New Times (San Luis Obispo, Calif.), 17 January 2002. 34. Faulkner Tjensvold, “An Inquiry into the Reasons for the PostDepression Migration from Oklahoma to Kern County in California” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1947), 6, 9; Sudmeier, interview by author, 8 April 2001 35. “Douglas All-Americans,” Douglas Airview, September 1941, pp. 20–21, 32. 36. “American Amalgam,” Douglas Airview, May 1943, pp. 20–21. 37. Garcia, interview by author; Hank Thompson, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 3 August 2001, Red River, Texas; “Mexico’s No. 1 Cowboy Singer,” Western and Country Music, 1, no. 7 (January 1952): n.p.; Jenks “Tex” Carman, “Hillbilly Hula,” 78-rpm disc, Four Star 1229, GLC. Also see liner notes, Jenks “Tex” Carman, Chippeha! Essential Dixie Cowboy (1948–1953), compact disc, Revenant Records 207; Mitch Myers, “Chippeha! Jenks ‘Tex’ Carman,” Metro Times (Detroit), www.metrotimes.com/music/rr/ 18/47/chipp.html, accessed 15 July 2006; Jon Johnson, review of Chippeha! Essential Dixie Cowboy (1948–1953), by Jenks “Tex” Carman, compact disc, Revenant Records Country Standard Time Web site, http://countrystandard time.com/cdtexcarman.html, accessed on 11 August 2005. Bob Wills reportedly hired a black horn player for his band while on a drinking binge, but relented after he sobered up, telling the man “I don’t know which one of us would get killed first if I took you back to Oklahoma with me.” This story was relayed by Wills’s wife, Betty Anderson Wills, interview by David Stricklin, 5 November 1974. 38. “The Indian Story,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 23 (April 1953): 14. 39. “Douglas Minstrels Draw Record Crowd,” Douglas Airview, February 1941, pp. 22–23; “Entertaining the Boys Who Fly Them,” Douglas Airview, June 1941, pp. 20–21; Dorothy Chandler, “Victory Varieties,” Douglas Airview, February 1943, pp. 28–29; “Jamup and Honey Spend 18 Years on WSM ‘Grand Ole Opry,’ ” National Hill-Billy News (September 1945): 11; Charles Wolfe, “Jamup and Honey (Lasses and Honey),” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 261. Although accounts suggest that the Douglas show featured traditional country music and not western swing, there are some connections to the tradition. Wills, for instance, had worked in blackface in a medicine show in his early days back in Texas. See David B. Stricklin, “The Development of the Musical Career of Bob Wills, 1929–1938: Folkforces and Commercialization” (master’s thesis, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 1978), 19. 40. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1992), 21–40.

Notes to Pages 90–92 / 267 41. North American Skywriter 4, no. 2 (14 January 1944): 3; “Oklahoma Day in Sycamore Grove, Los Angeles,” Tophand 1, no. 6 (October 1946), 9–10; “He Made Hillbilly History: Spade Cooley,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 6 (June 1950): 6. 42. Spade Cooley and Smokey Rogers, “Jive on the Range,” Spade Cooley’s Western Swing Song Folio (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Hill and Range Songs, 1945), 6–7; Jim Bob Tinsley, For a Cowboy Has to Sing (Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991), 23–28. 43. Jack Guthrie and His Oklahomans, “Oakie Boogie,” 78-rpm recording, Capitol 341; Capitol Records advertisement, Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946); Dave Travis, liner notes, As Good as It Gets: Western Swing, compact disc set, Disky Communications DO 247362, 5. 44. Cliffie Stone and His Orchestra, “He’s a Real Gone Okie,” Capitol 15157, GLC; Zeke Clements and His Western Swing Gang, “Oklahoma Blues” (originally Liberty 8), and Al Turner, liner notes, Swinging West: 1940s Western Swing from Southern California, Krazy Kat KK CD 15. 45. Doye O’Dell, “Dear Okie,” 78-rpm disc, Exclusive 33x, GLC; liner notes, Richard K. Spottswood, ed., Songs of Migration and Immigration, 33-rpm LP, LBC 6 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1977), 6; Doye O’Dell, “Okies in California,” Exclusive 88x, 78-rpm disc, GLC; liner notes, Doye O’Dell Bath Tub Blues, compact disc, Cattle CCD 250; “Platter Chatter: Okies in California,” Jamboree Magazine (Ventura, Calif.) 2, no. 3 (April 1949): 11. Another “Okie” recording, “She’s an Okie” by Al Vaughn, appears on a late 1940s release list from Los Angeles–based Four Star Records. “Four Star Records,” Rose Maddox name file, CMFL. 46. “California CIO Cost of Living Survey, Los Angeles Area, Sept. 1947,” “1947 Profits after Taxes of Specified Corporations Active in California,” and “Changes in Average Weekly Earnings in Los Angeles Industrial Area,” all typescript reports, box 1, folder 17, James Daugherty Collection, Southern California Library of Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles; “Transients Flood State: Too Few Jobs,” 8 April 1951, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (1953; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 205. 47. Although Guthrie referred to “us Oakies” in his personal correspondence in 1940 (see Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty: A Self Portrait, comp. and ed. Dave Marsh and Howard Leventhal [New York: HarperCollins, 1990], 38), he rarely used the term in his public writing until much later, in publications such as “The Okie Section” in Guthrie, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (New York: Oak Publications, 1967), 213. 48. Daniel J. Levinson, “The Study of Ethnocentric Ideology,” in The Authoritarian Personality: Part One, ed. T. W. Adorno et al. (New York: Science Editions, 1964), 115–16, 127. Also see D. J. Waldie, Holyland: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 173. 49. Lockheed Star (Los Angeles), 7 (12 April 1940): 15; American Aeronaut 2, no. 38 (27 April 1942): 1, 5, 8; American Aeronaut 7, no. 2 (June 1944): 1;

268

/ Notes to Pages 93–94

“Ex-Chief Davis Joins Douglas Aircraft Staff,” Los Angeles Times, 12 May 1939, 26. 50. See John S. Otto and Augustus M. Burns’s classic treatment “Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Early Twentieth Century South: Race and Hillbilly Music,” Phylon 35, no. 4 (December 1974): 407–17. 51. Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 250–60; Tony Scherman, “Arthur E. Satherly,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 470–71; Ken Griffis, Hear My Song: The Story of the Celebrated Sons of the Pioneers, JEMF series no. 5 (Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, 1974), 62–63. 52. “Sagebrush Johnny Mercer,” The Capitol 5, no. 5 (May 1947): 9; Lee Gillette, “Wally Fowler in Hollywood,” The Capitol 3, no. 11 (November 1945), 10. 53. Label information gleaned from various issues of Billboard, Tophand, and Down Beat, and from Don Pierce, interview by author. 54. “Sagebrush Johnny Mercer,” The Capitol 5, no. 5 (May 1947): 9; Lee Gillette, “Wally Fowler in Hollywood,” The Capitol 3, no. 11 (November 1945): 10. 55. Merle Travis, “Merle Travis on ‘Western Swing,’ ” JEMFQ 16, no. 60 (Winter 1980): 216; Johnny Bond, “Cave Man to Cowboy to Country: A Theory,” typescript, 7–10, Johnny Bond name file, NF 285, SFC. 56. On western swing’s polyglot origins, see Kevin Coffey, review, Journal of Country Music 20, no. 2 (n.d.): 43–46; Luther J. “Luke” Wills, interview by Jean Boyd, 21 July 1993, Las Vegas, Nevada, IOH; Joe Frank Ferguson and Eldon Shamblen, interview by David Stricklin, 19 May 1985, Dallas, Texas, IOH; Ginell, Milton Brown, 80, 108–10, 112–13, 120–21, 174–75, 177; Townsend, San Antonio, 101–4, 193–94; Bob Wills, interview by Buck Wayne Johnston; “Songs from Texas,” Time 37, no. 12 (24 March 1941). On the steel guitar’s origins in western swing, see Jean A. Boyd’s excellent Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 113–28. 57. Townsend, San Antonio, 28, 354; Claes af Geijerstam, Popular Music in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 139; Spade Cooley, “Saturday Night Social,” Spade Cooley: King of Western Swing, Club of Spade 00102, FC 11128, SFC. 58. Sudmeier, interviews by author; Clinton Machann, “Country-Western Music and the ‘Now’ Sound in Texas-Czech Polka Music,” JEMFQ 19, no. 69 (Spring 1983): 3–7. 59. “Adolph Hofner,” official Web page, www.geocities.com/~jimlowe/ western/hofner.html, accessed on 28 May 2004; Sunny Ciesla, “The Western Caravan,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 6 (June 1947): 6; Mary Jean Shurtz, “Your Song and Mine,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 1 (September–October 1948): 9; “New Releases,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 9 (July–August

Notes to Pages 94–95 / 269 1947): 21; Spade Cooley and His Orchestra, “Yodeling Polka,” 78-rpm disc, Columbia 20431. 60. “Spade Cooley ‘The King of Western Swing’ and His Dance Gang,” 16 in., 33-rpm transcription, Standard Program Library Q-206, CMFL; “Hornpipe (Devil’s Dream),” in Harding’s Original Collection of Jigs and Reels (New York: Paull-Pioneer Music Company, ca. 1930), 6. 61. William W. Savage Jr., Singing Cowboys and All That Jazz: A Short History of Popular Music in Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 48–52; Garcia, interview by author; Leonard Feather, The Book of Jazz: A Guide to the Entire Field (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), 112–16; Tex Williams, “One O’Clock Jump” and “South,” On the Air, 1947–1949: Western Swing from Southern California, compact disc, Country Routes RFD CD 17. 62. Ole Rasmussen and His Nebraska Cornhuskers, “C Jam Blues,” 78-rpm record, Capitol 205; Kevin Coffey, liner notes and discography, Ole Rasmussen, Sleepy Eyed John, compact disc, Bear Family, 1997, BCD 16255 20–23, 30–33; Rich Kienzle, liner notes, Hank Penny: Crazy Rhythm: The Standard Transcriptions, compact discs, Blood Shot Revival BS 806; Rody Erickson, “Don’t Get around Much Anymore,” and Al Turner, liner notes to Swinging West: 1940s Western Swing from Southern California, Krazy Kat KK CD 15, 17; Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–5, 639–39; Ginell, Milton Brown, 4–5, 63–64, 81; Broonzy, with Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues, 16, 19–20; T. Texas Tyler, “Remember Me,” Remember Me, audiocassette, Country Road N5–2106. 63. The Rhythm Boys, “Porky’s Boogie Woogie,” and Al Turner, liner notes, Swinging West: 1940s Western Swing from Southern California, by various artists, compact disc, Krazy Kat KK CD 15. Song was released under the name Porky Freeman Trio on the jazz label ARA—see ARA 4009A, 78-rpm disc, GLC. Also see Gene Bear and Ken Griffis, “The Porky Freeman Story,” JEMFQ 11, pt. 1, no. 37 (Spring 1975): 33–37; Jerry Vaughn, “That Ozark Playboy: Red Murrell,” JEMFQ 17, no. 61 (Fall 1981): 119; Guy Logsdon, “Jack Guthrie: A Star That Almost Was,” Journal of Country Music 15, no. 2 (1993): 32–38; “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records,” The Billboard 1946–47 Encyclopedia of Music (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1947), 548, special supplement to Billboard; “Red Murrell Adds Skonks to Airer,” Tophand 1, no. 3 (June 1946): 1. 64. “Coast Orks Go ‘Billy’,” 25. 65. John Payne, “Juke Joint Jive: Jimmy Maddin on the L.A. Scene circa the ’40s and ’50s,” LA Weekly, 25 June 1999, p. 42; Gerald Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 124; “Spade Organizes 18-Piece Group,” Down Beat, 6 May 1949, p. 8; Walter Carter, “It All Begins with a Song,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 525; Lee Gillette, “Big Man of Many Talents,” Capitol News 5, no. 11 (November 1947): 14; Wakely, See Ya’ Up There, 96; C. Phil Henderson, “’Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946): 6; George Saunders, “Hollywood

270

/ Notes to Pages 95–97

Hoedown Lowdown,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 17 (April 1952): 24; “Artists: Jimmy Wyble,” Classic Jazz Guitar, www.classicjazzguitar.com/artists/ artists_page.jsp?artist = 47, accessed on 15 July 2006. Wyble later became a fullfledged jazz artist, leading his own quintet in 1953 and later touring with Red Norvo and Benny Goodman. 66. “Zuccas Converting French Casino into Sagebrush Terpery,” Billboard, 9 September 1943, p. 13; “Sagebrush OK with Aragon,” Billboard, 8 July 1944, p. 16; “Rustic Music Fading From L.A. Scene,” The Capitol 3, no. 1 (January 1945): 11. 67. See various interviews on segregation policies of L.A. clubs in Clora Bryant et al., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 68. Merle Travis, “Merle Travis on ‘Western Swing,’ ” JEMFQ 16, no. 60 (Winter 1980): 216. Johnny Bond, quoted in Rich Kienzle, “When a Country Star Turns Murderer: The Strange, Tragic Case of Spade Cooley, Country Music (10 July 1977): 34–38, 64. Here I disagree, to some extent, with Jean A. Boyd’s assessment in Jazz of the Southwest, 30, 57. More precomposition was necessary on the West Coast than among the Texas-Oklahoma bands because of the complex nature of keeping large bands of guitarists, horn players, jazz fiddlers, and even accordionists on the same page, but label demands may have masked the level of intuitive playing that took place at live performances. Compare Spade Cooley, “Shame on You,” Okeh 6731, 78-rpm disc, with the Standard Radio Transcription version of the song available on Spade Cooley and the Western Swing Dance Gang, Shame on You, audio cassette, Soundies SCD4102 (liner notes by Matt Cook). The Cooley band played in a more “hot jazz” vein on the Standard disc, a recording used solely for radio broadcasts, than they did on the 1944 Okeh recording, a waxing that was sold directly to the public. 69. Jimmy Wakely, liner notes, Spade Cooley, LP, Columbia Historic Edition FC37467, SFC; Garcia, interview by author; Eldon Shamblen, interview by Jean A. Boyd, 21 July 1992, Tulsa, Oklahoma, IOH. 70. Capitol News 5, no. 3 (March 1948), 11; Feather, The Book of Jazz, 188; Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 144–51; “Stan Kenton at Palladium,” The Capitol 2, no. 11 (November 1949): 7; Stan Kenton, “Artistry in Rhythm,” on The Best of Stan Kenton, compact disc, EMI-Capitol 72434–99516–2–4; Tex Williams and His Western Caravan, “Artistry in Western Swing,” 78-rpm record, Capitol 40095; Henderson, “Spade Cooley Defies Western Music Standards,” 1; Hank Penny, Hollywood Western Swing: The Best of Hang Penny, 1944–1947, compact disc, Krazy Kat KK CD 25; Hank Penny, Crazy Rhythm, compact disc. 71. Nat Green, “Hillbillies Heat with Helium,” The Billboard 1943 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1943), 99, 102, special supplement to Billboard; “Phillips Looks Like ‘King Korn’ Tycoon of the West,” 4; “Foreman Phillips Country Barn Dances” advertisement and “Foreman Phillips” article,

Notes to Pages 97–99 / 271 in The Billboard 1946–47 Encyclopedia of Music (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1947), 518–19, 784, special supplement to Billboard; Gerald F. Vaugh, “Foreman Phillips: Western Swing’s Kingmaker,” JEMFQ 15, no. 53 (Spring 1979): 27–29; C. Phil Henderson, “Syd Nathan and King Records Take Glamourville by Storm,” Tophand 1, no. 6 (October 1946): 18; “Sagebrush Johnny Mercer,” 9. 72. George Saunders, “Saddle Soap,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1046): 8. Ironically, two years later Saunders became the emcee for jazzy Cooley’s radio orchestra: “George Saunders Takes On Emcee Chores,” Jamboree Magazine (December 1948): 9. 73. Hank Penny, “Penny’s Patter Parade,” Tophand 1, no. 3 (June 1946): 1; Merle Travis, “Merle Travis on ‘Western Swing,’ ” JEMFQ 16, no. 60 (Winter 1980), 216; Hank Penny, letter to the editor, JEMFQ 17, no. 64 (Winter 1981), 180. 74. See, for instance, “LA Cowboy Band Tries Expansion,” Down Beat, 5 March 1944, p. 8; and “Los Angeles Band Briefs,” Down Beat, 1 May 1944, p. 6. 75. Charles Emge, “Hillbilly Boom Can Spread Like Plague,” Down Beat, 6 May 1949, p. 1. 76. Jimmy Wakely, liner notes, Spade Cooley, Spade Cooley: Columbia Historic Edition; Columbia FC37467, UNC-SFC-FC 11130; Hank Penny, “Penny’s Patter Parade,” Tophand 1, no. 3 (June 1946): 1; C. Phil Henderson, “’Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946): 6; Henderson, “’Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 3; “ ‘Tophand’ Is Newest Movie Magazine in Film Capitol City,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 4 (November 1946): 18. 77. “Doorman Fillips Country Barn Dance” cartoon, Tophand 1, no. 5 (September 1946): 10. Considering Foreman’s influence, it is probably not unintentional that the cartoon appeared without the artist’s signature. 78. Rudy Sooter with String Band, “Easy Payment Blues,” Black and White 10023, as reissued on Swinging West: 1940s Western Swing from Southern California, by various artists, compact disc, Interstate Music/Krazy Kat KK CD 15; Roy Hogsed, “Easy Payment Blues,” Capitol 40133, GLC; Hank Penny, “Politics,” 78-rpm record, King 711-A, GLC. 79. Ted Daffan and His Texans’ “Born to Lose” was recorded in Hollywood, California, on February 1942 in the wake of a North American Aviation strike quashed by federal troops. The song appears on Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection, by various artists, four-cassette collection, RC 042 DMK4–0914. For background on the strike, see James R. Prickett, “Communist Conspiracy or Wage Dispute? The 1941 Strike at North American Aviation,” Pacific Historical Review 50, no, 2 (May 1981): 215–33. 80. Merle Travis, “No Vacancy,” 78-rpm record, Capitol 258, GLC; Rich Kienzle, liner notes, Merle Travis, The Best of Merle Travis: Sweet Temptation, 1946–1953, compact disc, Razor and Tie 7930182214–1. Travis co-penned this 1947 hit. On housing conditions, see “California Boom,” Life 20, no. 23 (10 June 1946): 31, 33, 35; and “Housing,” Time (19 November 1945): 24. On the local reception, listen to the response of the Hollywood Barn Dance’s studio audience

272

/ Notes to Page 100

on Merle Travis, 1944–1949: Unreleased Radio Transcriptions, compact disc, Country Routes RFD CD 09. Merle Travis, “Sixteen Tons,” Folk Songs of the Hills: Back Home/Songs of the Coalmines, compact disc rerelease, Bear Family BCD 15636 AH; Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies of Coal-Mining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1979), 279–316. 81. “Radio Listening Habits of Enlisted Men,” typescript report, 3 September 1942, Research Branch, Special Service Division, War Department, box 1, folder 16, AFRS. The 1942 study, conducted by the research branch of the War Department’s Special Service Division, broke listeners into three education groups—“grade school,” “some high school,” and “high school graduate or attended college.” It did not specifically address economic status, but approximated it based on educational attainment as surveys of the 1930s often did. Researchers found that 57 percent of those with some high school reported liking “hillbilly and western music,” while only 34 percent of those with a high school degree or some college reported the same response. 82. My survey is based on names and biographical information found in era fan magazines such as Tophand, National Hill-Billy News, Jamboree Magazine (Ventura, California), and the name files of the SFC and CMFL, as well as in contemporary sources such as Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.; Haslam, Workin’ Man’s Blues; and Kingsbury, ed., Encyclopedia of Country Music. 83. “Shug Fisher Now Making Pictures,” National Hill-Billy News (September 1945): 15; Ken Griffis, “Ray Whitley Story,” JEMFQ 6, no. 18 (Summer 1970): 65; Glynn Duncan, interview by author, 8 April 2001, San Dimas, California; Sunny Ciesla, “Miss Sunny Ciesla: ‘Round-Up in Hollywood’ News Editor,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 1 (September–October 1947): 4–5; Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 3 (January– February 1948): 6. 84. Peterson, Creating Country, 186. Wills, for instance, had been denied membership in the Tulsa American Federation of Musicians local because of the belief that his band were merely “hillbilly performers.” Stricklin, “The Development of the Musical Career of Bob Wills,” 60. 85. Tuttle and Tuttle, interview by author, 6; Buddy Ray, interview by Jean A. Boyd, 22 June 1993, Fort Worth, Texas, IOH. 86. Tuttle and Tuttle, interview by author, 6. Analysis of wage issues based on Price List, revised as of 15 September 1942, corrected to 15 May 1945 (Los Angeles: Musicians Mutual Protective Association, 1945), 23–24, box 6, Charles Leland Bagley Collection, collection 16, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 118; Contract blank, Johnny Bond, 26 November 1946, Columbia Recording Company, Hollywood, California, in Professional Musicians Local 47 American Federation of Musicians Archive, Los Angeles.

Notes to Pages 101–102 / 273 87. Linda Lee Wakely, See Ya’ Up There, Baby: The Jimmy Wakely Story (Canoga Park, Calif.: Shasta Records, 1992), 99–100; Overture masthead, ca. Early 1980s, fax from American Federation of Musicians Local 47 archivist; Rich Kienzle, “The Checkered Career of Hank Penny,” Journal of Country Music 8, no. 2 (1980): 65. According to its statements in Billboard and Tophand, the Federation of American Folk Artists was not meant to be an official trade union, but would represent “men and women who are primarily concerned with Folk Music (socalled western and hillbilly songs) as a means of making a livelihood.” Profiled in Billboard, the group’s goals made it sound as though the federation might eventually offer a unified alternative for workplace representation—“One Big Union” for country entertainers—that would replace the multiple union memberships many artists had to simultaneously maintain (i.e., as musicians, radio performers, variety artists, etc.). After the federation’s initial appearance in 1946, news about the it dwindled, and the organization eventually receded from media and performer awareness. Riley Shepard, “Reasons for Folk Federation,” The Billboard 1946–47 Encyclopedia of Music (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1947), 532, special supplement to Billboard; C. Phil Henderson, “‘Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (May 1946): 3; “Federation of American Folk Artists: Constitution and Bylaws,” Tophand 1, no. 3 (June 1946): 3. 88. Sims, interview by author. 89. Arthur C. Verge, Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second World War (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1993), 89; Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 75; Louise Lillian Haun, “The Attitude of Workers toward Their Jobs in the California Shipbuilding Industry during World War II” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1945), 20, 52, 106. 90. James Richard Wilburn, “Social and Economic Aspects of the Aircraft Industry in Metropolitan Los Angeles during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971), 212–13; “Women at War,” Life (5 June 1944): 74. 91. U.S. Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Population: 1940, State of Birth, 17–18; U.S. Bureau of Census, United States Census of Population: 1950: Special Reports: State of Birth, vol. 4, pt. 4, chap. A, 20–24; James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6, 175. 92. Club and plant locations have been gleaned from oral history interviews; Tophand; National Hill-Billy News; Billboard; Down Beat; Los Angeles Times; Downey Eagle; Long Beach Press-Telegram; Wilmington Press; JEMFQ; Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Work Projects Administration, Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs, American Guide Series (New York: Hastings, 1941); and Fred W. Viehe, “The Social-Spatial Distribution in the Black Gold Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1900–1930,” Southern California Quarterly 73, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 33–54. Some locations are approximate. 93. “Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys,” Wilmington Press, 30 March 1945,

274

/ Notes to Pages 102–104

p. 5; “Bob Wills at Wilhall Monday,” Wilmington Press, 31 March 1945, p. 4; Haun, “The Attitude of Workers,” 121. 94. The Juanita Loveless interview appears in Sherna Berger Gluck’s excellent Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 128, 132, 138. 95. Stella Elizabeth Hartman, “A Study of Leisure Time Activities of Young Men and Young Women in Los Angeles” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1941), 14–15, 53–54, 78, 93. 96. Miriam Frank, Marilyn Ziebarth, and Connie Field, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter: The Story of Three Million Working Women during World War II (Emeryville, Calif.: Clarity Educational Productions, 1982), 73; Sims, interview by author. 97. “Dance with Texas Jim Lewis and His Lone Star Cowboys,” advertisement, American Aeronaut (Los Angeles) 3, no. 15 (18 September 1942): 9; “Swing Shifters to Start Big Barn Dance” and “Barn Dance: Bob Wills Band,” advertisement, American Aeronaut 3, no. 25 (27 November 1942), 4. 98. Sims, interview by author; “Phillips Looks Like ‘King Korn’ Tycoon of the West,” 4; “On the Stand: Spade Cooley,” Billboard, 10 June 1944, p. 18; “Chuck Hansen” advertisement, Tophand 1, no. 4 (July 1946): 5. 99. “Beloved L.A. Western Music Spot Now Running Seven Nights Weekly,” Jamboree Magazine (Ventura, California) (December 1948): 31; “Dave Ming’s 97 St. Corral has Gala Opening,” Tophand 1, no. 3 (June 1946): 1; Sims, interview by author; Pierce, interview by author; Arlie Kinkade, “Ole Rasmussen and His Nebraska Corn Huskers,” National Hill-Billy News 5, no. 3 (January–February 1950): 4–5; Ken Griffis, “Marty Landau: Profile and Tribute,” JEMFQ 12, no. 41 (Spring 1976): 40–43; “Location Loot Out West,” The Billboard 1946–47 Encyclopedia of Music (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1947), 437; Tex Williams, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke: The Cowboy Is a Gypsy,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 1 (July–August 1949): 17; Griffis, “Tex Williams Story,” 7; “Hank Penny,” press release, ca. 1948, Hank Penny name file, CMFL; “Herbert Clayton Penny,” unidentified published article (JEMFQ?), 9, Hank Penny name file, CMFL. 100. “A Partial Biography of the Fabulous Bonnie Price,” California Country (February 1970): n.p.; Dave Wielenga, “The Angriest Bartender in the World,” Orange County Weekly, 24–30 August 2001, archived at www.ocweekly.com/ features/features/the-angriest-bartender-in-the-world/22463, accessed on 17 July 2006;Theo Douglas,“Foothill Boogie,” Press-Telegram (Long Beach), 29 August 2000, p. C1; Eddie Reed, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 2 May 2001, Los Angeles. 101. “Western Palisades Cops Tophand Ballroom Award,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 5; Rich Kienzle, “When a Country Star Turns Murderer: The Strange, Tragic Case of Spade Cooley,” Country Music 10 (July 1977): 34–36; “Right Up with Pops,” The Billboard 1946–47 Encyclopedia of Music (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1947), 525; “Phillips Looks Like ‘King Korn’ Tycoon of the West,” 4.

Notes to Pages 105–107 / 275 102. “Los Angeles Band Briefs: Notings Today,” Down Beat, 1 July 1944, p. 6; Grade Purdy, “Western Music Corral,” Tophand 1, no. 5 (September 1946): 1. 103. Dusti Lynn, “The Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 5, no. 2 (November–December 1949): 22. 104. Ciesla, “Miss Sunny Ciesla,” 4–5; Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 3 (January-February 1948), 6; “Western Palisades Cops Tophand,” 5; “Western Palisades” advertisement, Tophand 1, no. 2 ( April 1946): 10. 105. “Grace Purdy Joins Tophand Staff,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 1; “Nat Vincent Pens A Poem,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 3. 106. Nancy P. Herpolsheimer, personal correspondence with author, 15 August 2001, Oceanside, California; Marcy D. McCrae, “Marcy’s Musings,” Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946): 4; Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 4 (November 1946): 6; Sunny Ciesla, “RoundUp in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 2 (November–December 1947): 5; “Rustic Music Fading from L.A. Scene,” The Capitol 3, no. 1 (January 1945): 11; Norma Winton, “With the Trail Boss,” Trails of the West (Moffett, Okla.) October 1945, 2; Marcy D. McCrae, “Marcy’s Musings,” Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946), 4; “Official Fan Club Listings,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 29 (February 1954): 14–15; “Billie Green Bids for Fan Club Title,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 11. 107. See, for instance, Take Me Back to Oklahoma, dir. Albert Herman, VCI Classics videocassette (Monogram, 1940), 57 min.; various film clips also appear in Take Me Back to Tulsa: An Anthology of Western Swing, videocassette (Vestapool-Rounder, 1999), 60 min.; and Fiddlin’ Man: The Life and Times of Bob Wills, dir. Garydon Rhodes, videocassette (View Video, 1996), 61 min. 108. Roberta Mack, “What’s Wrong with Westerns,” Tophand 1, no. 4 (July 146): 2. 109. “Phillips Looks Like ‘King Korn’ Tycoon of the West,” 4. Also see Hank Penny, “Penny’s Patter Parade,” Tophand 1, no. 4 (July 146): 2; Henderson, “Spade Cooley Defies Western Music Standards,” 1; “Mailbox,” Jamboree Magazine 2, no. 3 (April 1949): 6. 110. Tuttle and Tuttle, interview by author, 4, 5; John Gilmore, personal email correspondence, 28 July 2005; “Lindy Hop: True American Folkdance,” Life 14 (23 August 1943): 15. 111. Advertisement, “97th Street Corral,” ca. 1946, reproduced in Dennis Flannigan, “Texas Jim Lewis,” www.telisphere.com/~agw1890/cwmapioneers lewispictures.htm, accessed on 15 June 2003. 112. Sims, interview by author; Charles J. Coll and Gabrielle Rosiere, Dancing Made Easy, rev. ed. (New York: E. J. Clode, 1922), 261–62. 113. “She Doesn’t Agree with Mayor, So Wears Slacks in City Hall,” Los Angeles Times, 23 April 1942, pt. 2, 1; “Kilts for Men Urged in Slap at Slacks Row,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1942. 114. “Coast Orks Go ‘Billy,’ ” 25.

276

/ Notes to Pages 107–108

115. Peter La Chapelle, “All That Glitters: Country Music, Taste, and the Politics of the Rhinestone ‘Nudie’ Suit,” Dress: The Annual Journal of the Costume of Society of America 28 (2001): 3–12; “An Interview with Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor,” typescript, 4–6, clippings and correspondence, box 1, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Western Equipment Collection, Research Division, Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles; Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors advertisement, Western Music 1, no. 3 (1 September 1951): 2; Dusti Lynn, “Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 2 (November–December 1948): 10; “Spade Cooley,” advertisement, The Billboard 1946–47 Music Year Book (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1947), folk music section, special supplement to Billboard. 116. Rich Kienzle, “When a Country Star Turns Murderer: The Strange Tragic Case of Spade Cooley,” Country Music 5, no. 10 (July 1977): 34–38, 64; “Biographical Notes,” Hank Penny promotional packet, 3 August 1953, 13, Hank Penny name file, CMFL. 117. Dusti Lynn, “Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 2 (November–December 1948): 10. 118. Sims, interview by author. 119. Merle Travis, “N. Chick Cowboy Tailor” cartoon, Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 8. 120. Photographic collage, Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946): 31; “Carolina Cotton: Dynamite in the Saddle,” publicity materials, Carolina Cotton name file, CMFL. 121. Haun, “The Attitude of Workers,” 88. 122. Lorene Wills, interview by author. 123. Lynn, “Tall Texan . . . from Illinois,” 14. 124. Betty Anderson Wills, interview by David Stricklin, 2 November 1974; Herb Remington, interview by author, 26 March 2001, Houston, Texas. 125. Dennis Flannigan, “ ‘Texas’ Jim Lewis,” American Music (1985), www.telisphere.com/~agw1890/cwmapioneerslewis.htm, accessed on 15 June 2003. 126. Verge, Paradise Transformed, 76. 127. Lynn, “Tall Texan . . . from Illinois,” 14; Sunny Ciesla, “A Penny for Your Thoughts: Hank Penny,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 4 (March–April 1948): 7. 128. Grade Purdy, “Western Music Corral,” Tophand 1, no. 6 (October 1946), 4. 129. “Bands Build Business,” two-page photo spread, Overture 28, no. 4 (October 1948): 19–20; Jonny Whiteside, Ramblin’ Rose: The Life and Career of Rose Maddox (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 97–99. 130. “Hollywood Barn Dance,” ca. 1946, 16 inch, 33-rpm transcription, collection of Bob Pinson; Country Music (April–May 1999): 33; “Western Swing in Video Remote,” Overture (Los Angeles) 28, no. 4 (August 1948): 10–11; “Cowboy Close-Ups: Betsy Gay, Becky Barfield,” Tophand 1, no. 8 (December

Notes to Pages 109–116 / 277 1946): 5; Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 156. 131. “American Folk Tunes and Tunesters” column, Billboard, 18 September 1943, pp. 68–69. 132. Joe Blow, “Folks I Know and Places I Go,” Tophand, 1, no. 6 (October 1946): 7; James R. Mills, A Disorderly House: The Brown-Unruh Years in Sacramento (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1987), 17, 40–46; Kenneth Reich, “Jesse Unruh, Key Political Figure in State, Dies at 64,” Los Angeles Times, 5 August 1987, pt. 1, 1; Mark A. Uhlig, “Jesse Unruh, a California Political Power, Dies” New York Times, 6 August 1987, late city final edition, B-6. 133. Al Quaglieri, liner notes, Spade Cooley, Spadella: The Essential Spade Cooley, compact disc, Columbia/Legacy 57392. 134. Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 103. 135. Boyd, Jazz of the Southwest, 31.

4. ballads for the crabgrass frontier 1. “The Latest in Western and Country Music,” Western Music (Los Angeles) 1, no. 1 (December 1951): n.p. 2. Johnny Bond, Reflections: The Autobiography of Johnny Bond, JEMF special series no. 8 (Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, 1976), 17. 3. Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 38; David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ’n’ Roll in Southern California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 46–47; Jim Hilliker, “Archive Top Ten: KTNQ 80th Birthday,” Radio Heritage Foundation, www.radioheritage.net/story 28.asp, accessed on 18 July 2006. 4. See Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 61–109; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 5. Richard Viguerie, America’s Right Turn: How the Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power (New York: Bonus Books, 2004). 6. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

278

/ Notes to Pages 116–119

7. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 259. 8. “Phillips Looks Like ‘King Korn’ Tycoon of the West; Barnerys Now Eyeing Rural Calif. Circuit,” Billboard, 24 April 1944, p. 4; Beep Roberts, “Eddie Dean Etches New Discs,” Capitol News 1, no. 2 (February 1951): 11; “Old Riverside Rancho Burns—for Practice,” 4 September 1959, Los Angeles Examiner files, Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter Los Angeles Examiner files, HC); Gerald F. Vaughn, “Foreman Phillips: Western Swing’s Kingmaker,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (hereafter JEMFQ) 15, no. 53 (Spring 1979): 27–29; Ken Griffis, “Profile of a Night Club Operator,” JEMFQ 11, no. 37 (Spring 1977): 39; “The Times Have Changed at the Foothill,” Grindstone Magazine 5 (21 July 2001), www.throwrag.com/grindstone5.html, accessed on 4 April 2004; City of Los Angeles, Parcel Profile Report, 6907 N. Lankershim Blvd. (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning, 19 July 2006). Also see Dave Alvin’s comments in Gerald Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California, 1999), 265. 9. Sources for maps include: Hank Thompson, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 3 August 2001, Red River, Texas; Jim Halsey, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 23 July 2001, Los Angeles, California; Devvy Davenport, “Under My Hat,” Country Music Report 1, no. 2 (September 1963): 9; Devvy Davenport, “Under My Hat,” Country Music Report 1, no. 1 (August 1963): 9; “C.M.R. Entertainment Guide,” Country Music Report 1, no. 3 (November 1963): 19; “C.M.R. Entertainment Guide,” Country Music Review 1, no. 5 (January 1964): 35; Mike Hall, “Having a Ball,” and various ads in California Country (Covina, California) 4, no. 6 (December 1969): n.p.; “San Berdo Scene” and “Los Angeles Scene,” California Town and County 1, no. 1 (December 1970): 16, 18. 10. Lipsitz, Rainbow, 258–59. 11. Mike Davis, “The L.A. Inferno,” Socialist Review 22, no. 1 (January–March 1992): 61; Allen J. Scott, “High Technology Industrial Development in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County: Observations on Economic Growth and the Evolution of Urban Form,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Scott and Edward Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 277, 281–84; William H. Whyte Jr., “Urban Sprawl,” Fortune 57 (January 1958): 302. 12. John H. M. Laslett, “Historical Perspectives: Immigration and the Rise of a Distinctive Urban Region,” in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), 63. 13. Calculated from U.S. Bureau of Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950: vol. 3, Census Tract Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), chap. 28, tables 1 and 6; U.S. Bureau of Census, U.S. Censuses of Population and Housing: 1960: Census Tracts, Final Report PHC(1)-82 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), table p-1; U.S. Bureau of Census, Census of Population: 1970: Census Tracts, Final Report, PHC (1)-117,

Notes to Pages 119–121 / 279 Los Angeles–Long Beach, Calif. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), Standard Municipal Statistic Area, Pt. 1, tables p-1, p-7; U.S. Bureau of Census, Census of Population and Housing: 1970: Census Tracts, Final Report PHC (1)-9 Anaheim–Santa Ana–Garden Grove (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), tables p-1, p-7. On Okie residency, see D. J. Waldie, Holyland: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 162–64; Donald J. Waldie, interview by author, 12 July 2001, Lakewood, California; Tom Vasich, “Blue Collar Ribs: Chris and Pitts for the People,” OC Weekly 5, no. 2 (17–23 September 1999); John Einarson, Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 21–22; liner notes Nashville West, Nashville West, 33-rpm phonograph, Sierra SE-4216, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter SFC). 14. Riley Moffat, Population History of Western U.S. Cities and Towns, 1850–1990 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 18, 22, 28, 32. 15. Lloyd R. Sims, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 29 April 2001, San Bernardino, California. On the increase in ads seeking fan club members, compare, for instance, “C/W Fan Clubs,” Country Music Life (November 1965): 28, 33, with the much shorter list of notices that appear in 1940s issues of Top Hand, in the CMFL files. 16. Lipsitz, Rainbow, 259. 17. “7-County L.A. Signal Area Added 268,156 Sets in ‘53,” 22 January 1954; “TV Sales Jump 13 Pct. in Year,” 18 September 1952; and “1,490,829 TV Sets in L.A.,” 29 January 1953, all in Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; U.S. Bureau of Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950: vol. 3, Population and Housing: Census Tract Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), chap. 28, table 3. 18. Susan Kresnika Wilbur, “The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931–1952” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1976), 67, 101; George Sanders, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” in the following issues of Country Song Roundup: 1, no. 6 (June 1950): 25; 1, no. 9 (December 1950): 20; and 1, no. 10 (February 1950): 21; Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 4 (March–April 1949): 12. 19. Spade Cooley Show, dir. Bill States, KTLA-TV, ca. 1957, videorecording of television program, Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee (hereafter CMFL); Town Hall Party, KTTV-TV, ca. 1959, videorecording of television program, CMFL; Rich Kienzle, liner notes, Wanda Jackson, Vintage Collections compact disc, Capitol 7243–8–36185–2–1; Julie Mundy and Darrel Higham, Don’t Forget Me: The Eddie Cochran Story (New York: Billboard Books, 2001), 1–60, 66–68, 109–11, 123–34; Eddie Cochrane, recorded interviews, ca. 1958–60, Denver and London (unknown interviewers) and liner notes, Eddie Cochran, On the Air, audiocassette, EMI America 4XQ-17245. 20. C. Phil Henderson, “’Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 3; Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 4

280

/ Notes to Pages 121–122

(March–April 1949): 12–13; Lulu Bell Errett, “Speakin’ of the ‘Squeakin’ Deacon,’ ” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 2 (November–December 1948): 20; Biff Collie, “What Is a Disc Jockey?” Country Music Life (January 1968): 41; George Sanders, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” Country Song Roundup 1 , no. 20 (October 1952): 8; Bea Terry, “Folk Music and Its Folks: Carolina Cotton,” newsclipping, ca. 1950, Carolina Cotton name file, CMFL; Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 169; Hugh Cherry, “The KFOX Story,” in “Radio station KFOX” file, SFC. 21. See Dick Schofield and Joe Allison’s quotes in Richard Stockdell, “The Evolution of the Country Format,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 4 (1983): 147–49. 22. Play list, ca. 1969, in “Radio Station KGBS” file, SFC; Bill Ward, letter to Bill Meeks, 29 August 1969, in “1969 and Miscellaneous Outgoing Letters” folder in “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; Bill Ward, memo to staff, 11 March 1969, “Master Program Policy—Bill Ward” file, in “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; Ken Griffis, “Dick Haynes: Portrait of a Disc Jockey,” JEMFQ 12, no. 44 (Winter 1976): 192–95; Ken Griffis, “Bill Ward—Profile of a Radio Man,” JEMFQ 10, no. 36 (Winter 1974): 177. One possible exception may have been KFOX, the old KXLA, owned now by Bing Crosby Enterprises. Hugh Cherry reports that KFOX disc jockeys “were allowed to ‘do their thing’ ” in the late 1950s and 1960s because of their expertise in country music. See Cherry, “The KFOX Story,” 10–11, in KFOX 15th Anniversary, n.d., in “Radio Station KFOX” file, SFC. 23. “Tuning in On . . . KBBQ-Burbank,” Cashbox (17 May 1969), in “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; Bill Ward, letter to Felix Adams, 9 January 1969; Bill Ward, memo to staff, 25 April 1969, SFC; Bill Ward, memo to staff, 18 February 1969, “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; Bill Ward, “General Program Policy,” 10 June 1969, in “1969 Letters Outgoing: Bill Ward” folder, in “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC. 24. Ward, “General Program Policy.” 25. “Best Bets,” Cash Box (2 August 1969): n.p., in “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; Bill Ward, memo to Southern States Industrial Council, 12 May 1969, in “1969 Letters outgoing” folder, “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980: A History of the South, vol. 11 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996) 41, 83. 26. “Tuning in On . . . KBBQ-Burbank,” Cashbox, 17 May 1969. 27. Ward, “General Program Policy,” KBBQ radio file, SFC; the emphasis is Ward’s. 28. Bob Wills, interview by Buck Wayne Johnston, audiocassette recording, April 1967, El Cajon, California, Johnston personal collection; “Storer Scrapping Good Music Format at KGBS for Oatunes,” Variety, 23 December 1965, p. 14; Jim Harris, “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life (August 1966): 29; “KBLA Goes Mod C&W,” Billboard, 27 June 1967, p. 26; Don Page, “Tired of the Tube? Get on Radio Beam,” Los Angeles Times, 27 August 1967, n.p., clipping in KBBQ

Notes to Pages 122–125 / 281 radio file, SFC; “KFOX” and “KWOW,” Billboard World of Country Music, annual special edition, 2 November 1963, pp. 93, 94; “King in Los Angeles,” Record World, 4 May 1968, newsclipping, and “KFOX Holding Solidly,” Record World, 4 May 1968, newsclipping, both in “Radio Station KFOX” file, SFC. 29. “KFOX Holding Solidly” newsclipping; KBBQ press release, 26 October 1967, “Radio station KBBQ” files, SFC; Bill Ward, “Country Music on the West Coast,” press release, October 1968, “Radio station KBBQ” files, SFC; Cherry, “The KFOX Story,” 10–11. 30. Thompson, interview by author; Hank Thompson, Dance Ranch/Songs for Rounders, compact disc, Koch CD-98048. 31. Thomas Hines, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986), 3–14, 22–23, 64–65, 75, 95–105. Also see Stuart Ewen’s interpretation of the populuxe era in All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 230. 32. Juliann Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998), 265, 270–73. Also see Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), 41. 33. Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 71–73; Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, The Interplay of Influence: Mass Media and Their Publics in News, Advertising, and Politics (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1988), 123–24; Jonathan Dee, “The Myth of ’18 to 34,’ ” New York Times Magazine (13 October 2002): 58–61. 34. T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 88–90, 138–39; Ewen, All Consuming, 68. 35. David Marc, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 62–63; Jamieson and Campbell, Interplay, 123; Barnouw, Sponsor, 71–73. 36. “A Big New Sound Blows Out of Nashville,” Broadcasting (28 January 1963): 74. 37. “Country Music Life,” in-house advertisement, Country Music Life (February 1968): 48. 38. “Los Angeles Country Combination—KFOX-KBBQ: Audience Composition Analysis,” in “1969 KBBQ Press Clippings” folder, “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC. 39. Town Hall Party, no. 46, reel 1, KTTV-TV, 8 August 1959, videorecording of television program, CMFL; “D.J. Spotlight,” Country Song Roundup 17, no. 91 (December 1965): 3; Wesley Tuttle and Marilyn Tuttle, interview by author, 7 February 2001, San Fernando, California; Bruce Hentsell, “How the King of Western Swing Reached the End of His Rope,” Los Angeles Magazine 24, no. 6 (June 1979): 130. 40. Fordist wage structures got their name from carmaker Henry Ford’s efforts in the 1930s to bolster employee consumer power by guaranteeing his

282

/ Notes to Pages 125–127

auto workers a five-dollar-a-day wage, a reasonably high wage for the time. Ford had originally hoped such wages would prompt workers to buy his cars. As a general term, Fordism has come to mean any manufacturing wage system that offers workers a relatively substantial wage in return for labor peace (i.e., no strike pledges). Managers generally designed Fordist wage structures to stimulate consumer spending and hence ensure the health of a capitalist economy. The term Fordism is also used today to connote a specific period in American economic history (the 1940s to 1960s), which was gradually replaced by a new, “Post-Fordist era” (the 1970s on), marked by outsourcing, overseas plant relocations, workforce “flexibility,” less job stability, and lower wages. In the 1950s and 1960s, Southern California, the site of shipbuilding, the aerospace industry, and weapons development, was home to one of the healthiest and highest paying defense industries in the world. 41. On early sponsorships, see Sunny Ciesla, “Stuart Hamblen and His Lucky Stars,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 6 (January 1947): 17; and Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, interview by author, 2 February 2001, Carson City, Nevada. On Cal Worthington, see Worthington, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 28 August 2001, Folsom, California; “Sammy Masters,” Country Music Report (Orange, California) 1, no. 4 (December 1963): 24; “Cal Worthington,” Country Music Report 1, no. 4 (December 1963): 23. 42. “I take THYAVALS,” advertisement, Western Music 1, no. 4 (1 October 1951): back cover. 43. Ewen, All Consuming, 70. 44. Cooper, “Country Music’s Hank,” 19; Bob Tucker, “How to Be a Successful Hillbilly Band Leader,” National Hill-Billy News 5, no. 3, (January– February 1950): 31. 45. “Tips from the Top,” Country Music Life (Orange, California) (December 1965): 6. 46. Jonny Whiteside, Ramblin’ Rose: The Life and Career of Rose Maddox (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 93. 47. Sunny Ciesla, “We Visit the Milton H. Berry Foundation School,” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 6 (January 1947); 12–13; George Sanders, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 10 (February 1950): 21; Tucker, “How to Be,” 31. 48. Bond, Reflections, 13. My discussion is informed by Ronnie Pugh’s excellent “Country Music Is Here to Stay,” Journal of Country Music 19, no. 1 (n.d.): 32–38. 49. Slim Hawkins, “Hillbillies or Mountain Williams?” and “Slim Hawkins Sez,” Top Hand (Hollywood) 1, no. 4 (July 1946): 11; Bob Wills, “1953 KXLA Radio Broadcasts,” audiocassette recording of radio transcription, author’s personal collection. 50. Pictures, Biographies, Current Recordings of Your Favorite Country and Hillbilly Record Artists (Los Angeles: Capitol Records, ca. 1953), in Capitol

Notes to Pages 127–130 / 283 Records name file, CMFL; Ken Nelson, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 16 May 2000, Camarillo, California. 51. Bond, Reflections, 13–14; Walter Camp, “Folking in Los Angeles,” Broadside 1, no. 3 (May 1962): 3. 52. “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life (Orange, California) (March 1966), 4; “Country Music Life,” in-house advertisement, Country Music Life (February 1968), 48; “British Firm Will Purchase Cap. Records,” 13 January 1955, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Bob Thomas, “Looks Like ‘Stack of Records’: L.A.’s Circular Building,” 12 January 1956, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 53. “Los Angeles Country Combination—KFOX-KBBQ: Audience Composition Analysis.” 54. Thompson, interview by author; Jim Halsey, interview by author. 55. California Department of Finance, Financial and Population Research Section, California Migration, 1955–1960 (Sacramento: California Department of Finance, 1964), table 12, p. 27. 56. Don Pierce, interview by author, 15 September 2000, Hendersonville, Tennessee. 57. On 1940s era “Okie” songs, see discussion in chapter 3. My analysis of local labels is based on Country Song Roundup and local fan magazines, release listings in artist, label files, and discographies at the CMFL, and materials held at the Smithsonian and Library of Congress. Particularly useful were the Rigler-Deutsch Record Index of 78-rpm records in the Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Reading Room and the Gilbert Louey Country Music Collection, Division of Cultural History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter GLC). Garrick H. S. Brown, liner notes, and David Gates, “Okie Surfer,” Del-Fi Beach Party! compact disc, DFCD71263; Dick Grant, “Jimmy Patton: I’m Not Shuckin’,” trans. from the German for author by Wilma Broekhuizen, Rockin’ Fifties (Munich, Germany), 65 (1997): 28–32. 58. K. Brad Stamm, Music Industry Economics: A Global Demand Model of Pre-Recorded Music (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 34–351; David Edwards and Mike Callahan, “Class/Rendezvous Labels,” Both Sides Now Publications: LP Discography (7 April 1999), www.bsnpubs.com/class.html, accessed on 29 November 2002; Al Turner, liner notes, Swinging West, by various artists; Don Pierce, interview by author; Jonny Whiteside, “Four Star Records,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 179. 59. Liner notes and discography for Tyler, Rockin’ and Swingin’; Guy Logsdon, “Jack Guthrie: A Star That Almost Was,” Journal of Country Music 15, no. 2 (1993): 32–38; Brown, liner notes for Del-Fi Beach Party!; Grant, “Jimmy Patton,” 29. 60. Waldie, interview by author.

284

/ Notes to Pages 130–134

61. My discussion is informed by comments made during the panel discussion on Southern California working-class history at the February 1998 conference of the California Studies Association, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as well as by “Suburbs of Extraction,” chap. 3 of The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, by William B. Fulton (Point Arena, Calif.: Solano Press Books, 1997); and Charles B. Spaulding, “The Development of Organization and Disorganization in the Social Life of a Rapidly Growing Working-Class Suburb within a Metropolitan District” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939). 62. Waldie, Holyland, 162, 172; Waldie, interview by author; William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 308–9. 63. Waldie, Holyland, 173. 64. “Ronnie Sessions,” Country Music Life (January 1968): 45. 65. Jim Harris, “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life (August 1966): 4. 66. Hugh Cherry, “The KFOX Story,” 10–11. 67. Thompson, interview by author. 68. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 7–9, 92–95; Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 272–75. One of the earliest articulations of the southernization thesis as it relates to Golden State politics appears to be Bill Boyarsky, The Rise of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1968), 132–36. 69. McGirr and Nicolaides, like James N. Gregory, a historian of Dust Bowl migrants, argue that southernness made a significant mark on middle- and working-class culture nationally in the 1950s and 1960s, an argument I do not dispute. The very existence of a strong country music market in Los Angeles is evidence of this. I do differ with these scholars, however, on the degree to which southernization prompted the rise of a working- and lower-middle-class conservatism. I find that, while southern cultural imports were a contributing factor, the rise of the New Right of the 1960s—at least among southern plains migrants—can be explained better as a function of social status. See Gregory, “Southernizing the American Working Class: Post-war Episodes of Regional and Class Transformation,” Labor History 39, no. 2 (1998): 135–54. 70. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Collier and Macmillan, 1986). Also see Millie Rahn, “The Folk Revival: Beyond Child’s Canon and Sharp’s Song Catching,” in American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, ed. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2001), 195–96. 71. Douglas B. Green, Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy (Nashville: Country Music Foundation and Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 40, 177–79; Woody Guthrie, “The Songs of Woody Guthrie,” ca. 1937–1940, 200-page folder, carbon copy of typescripts, 17, 197, in box 2, Writings, Woody Guthrie Manuscripts, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Peter Stanfield, Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 128–54; Patsy Montana, radio interview, KXLA Studios, Pasadena, California, 25 June

Notes to Pages 134–137 / 285 1959, audiocassette, Field Recording Collection no. FT2682, SFC; John Rechy, City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 72. My discussion is partly informed by Green, Singing in the Saddle, 256–59. Also see Bond, Reflections, 15. 73. “Editorial” and “Ernest Tubb Visits the Tex Williams Show,” Western Music 1, no. 1 (July 1951): 2, 5; masthead, Western and Country Music (relocated to Pasadena) 1, no. 8 (February 1952): 2. Also see various other issues in SFC. 74. Autry’s and Rogers’s television careers are discussed later in the chapter in more detail. “High Noon Sets Film Pace,” Billboard, 7 December 1968, p. 46. 75. Jonny Whiteside, “Academic History,” Daily Variety, 5 May 1995, pp. 19, 22. 76. Pugh, “Country Music Is Here to Stay,” 32–38; Bill Ward, “Country Music on the West Coast,” in “Press Releases 1967–68,” “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC; “Academy of Country Music Awards,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 625–29. 77. Johnny Bond, “The Town Hall Party Story,” typed manuscript, n.d., Town Hall Party name file, CMFL; Rich Kienzle, “Hometown Jamboree,” Journal of the American Academy for the Preservation of Old-Time Music 26 (April 1995): 9–10; Anonymous, “An Open Letter to the Editor,” Country Music Review (February 1964), 33. 78. Whiteside, “Academic History,” 19, 22; Bill Ward, “General Program Policy (KBBQ),” 12 August 1970, in “1969 Letters Out: Personal: Bill Ward” folder, “KBBQ Radio” files, SFC; “Tex Ritter: Country Music Life-Line,” Country Music Life (March 1968): 28. 79. My understanding of consumer westernness is based partly on Whyte, Organization Man, 175, 441; and “One Youngster,” photograph and caption, Western and Country Music 1, no. 8 (February 1952): n.p. The classic study of “other directedness” is David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). My understanding of the postwar western is informed by my own viewing of films for a course I taught, History and Image of the American West, as well as key studies, such as Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1998), 379–404, 489–533, and David Lusted, The Western (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2003), 123–204. Another important influence on my discussion in this section, Stanley Corkin sees postwar westerns as nuanced explorations of the American foreign policy alternatives, but nevertheless agrees that these films usually sanctioned violent, nationalistic, and militaristic solutions. See Corkin’s Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), especially 1–19, 94–163, 205–47. 80. Jim Harte, “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life (September 1966):

286

/ Notes to Pages 138–140

5; “Country Music at Disneyland,” Country Music Life (November 1967): 42–43; Dick Goodman, interview by author, 27 June 2002, Sun City, Arizona; “Knotts’ to Present Country Music Show,” Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1970, sec. D, p. 7; “ACM Awards,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 628. Mike Davis discusses the “cowboy capitalist phenomena” and Walter Knott in Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 163, 172. 81. Jonathon Guyot Smith, “Gene Autry,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22–23; Frank Harris, “The Melody Ranch Show,” Country Music Life (January 1966): 20–21; Green, Singing in the Saddle, 120, 194–95. 82. Kenneth Turan, “Still in the Saddle: Gene Autry, Cowboy Star Turned Tycoon,” Washington Post, 24 October 1978, sec. C, p. 1; Penny Pagano and Thomas B. Rosenstiel, “FCC Approves Sale of KTLA,” Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1985, business sec., pt. 4, 1; “Still Room for Growth,” Television Digest 5, no. 97 (17 May 1985): 1; Harris, “The Melody Ranch,” 20–21. 83. “Roy Rogers,” obituary, City News Service, 6 July 1998, cited from Lexis-Nexis; “All-American Cowboy: Doye O’Dell,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 15 (December 1951): 18. 84. Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002), 27; Patrick J. Huber, “The Modern Origins of an Old Time Sound: Southern Millhands and their Hillbilly Music, 1923–1942” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000), 34–44. 85. Gene Autry, with Michael Herskowitz, Back in the Saddle Again (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 53. 86. Stanfield, Horse Opera, 131. 87. David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton, L.A. in the Thirties (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1975), 32. 88. Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 189. 89. Green, Singing in the Saddle, 121. 90. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, with Jane and Michael Stern, Happy Trails: Our Life Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 99. 91. “I Hear America Singing,” concert program, 8 October 1946, Philharmonic Auditorium, William Wolff Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles; show review, clipping, People’s World, 11 October 1946, in William Wolff Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles. 92. On Hamblen’s candidacy, see clippings in Stuart Hamblen file, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC.

Notes to Pages 140–143 / 287 93. Carrol Nye, “Hill Billy Broadcast Has Its Own System,” Los Angeles Times, 23 December 1934, sec. 2, p. 7. 94. “Prohibition Party Nominates Hamblen for President,” 16 November 1991, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC. 95. “Six Lectures Set Today as Anti-Red Talks Open,” Los Angeles Times, 28 August 1961, pt. 3, p. 1; Louis Fleming, “Probe into ‘Muzzling’ of Military Asked: 15,700 at Anti-Red School Rally,” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1961, pt. 3, p. 1; “Anti-Red School Hears Rep. Judd Over KTTV,” Los Angeles Times, 1 September 1961, pt. 3, p. 22. 96. Francis X. Clines, “Calling Tune to Call Democrats,” New York Times, 31 October 1980, p. A18; Myra MacPherson, “The Final Days: The Sound and Flurry,” Washington Post, 4 November 1980, p. B1; “Reagan: Working Together,” Washington Post, 12 October 1980, p. A2; “Roy Rogers Opposes Effort in California to Regulate Pistols,” New York Times, 22 July 1982, p. A20; “Roy Rides Happy Trails Again for Preacher Who’d Be President,” Toronto Star, 20 August 1980, p. B1. 97. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at Reagan-Bush Rally,” 3 September 1984, Fountain Valley, California, The Public Papers of Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/ 90384.htm, accessed on 15 July 2006; George Bush, “Remarks at Fundraising Dinner,” 19 September 1991, Los Angeles, California, Public Papers of the Presidents, 27 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1310, cited from Lexis-Nexis; Joel Kotkin, “Hollywood’s Great Right Hope,” Washington Post, 27 November 1977, p. 20. 98. R. Scott Moxley, “The Secret Lives of Bob Dornan: Inside the Fevered Imagination of O.C.’s Most Infamous Congressman,” OC Weekly 2, no. 6 (18–24 October 1996), www.ocweekly.com/ink/97/06/politics-moxley.php, accessed on 10 December 2002. 99. Jack Hurst, “Out in the Boondocks, Ritter Tracks a Fox,” Nashville Tennessean Sunday Magazine (31 May 1970): 12; Hurst, “Sen. Gore’s Forgotten Where His Homesite Is, Ritter Says,” Nashville Tennessean Sunday Magazine (2 July 1970): 12; “Ritter Gives War, Home Views,” newspaper clipping, 12 July 1970, in Tex Ritter name file, CMFL; Texas Jim Cooper, “Tex Ritter in the Twilight Years,” JEMFQ 13, no, 46 (Summer 1977): 82; Vivien Green Fryd, “That Sad Twang of Mountain Voices: Thomas Hart Benton’s Sources of Country Music,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 264–65; Larry Daughtrey, “Ritter, Robertson to Run,” Nashville Tennessean (6 January 1970): 2. 100. Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (1970; reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 99; Hugh Cherry, “The KFOX Story,” 10–11, in KFOX 15th Anniversary, n.d., in “Radio Station KFOX” files, SFC. Counterexamples include “1000 Form Society of Southern States,” 5 August 1933, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; and Horton, “Johnny Reb,” Honky-Tonk Man.

288

/ Notes to Pages 143–144

101. Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: An American Life (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), 77–83. 102. Boyarsky, Rise of Ronald Reagan, 132–36; MacPherson, “The Final Days,” 1; Merle Haggard, with Tom Carter, Merle Haggard’s My House of Memories: For the Record (New York: Harper Entertainment, 1999); Bill Ward, letter to Allen Lawler, 25 July 1969, “1969 and Misc. Outgoing Letters Bill Ward” folder in KBBQ files, SFC. Numerous articles and published presidential speeches allude to Autry’s and Rogers’ support and Reagan’s use of western and singing cowboy imagery; see, for example, Clines, “Calling Tune,” 18; “Reagan: Working Together,” 2; and Donnie Radcliffe, “Queen Takes Rain Check,” Washington Post, 1 March 1983, p. B1; Ronald Reagan, “The American Cowboy,” remarks at opening of Library of Congress exhibit, Public Papers of the Presidents, 24 March 1983, 19 Weekly Comp., Pres. Doc. 449, cited from Lexis-Nexis. 103. Inaugural quoted in Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Adventure of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1994), 83. 104. John Meroney, “Country Music Conservative,” American Enterprise Online, April–May 2001, www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.15600/article _detail.asp, accessed on 20 June 2006. 105. Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Random House, 1980), 138. 106. Hurst, “Sen. Gore’s Forgotten,” 12; Daughtrey, “Ritter, Robertson to Run,” 2; Fryd, “That Sad Twang.” 107. Fred G. Crawford, Organization and Administrative Development of the Government of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1955), 223–25; Jack B. Tenney, interview by Donald J. Schippers, 22 July 1965–12 May 1966, Hacienda Heights, California, Oral History Program, collection 300/56, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, 1, 95, 105, 140, 145–47; Ingrid Winther Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney: Molder of Anti-Communist Legislation in California, 1940–49” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1970), 59–61; David Rothel, The Singing Cowboy (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1979), 51; Jack B. Tenney, Zion’s Fifth Column (Tujunga, Calif.: Standard Publications, 1953), 1–10. 108. On Burke and KFVD, see Oliver Thornton, interview by Richard Reuss, 27 July 1967, box 8, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; “Where the Acts Are Playing,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 28 (January 1954): 19; Sunny Ciesla, “Spade Cooley: ‘The King of Western Swing,’ ” National Hill-Billy News 2, no. 4 (November 1946): 8; “Western Airshows on Upbeat,” The Capitol 4, no. 11 (November 1946): 14; Joe Bleeden, “Hollywood Now Hillbilly H.Q.,” Billboard, 24 November 1951, p. 18; Frank Burke [Jr.], letter to Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, 11 April 1975, correspondence 3, box 1, folder 11, Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, New

Notes to Pages 145–147 / 289 York; Hugh Cherry, “The KFOX Story,” n.p.; “KFOX Holding Solidly,” Record World (4 May 1968), in KFOX file, SFC; Hilliker, “Archive Top Ten: KTNQ.” On Burke’s postwar politics, see “Democrat for Warren Raps Roosevelt Flaws,” Los Angeles Times, 31 May 1950; “Burke against J. Roosevelt,” 3 June 1950, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; “FDR Admirers Urged Not to Vote for James,” Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1950; and “Civic Leader, Publisher Join Nixon Democrats,” Los Angeles Times, 1 November 1950. 109. Nelson, interview by author. 110. Rich Kienzle, “Off the Record,” Journal of the American Academy for the Preservation of Old-Time Music 15 (June 1993): 25. 111. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 198–99. 112. Sunny Ciesla, “Stuart Hamblen and His Lucky Stars,” National HillBilly News 2, no. 6 (January 1947): 17–18. All of the following are from Los Angeles Examiner files, HC: “Radio Actor Fined on Check Charge,” 22 March 1946; “ ‘Stu’ Hamblen Back to Jail,” 30 May 1944; “Cowboy Star Quits Racing: Public Testimony Given in Tent at Evangelistic Meeting,” 1 November 1949; “Prohibition Party Nominates Hamblen for President,” 16 November 1991; “Stuart Hamblen and His Cowboy Church of the Air,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 13 (August 1951): 12; “Who’s Who on the Label: Stuart Hamblen,” publicity materials, Stuart Hamblen name file, CMFL. 113. Rogers and Evans, with Stern and Stern, Happy Trails, 126, 132–34; Rogers and Evans, with Carlton Stowers, Happy Trails: The Story of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (Waco, Texas: Word, Inc., 1979), 90, 184–85; Dale Evans Rogers, Cool It or Lose It! Dale Evans Rogers Raps with Youth (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1972). 114. “Red Harper’s Hollywood Roundup,” 11 August 1951, 16 in., 33-rpm transcription, AFRS EN-81, program 236, CMFL; “In the Garden,” “Rock of Ages,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and liner notes, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Amazing Grace: 40 Treasured Hymns, compact disc, EMI Music SHD0830, 3. 115. “Red River” Dave McEnery, “The Red Deck of Cards,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 31 (May 1954): 13; Jimmy Wakely, “Red Deck of Cards,” GLC. 116. Hurst, “Out in the Boondocks,” 12. 117. Bill Boyarsky, “Country Music Vote: Is It Unruh’s Tune?” Los Angeles Times, 13 July 1970, pp. 3, 16–17. 118. “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life ( January 1969): 42; Bill O’Neil, Tex Ritter: America’s Most Beloved Cowboy (Austin: Eakin Press, 1998), 111, 129; Tex Ritter, Psalms, 33-rpm disc, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Tex Ritter, “God Bless America Again,” Green, Green Valley, 33-rpm disc, Capitol ST-467. 119. Ritter, “God Bless American Again”; Nashville, dir. Robert Altman, film (1975), Paramount Pictures, 160 min. 120. See, for instance, Johnny Horton, “Honky-Tonk Man,” “Sink the Bismarck,” and “The Battle of New Orleans,” in Honky-Tonk Man: The Essential Johnny Horton, 1956–1960, double audiocassette, Columbia Legacy C2T 6476.

290

/ Notes to Pages 148–151

121. J. R. Peakins, “Buck Owens Drops a Bombshell,” Country Song Roundup 18, no. 95 (June 1966): 8; Dwight Whitney, “Buck Owens: One Man Conglomerate,” TV Guide 18, no. 45 (7 November 1970): 14–15; “Buck Owens,” Academy of Country and Western Music News (Los Angeles), May 1969, p. 4. 122. Advertisement, “97th Street Corral,” ca. 1946, displayed on Web site by Dennis Flannigan, “Texas Jim Lewis,” www.telisphere.com/~agw1890/cwma pioneerslewispictures.htm, accessed on 15 June 2003; Bob Wills, “Mama Don’t Allow,” segment of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, dir. LeRoy Prinz, Warner Bros., 1944, as appears on Take Me Back to Tulsa: An Anthology of Western Swing, VHS tape (Vestapol Production 2000). 123. Thompson, interview by author; Sims, interview by author; Charles McGovern, conversation with author, June 2002, Washington, D.C. 124. Patricia Hall, “Square Dancing,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 500. 125. Thompson, interview by author; “Square Dance—U.S.A.,” Rustic Rhythm 1, no. 2 (May 1957): 57. 126. On square dancing’s roots, see Hall, “Square Dancing,” 57; and Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: A History from the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004), 132. 127. Square Dances: Cliffie Stone’s Band: Square Dance Instruction (Los Angeles: Capitol Records, 1947). 128. Goodman, interview by author; Harvey Barkan, personal e-mail correspondence with author, 19 May 2001. 129. “The City” and “Attachment Papers for the Fanny Hill Hippodrome,” Daily Ardmoreite (Oklahoma), 27 February 1894, p. 1; “The Ardmoreite Has a Better Opinion,” editorial, Daily Ardmoreite, 26 February 1894, p. 2. 130. Nick Tosches, “Honky-Tonkin’: Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and the Bartender’s Muse,” in Country: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Paul Kingsbury and Alan Axelrod, 1st ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 223–25. 131. My discussion here stems from my own personal e-mails with linguists and Wolof experts, as well as the following Internet sources: “Origins of ‘Honkie,’ ” LINGUIST List 3.53, 21 January 1992, www.linguistlist.org/ issues/3/3–53.html, accessed on 10 July 2001; “Words to the Wise,” Take Our Word for It 91 (26 June 2000), www.takeourword.com/Issue091.html; and “Honky-Tonk,” Archives H–J, www.takeourword.com/et_h-j.html, accessed on 10 July 2001; “Origins of the Term Honky-Tonk,” Keep It Country, 20 January 2000, www.talentondisplay.com/kicpage2.html, accessed on 10 July 2001. 132. Dick Bueschel, “ ‘Nickelodeon,’ ‘Jukebox,’ ‘Honky Tonk,’ ” Mechanical Music Digest archives, 30 January 1997, item 6, http://mmd.foxtail.com/ Archives/Digests/199701/1997.01.30.06.html, accessed on 29 July 2001. 133. Tosches, “Honky-Tonkin’,” 223–25; “Poindexter, Clarence Albert,” Texas Handbook Online, University of Texas, Austin, Internet encyclopedia,

Notes to Pages 151–152 / 291 www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/PP/fpo38.html; Chester Rosson, “Texas Music Source: Al Dexter,” Texas Monthly Online, May 1997, www.texasmonthly.com/ranch/source/86379445627770/86379446427770.php, accessed on 10 July 2001. 134. Tosches, “Honky-Tonkin’,” 223–25; Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 154; John W. Wise, personal correspondence with author, 21 July 2001, Owasso, Oklahoma; 2001; Paul Wadey, “Obituary: Ted Daffan,” The Independent (London), 9 November 1996, p. 18; liner notes, 5, Country Music: South and West, LP, NW 287, in record collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 135. “Al Dexter,” Country Music Life (November 1966), 38–39; “Hank Thompson,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 30 (March–April 1954): 6; “Hank Thompson: Where the Stars Are Shining,” Country Music Life (December 1965): 39; “The Writer of ‘Humpty Dumpty Heart:’ Hank Thompson,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 6 (July–August 1948): 17; “Hank Thompson,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 30 (April 1954): 6; Thompson, interview by author; “His Side of Life: Hank Thompson,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 20 (October 1952): 7; “Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys,” Western and Country Music (Los Angeles: new title for Western Music) 1, no. 7 (January 1952): n.p. Also see “Johnny Horton: That ‘One Woman Man,’ ” Country Song Roundup 4, no. 48 (February 1957): 11; Daniel Cooper, Lefty Frizzell: The Honky-Tonk Life of Country Music’s Greatest Singer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 85–86. 136. Paul Herbold, “Sociological Survey of Main Street, Los Angeles, California” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1936), 100–106; Merrill Leonard Harrod, “A Study of Deviate Personalities as Found in Main Street of Los Angeles” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939), 27; Thompson, interview by author. 137. See stories mentioned in notes 73 and 135. 138. Much of this section draws on my essay “All That Glitters: Country Music, Taste, and the Politics of the Rhinestone ‘Nudie’ Suit,” Dress: The Annual Journal of the Costume Society of America 28 (2001): 3–12. 139. Holly George-Warren and Michelle Freedman, How the West Was Worn (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 58–59. 140. Nudie Cohn, “An Interview with Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor,” typescript by unidentified student of contemporary art at the University of California, Irvine, n.d., 4–5, in box 1, clippings and correspondence, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Western Equipment Collection, Research Division, Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles. 141. Manuel Cuevas, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 5 September 2000, Nashville, Tennessee. 142. See Turk outfits in the collections of the CMFL, the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the private Thomas Sims Archives, in the possession of Thomas Sims, San Diego, California. Also see photos of Cooley and

292

/ Notes to Pages 152–154

Maddox in the photo collection of the SFC. Holly George-Warren, “Nathan Turk,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 551. 143. Mae Axton, “Nudie: Country Music’s Tailor,” Country Song Roundup 18, no. 93 (April 1966): 28; Nudie billing files, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Western Equipment Collection, Research Division, Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles; Cohn, “An Interview with Nudie.” Compare the Turk and Cohn outfits in the CMFL and Thomas Sims collections. 144. See “Resplendent Rex Allen Has ‘New Gimmick,’ ” Leaksville News (Leaksville, N.C.), 17 June 1954, in Nudie name file, CMFL; and various newspaper clippings from box 1, clippings and correspondence, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Western Equipment Collection, Research Division, Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles: Dave Lipman, “Nudie, Cowboy’s Clothier,” n.d., typescript; and Al Martinez, “All That Glitters,” Los Angeles Times, news clipping, n.d. Also see photographs of Williams and Husky in Sims archives as well as Tyler Beard, 100 Years of Western Wear (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1993), 32, 72; and Debby Bull, Hillbilly Hollywood: The Origins of Country and Western Style (New York: Rizzoli International, 2000), 120. 145. Cooper, Lefty Frizzell, 129–30. 146. Cuevas, interview by author. 147. Whyte, Organization Man, 308–9; Richard Martin and Harold Koda, Jocks and Nerds: Men’s Style in the Twentieth Century (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 154–55. 148. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Cambridge, Mass.: Robert Bentley, 1955), 202, 262, 300. 149. Whyte, Organization Man, 6, 63–68, 172–75. Also see Riesman, Lonely Crowd; and Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: The Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon, 1967). 150. On the charro influence, see Cuevas, interview by author. On the Sioux headdresses, see “Resplendent Rex Allen,” Nudie name file, CMFL. 151. Bull, Hillbilly Hollywood, 120. 152. Cohn, “An Interview with Nudie.” On the zoot suit’s history, see Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). 153. Compare the Ukrainian blouses and waistcoats in Natalia Kalashnikova and Galina Pluzhnikova, National Costumes of the Soviet Peoples (Moscow: Planeta Publishers, 1990), plate 33, pp. 56–59, 207, with outfits on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Thomas Sims Archives, in the possession of Thomas Sims, San Diego, California. 154. Cuevas, interview by author. Compare, for instance, Cuevas’s embroidery designs with the patterns in Donald and Dorothy Cordry, Mexican Indian Costumes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 145. 155. Cohn, “An Interview with Nudie.” 156. Hank Thompson, “Cryin’ in the Deep Blue Sea,” Vintage Collections,

Notes to Pages 154–156 / 293 compact disc, Capitol 7246–8–36901–2–1; Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 24 of Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits, compact disc, Polygram 823293–2. 157. My assessment of gender bending in country music culture is based on interviews of fans from the era and readings of the national Country Song Roundup from 1940 to 1962, as well as local fan magazines such as Western and Country Music, Country Music Review, and Country Music Life. 158. “Hobo Village Burned,” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1938, p. 12. 159. Cuevas, interview by author. 160. Beard, 100 Years, 50. 161. Cuevas, interview by author. 162. Cohn, “An Interview with Nudie”; “Nudie and Roy Rogers,” photograph and caption, Western and Country Music 1, no. 6 (December 1951): n.p.; Bull, Hillbilly Hollywood, 123. 163. Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, Town Hall Party, compact disc, Rockstar; Nick Tosches, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 92–95; Rich Kienzle, liner notes to Wanda Jackson, Vintage Collections, compact disc, Capitol 7243–8–36185–2–1; William P. Davis, “Big Al Downing,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 141. 164. Brenda Jo Bright, “Remappings: Los Angeles Low Riders,” in Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity, ed. Bright and Liza Bakewell (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 103–4. 165. Arkie Shibley and His Mountain Dew Boys, “Hot Rod Race,” 78-rpm record, Gilt-Edge 3856, no. SFC78-7891, SFC; Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 79–84; Joe Wajgel, “A Short History and Evolution of ‘Hot Rod Lincoln,’ ” 21 March 2001, Rockabilly Hall of Fame, www.rockabillyhall.com/HotRodL ncln1.html, accessed on 15 July 2006. 166. Nelson, interview by author; Rich Kienzle, “Ken Nelson,” Journal of the American Academy for the Preservation of Old-Time Country Music 33 (June 1996): 14; “Capitol Industries Is off on Another Spin,” Business Week 25 (April 1970): 147. 167. Anthony Macias, “Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture, and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los Angeles,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004), 705–6. 168. Quoted from Don Snowden, liner notes to the Blasters, Testament: The Complete Slash Recordings, two-compact-disc set, Warner Bros./Slash/Rhino R2 783435 (2002), 9. 169. “KLAC: The Big 57,” survey sheet, 2 December 1971, in author’s personal collection; “K-Bar-B-Q Silver Dollar Survey,” 20 December 1969, ‘KBBQ Silver Dollar Surveys—2nd half 1969” folder, “Radio Station KBBQ” files, SFC. 170. “Stoney Edwards” and “ACM Awards,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country

294

/ Notes to Pages 157–161

Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),163, 626. 171. “Band Leader of the Month,” California Country 5, no. 5 (October 1970): 1. 172. Rebel Rouser advertisement, California Country 5, no. 5 (October 1970): 2. 173. “Probe Fiery Cross Burning on Lawn at Montebello,” 27 February 1947, Los Angeles Examiner files, HC; Bette Yarbrough Cox, Central Avenue— Its Rise and Fall (1890–c. 1955): Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: BEEM Publications, 1993), 301; Charlotta Bass, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles: Self-published, 1960), 95–109; Davis, “The L.A. Inferno,” 61–62. 174. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; reprint, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986), 124–25, 146–47, 179–81; “Carenegie-Myrdal Study—Form IV: Survey of the Negro Wage Earner in Los Angeles,” ca. 1945, box 2, folder 9, collection 203, Los Angeles Urban League Records, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 175. Bass, Forty Years, 95–109. 176. Lawrence E. Walsh, interview by Donald B. Seney, typed transcript, 23 October–1 November 1990, Sacramento, California, Oral History Program, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 177. Debbie Brimer, “The Pride of Country Music,” Country Music Reporter 2, no. 3 (September 1971): 8. 178. Bob Millard, “Charlie Pride,” 424, and “ACM Awards,” 625–29, in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 179. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 120–30.

5. playing second fiddle no more? 1. Catherine Winston, “Musically Inclined Spade Cooley Family Enjoys Valley Life,” Antelope Valley Press, 6 November 1960, p. 8. 2. See Spade Cooley envelope, Los Angeles Examiner files, Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Also see coverage in the Los Angeles Times, 5 April 1961, pp. A1, A26; and “Spade Cooley Dies Following Oakland Show,” Nashville Tennessean, 24 November 1969, p. 24. Pop culture depictions include James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential (New York: Warner Books, 1997); Big Sandy and His FlyRite Boys, “When Sleep Won’t Come (Blues for Spade),” Night Tide, compact disc, Hightone HCD8123; L.A. Confidential, dir. Curtis Hanson, film (Warner Bros., 1997), 138 min. 3. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

Notes to Pages 161–165 / 295 4. Joanne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). The quote is from p. 4. 5. Runs of some of these magazines are located in Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee (hereafter CMFL), but the Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter SFC) is particularly strong on Southern California periodicals of this era. 6. Runs—both complete and incomplete—of these fan journals are located in the CMFL and in the private Thomas Sims Archives, in the possession of Thomas Sims, San Diego, California. 7. Specifics on Ciesla were gleaned from “Miss Sunny Ciesla: ‘Round-Up in Hollywood’ News Editor,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 1 (September– October 1947): 4–5; and Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 3, no. 3 (January–February 1948): 6. Also see Dusti Lynn, “The Trail Dreamer,” National Hill-Billy News 5, no. 2 (November–December 1949): 22; “Grace Purdy Joins Tophand Staff,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 1. 8. Bill A. Wheeler, “At Home with Doye O’Dell,” Country Music Report 1, no. 3 (November 1963): 14–15, 37; Bill A. Wheeler, “A Home That Talks: It Speaks of Cash,” Country Music Review (Anaheim; formerly Country Music Report) (May 1964): 12–13; Bill A. Wheeler, “At Home with Joe and Rose Lee Maphis,” in Country Music Review First Annual Yearbook (Anaheim, California: Cal-Western Publications, 1965), n.p.; Jim Harris “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life (August 1966): 4; Jim Harris, “West Coast Notes,” Country Music Life (September 1966): 5; Carolina Cotton, “Bits ’n Pieces from Carolina Cotton’s West Coast Treasure Chest,” Rustic Rhythm 1, no. 3 (July 1957): 4. On Devvy Davenport, see 1963 issues of Country Music Report and 1964 issues of Country Music Review. 9. “Doorman Fillips Country Barn Dance” cartoon, Tophand 1, no. 5 (September 1946): 10; photographic collage, Tophand 1, no. 8 (December 1946): 31; Country Music Life (November 1965): 4. 10. “Meet the Mrs.” columns appeared in Country Song Roundup, and “At Home With . . . ” columns were regular features of Country Music Report and its successor, Country Music Review. 11. Winston, “Musically Inclined Spade Cooley,” 8; “Meet the Mrs.: Ruth O’Dell,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 26 (October 1953): 13. 12. Compare, for instance, information presented in Ken Griffis, “The Beverly Hill Billies,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (hereafter JEMFQ) 16, no 57 (Spring 1980): 3–16; Maxine (Crissman) Dempsey, interview by Richard Reuss, field notes, 14 June to 18 June 1968, 4, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and John Atkins, ed., The Carter Family: Old Time Music Booklet 1 (London: Old Time Music, 1973), with those of the cold war era. such as “Dear John: Ferlin Huskey [sic] and Jean Shepard,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 28 (January

296

/ Notes to Pages 165–168

1954): 7; “At Home with Stuart Hamblen,” Country Music Report 1, no. 2 (October 1963): 14–15, 33; Wheeler, “At Home with Doye O’Dell,” 14–15, 37; Wheeler, “A Home That Talks: It Speaks of Cash,” 12–13; and Wheeler, “At Home with Joe and Rose,” n.p. 13. Winston, “Musically Inclined Spade Cooley,” 8; “At Home with Stuart Hamblen,” 14–15, 33. 14. “Meet the Mrs.: Ruth O’Dell,” 13; “At Home with Stuart Hamblen,” 14–15, 33. 15. Wheeler, “At Home with Joe and Rose,” n.p.; Andy Mosely, “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music: Joe and Rose Lee Maphis,” Country Music Life (March 1968): 38–40. 16. Woody Guthrie and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection of Old Time Hill Country Songs: Being Sung for Ages, Still Going Strong (Gardena, Calif.: Spanish American Institute Press, 1937), 22; Spade Cooley’s Western Swing Song Folio (New York: Hill and Range Songs, 1945), 18–19; Bea Terry, “Folk Music and Its Folks: Carolina Cotton,” clippings from unidentified country music publication, possibly Hoedown, ca. 1950, Carolina Cotton name file, CMFL. 17. On honky-tonk’s liberating influence on male expressions of emotion, see George Lipsitz and Richard Leppert, “Age, the Body, and Experience in the Music of Hank Williams,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993), 22–37. 18. Songs sampled were recorded by these artists between 1950 and 1965 and were obtained through Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter CFCH); the Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Reading Room recorded and print holdings, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Gilbert Louey Country Music Collection, Division of Cultural History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter GLC), and author’s personal collection. Songs included in this list are: Johnny Bond: “Sick, Sober, and Sorry,” “Divorce Me COD,” “Love Song in 32 Bars”; Hank Thompson: “The Wild Side of Life,” “Cryin’ in the Deep Blue Sea,” How Cold Hearted Can You Get,” “Wake Up, Irene,” “A Fooler, A Faker,” “Honky-Tonk Girl,” “The New Green Light,” “A Six Pack to Go,” “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin,” “Headin’ Down the Wrong Highway,” “After All the Things I’ve Done,” “Bubbles in My Beer,” “I Wouldn’t Miss It for the World,” “Lawdy, What a Gal,” “I’ll Be a Bachelor Till I Die,” “Teach ’Em How to Swim,” “Dry,” “Cocaine,” “Little,” “Rovin’ Gambler,” “May I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister”; Lefty Frizzell: “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time,” “Long Black Veil,” “I Want to Be With You Always,” “A Little Unfair,” “Release Me,” “Always Late with Your Kisses,” “She’s Gone, Gone, Gone”; Johnny Horton: “All for the Love a Girl,” “Honky Tonk Man,” “I’m Ready If You’re Willing”; Joe and Rose Lee Maphis: “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music).” This thirty-six-song sample was chosen from trade magazine charts and an-

Notes to Pages 168–171 / 297 ecdotal evidence about local audiences, paying attention not just to chart toppers but also to “crowd pleasers” and “signature songs” of local performers, such as “Dim Lights, Think Smoke.” Thompson, a Texas-based artist, called Los Angeles the “bread and butter” of his performance tour. Frizzell settled in the San Fernando Valley by the late 1950s. Compare with Woody Guthrie, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” ca. 1937–1940, 200-page folder, carbon copy of typescripts, 17, 197, in box 2, Writings, Woody Guthrie Manuscripts, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 19. Thompson, “California Women,” Capitol Americana 40112, GLC; and Sheb Wooley, “Oklahoma Honky-Tonk Gal,” Bullet 603A, GLC. 20. This analysis stems from the songs cited in note 18. 21. Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, ed. Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1994), 230, 247. 22. Epithets stem from aforementioned song sample, see note 18. 23. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1942), 44–51, 184–204. For a discussion of Generation and Wylie’s later cold war–era works, see May, Homeward Bound, 74–75, 96–97. 24. Bill C. Malone, “Honky-Tonk,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 246. 25. See, for example, Carolina Cotton, “Carolina’s Cotton Pickin’ News,” Rustic Rhythm 1, no. 2 (May 1957): 32–33. 26. Joe Maphis and Rose Lee, “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music),” Swing West! vol. 1, Bakersfield, by various artists, compact disc, Razor and Tie 7930182197–2. Farnham’s views are discussed in Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine,” 247–48. 27. Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 45–46. 28. Here I build on the foundational ideas of Karl William Neuenfeldt, “Sun, Sea, Sex, and Senoritas: ‘Shorthand’ Images of Ethnicity, Ethos, and Gender in Country Songs Set in the Circum-Caribbean,” Popular Music and Society 15, no. 2 (1991): 7; and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 111–16. Fetishizations of non-European or “dark-skinned” women have a long history in the imperial Western imagination, often reflecting the anxieties, guilt, and actual violence surrounding conquest, as well as a willful exoticization and eroticization of the subordinated group by the conquering people. In the Americas, stories of interracial and intercultural romance often hid heinous truths about conquering European or European-American armies’ wholesale rape of indigenous women or forced efforts to “civilize” native peoples by intermarriage. 29. Johnny Bond, “Cherokee Waltz,” Johnny Bond Compositions (Burbank, California: Vidor Publications/Red River Songs, ca. 1960), 16; Gene Autry, “South of the Border,” audio recording, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and

298

/ Notes to Pages 171–174

Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 30. Hank Thompson, “Squaws along the Yukon,” Hank Thompson, Bob Wills, Pee Wee King, Red Stewart, audiocassette, Hollywood HT-138; Wooley, “Oklahoma Honky Tonk Gal,” GLC. 31. Thompson, “Squaws”; Cowboy Copas, “Filipino Baby,” 16 Country Hits From the 1940s, by various artists, compact disc, Hollywood HCD-208; Spade Cooley, “Pale Moon,” Best of the Spade Cooley Transcribed Shows, 33-rpm LP, Club of Spade 00101, FC11127, SFC. 32. Cooley, “San Antonio Rose,” Best of the Spade Cooley Transcribed Shows, 33-rpm LP, Club of Spade 00101, FC11127, SFC; Thompson, “Squaws.” 33. Spade Cooley and Smokey Rogers, “My Chickasay Gal,” Spade Cooley’s Western Swing Song Folio (New York: Hill and Range Songs, 1945), 16; Roy Rogers, “My Chickasay Gal,” on Country and Western Jamboree, by various artists, 33-rpm LP, RCA ADL2–0579(e), FC 3601, SFC; Terry Preston (Ferlin Husky), “China Doll,” on Swing West! vol. 1, Bakersfield, by various artists, compact disc, Capitol 79301821972; Tex Carman, “Pretty Geisha Girl,” on Town Hall Party, no. 60, reel 1, 5 December 1959, video recording of television program, CMFL. 34. Beverly Hill Billies, “My Pretty Quadroon” (rec. 1929), Another Americana, 33-rpm LP, Rare Art Records WIP1001, SFC; Merle Haggard, “Irma Jackson,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, vol. 2, compact disc box set, Capitol 7243–8–35711–2–3; Faulkner Tjensvold, “An Inquiry into the Reasons for the Post-Depression Migration from Oklahoma to Kern County in California,” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1947), 9. 35. The preponderance of songs about Mexican-Anglo affairs also may have reflected, in some ways, new trends in intercultural marriage. See Frank G. Mittelbach and Joan W. Moore, “Ethnic Endogamy—the Case of Mexican Americans,” American Journal of Sociology 74, no. 1 (July 1968): 50–62. More evidence, however, links the southern plains migration with Native American intermarriage and heritage. See “Douglas All-Americans,” Douglas AllAmericans 8, no. 9 (September 1941): 20–1, 32; Tjensvold, “Post-Depression Migration,” 6. 36. Patsy Montana, radio interview, KXLA Studios, Pasadena, California, 25 June 1959, audiocassette, Field Recording Collection no. FT2682, SFC; Chris Comber, “Patsy Montana: The Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” newsclipping, Old Time Music 4 (1972): 10, in Patsy Montana Artist File, no. NF 1407, SFC. 37. “Maddox Bros. and Rose,” Four Star publicity materials, ca. 1954, Rose Maddox name file, CMFL; “Maddox Brothers and Rose: Most Colorful Western and Hillbilly Band in America,” Western Music 1, no. 1 (July 1951): 14; George Sanders, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 20 (October 1952): 8; “Bill Price’s Ranch Roundup,” Rustic Rhythm 1, no. 4 (July 1957): 54; Maddox Brothers and Rose, “I Wish I Were a Single Girl Again,” and “Philadelphia Lawyer,” 78-rpm discs, Four Star 1586 and 1289, No. SFC7815673, SFC; Jonny Whiteside, “Cowgirl in a Cadillac,” LA Weekly, 27 April–3

Notes to Pages 174–177 / 299 May 1990, pp. 16–17. Also see Whiteside’s excellent biography of Maddox, Ramblin’ Rose: The Life and Career of Rose Maddox (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1997). 38. “Dear John: Ferlin Huskey [sic] and Jean Shepard,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 28 (January 1954): 7; Chris Skinker, liner note booklet, Jean Shepard, The Melody Ranch Girl, boxed compact disc set, Bear Family Records BC15905EI, 4–7; Jean Shepard, “A Real Good Woman” and “The Trouble with Girls,” audio recording, SFC45-377 P21, SFC. 39. Jean Shepard, “Two Hoops and a Holler,” The Melody Ranch Girl, boxed compact disc set, Bear Family Records BC15905EI; Skinker, liner notes, Melody Ranch Girl, 11, 28. 40. Skinker, liner notes, Melody Ranch Girl, 11, 28; Shepard photographs in Thomas Sims Archives, in the possession of Thomas Sims, San Diego, California. 41. Skinker, liner notes, Melody Ranch Girl, 11, 28; Jean Shepard, “Two Hoops and a Holler,” “Girls in Disgrace,” “The Root of All Evil (Is a Man),” and “Second Fiddle (to an Old Guitar),” The Melody Ranch Girl boxed compact disc set, Bear Family Records BC15905EI. 42. Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 178–79; C. Phil Henderson, “’Ritin’ th’ Range,” Tophand 1, no. 2 (April 1946): 3; Sunny Ciesla, “Round-Up in Hollywood,” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 4 (March–April 1949): 12–13; Lulu Bell Errett, “Speakin’ of the ‘Squeakin’ Deacon,’ ” National Hill-Billy News 4, no. 2 (November–December 1948): 20; Biff Collie, “What Is a Disc Jockey?” Country Music Life (January 1968): 41; George Sanders, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 20 (October 1952): 8; Bea Terry, “Folk Music and Its Folks: Carolina Cotton,” newsclipping, ca. 1950, Carolina Cotton name file, CMFL; KFOX advertisement, Country Music Report 1, no. 4 (December 1963): 17; Hugh Cherry, “The KFOX Story.” 43. Mike Streissguth, “Untold Stories: Cindy Walker: You Do Know Her Songs,” Journal of Country Music 19, no. 1 (n.d.): 7–9; “Bobby Gregory’s Question and Answer Column,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 35 (November 1954): 21. 44. Ben Townsend, “The Magic Wanda,” Hoedown (Denver) 1, no. 1 (May 1966): 8–12; Robert Medley, authorized biography synopsis, typed manuscript, 1 May 1991, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in Wanda Jackson Artist File, SFC; Kurt Wolff, “Q & A with Wanda Jackson,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 1995, p. 34; Alison DeBrucque, “The Queen of Rockabilly,” Oklahoma Gazette, 24 April 1991, p. 21; Bob Garbutt, Rockabilly Queens (Ontario, Canada: Duck Tail Press, 1979), 15, 21; Wanda Jackson, “I Gotta Know,” “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad,” “Cool Love,” “This Should Go On Forever,” “Fujiyama Mama,” and “Let’s Have a Party,” Vintage Collections, compact disc, Capitol 7243–8–36185 (also Rich Kienzle, liner notes, same compact disc); Nick Tosches, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 128–32; Town

300

/ Notes to Pages 177–181

Hall Party, no. 11, reel 2, 29 November 1959, video recording of television program, CMFL; Randy Fox and Michael Gray, “Hillbilly Boogie: All Mama’s Children Are Doin’ the Bop,” Journal of Country Music 20, no. 2 (1999): 21. 45. Townsend, “Magic Wanda,” 8–12; Shepard talks openly of her Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, upbringing in “The Girl with the Big Heart: Jean Shepard,” Country Song Roundup 6, no. 50 (June 1957): 10; and “Dear John: Ferlin Huskey [sic] and Jean Shepard,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 28 (January 1954): 7; Skinker, liner notes, Melody Ranch Girl, 11; Maddox Bros. and Rose, “Oklahoma Sweetheart Sally Anne,” 78-rpm disc, Four Star 1527, GLC. 46. Barbara Mandrell, with George Vecsey, Get to the Heart: My Story (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 256. 47. Ann Glaze, personal correspondence with author, 15 August 2001, North Hollywood, California. 48. Shirley Desy, interview by author, audiocassette recording, 7 August 2001, Long Beach, California; Shirley Desy, personal e-mail correspondence with author, 29 July 2001. Desy and Glaze were among those responding to notices seeking fans of the era that I placed in the Journal of Country Music and the San Bernardino Sun. 49. Desy, interview by author. 50. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 139–71.

6. fightin’ sides 1. Michael Ochs, “Merle Haggard: America’s Proletarian Poet,” Coast FM and Fine Arts (Beverly Hills) 2, no. 6 (June 1970): 40; Paul Hemphill, “Merle Haggard: When You’re Runnin’ Down Our Country,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1971): 98–99. 2. Merle Haggard and the Strangers, “Okie from Muskogee,” Okie from Muskogee, 33-rpm album, Capitol ST-384; “Lord, They’ve Done It All,” Time (6 May 1974): 54; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99. 3. Peter Thorpe, “I’m Movin’ On: The Escape Theme in Country and Western Music,” Western Humanities Review 24, no. 4 (1970): 317; Terry H. Anderson, “American Popular Music and the War in Vietnam,” Peace and Change 7, no. 4 (Fall 1971): 51–65; Patricia Averill, “Esoteric-Exoteric Expectations of Redneck Music,” Journal of Country Music 4, no. 2 (1973): 34–35. 4. Paul DiMaggio, Richard A. Peterson, and Jack Esco Jr., “Country Music: Ballad of the Silent Majority,” in The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture, ed. R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), 44; James C. Cobb, “From Muskogee to Luckenbach: Country Music and the ‘Southernization’ of America,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 3 (Winter 1982): 84; James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 238–43; James C. Cobb, Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia, 1999), 78–91; Tex Sample,

Notes to Pages 182–185 / 301 White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 124–26; Gerald Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 183, 194. Barbara Ching offers an astute gender-oriented auteur analysis that does consider some of the “responses” to “Okie” in Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country, Music, and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5. See Stuart Hall’s interpretation of Bakhtin’s concept of polysemy in “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 98. 6. Tim Schneckloth, “Merle Haggard: Country Jazz Messiah,” Down Beat, May 1980, p. 17. 7. Hall, “Encoding,” 98–99, 103. 8. Charlie Burton, “We Don’t Smoke Marijuana in Muskogee. We Steal,” Rolling Stone (18 March 1971): 48; Paul Hemphill, The Good Old Boys (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 126. 9. Merle Haggard, with Peggy Russell, Sing Me Back Home: My Story (New York: Times Books, 1981), 18, 20–22, 38, 25–29, 32, 68–70, 85–86, 100–103; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99–100; Daniel Cooper, Lefty Frizzell: The Honky-Tonk Life of Country Music’s Greatest Singer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 238–39. 10. Haggard, Sing Me Back, 32–33, 68–70, 124, 142–45. 11. Henry Sharpe, interview by author, 26 September 1994, Bakersfield, California; “Country Song Folk: Merle Haggard,” Country Song Roundup 16, no. 86 (November 1964): 21; Christopher S. Wren, “Merle Haggard: He Sings for the Folks Who Fought World War II,” Look (13 July 1971): 36; “Lord, They’ve Done It All,” 55; Haggard, Sing Me Back, 124; liner notes to Merle Haggard: Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed CD set, Capitol Nashville 72438-35711-2-3, p. 18; Mark Fenster, “Buck Owens,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 399–400. 12. Ed Briggs, “Country Music Capitol of the West,” Billboard: World of Country Music, special annual edition, 1966–67 (Cincinnati: Billboard, 1967), 30–32. Also see Richard A. Peterson, “The Production of Cultural Change: The Case of Contemporary Country Music,” Social Research 45 (1978): 299. “Nashville West” was more associated with a country music club of the same name in the L.A. suburb of El Monte and that club’s same-titled house band. 13. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 291. 14. Briggs, “Country Music Capitol of the West,” 30–32; Helen Goglin, “California’s Favorite ‘Country’ Son, Billy Mize,” Country Music Life (May 1966): 20–21; Robert Price, “Ken Nelson: Bakersfield Bonanza,” Journal of Country Music 19, no. 3 (1998): 32–35; Ken Nelson, interview by author, 16 May 2000, Camarillo, California.

302

/ Notes to Pages 185–188

15. “Lord, They’ve Done It All,” 53. 16. Songs and discographical material from Merle Haggard, Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 100. 17. Information about Haggard’s disclosure of his prison record can be discerned from Music City News 4, no. 11 (May 1967); and Music City News 5, no. 13 (July 1968). The first article does not mention his prison record, while the second talks of it as though it is common knowledge. 18. Haggard, Sing Me Back, 13. 19. Glenn Fowler, “Thomas Murton, 62,” New York Times, 19 October 1999, late edition, p. A28. 20. Alice Foster, “Merle Haggard: ‘I Take a Lot of Pride in Who I Am,’ ” 13 October 1969 article from the Great Speckled Bird, reprinted in Sing Out! (New York), n.d., 11–17, in “Okie from Muskogee” folder, no. 20002, series 3, folder 670, Archie Green Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although appearing shortly after the release of “Okie from Muskogee,” the Great Speckled Bird article was written before the antihippie song hit the airwaves and record shop shelves. 21. “California’s White Man Blues,” Rolling Stone (28 June 1969): 28. 22. Foster, “Merle Haggard,” 13–15. 23. On the Los Angeles country-rock scene, see John Einarson, Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001). 24. People’s World comments as quoted in Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues, 194. 25. Merle Haggard and the Strangers, “Okie from Muskogee”; “Lord, They’ve Done It All,” 54; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99. 26. Ibid. 27. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 318–19; Anderson, “American Popular Music,” 56–59. 28. Anderson, “American Popular Music,” 56–60; George Lipsitz, “Looking for a Style: Male Images in Country Music of the 1970s,” in Popular Culture in America, ed. Paul Buhle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 85–86. My thanks to the anonymous reader at the University of California Press for pointing me to recordings such as Davis’s “When You Gonna Bring Our Soldiers Home” and Jennings’s “Six White Horses.” 29. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 319. 30. Bill O’Neil, Tex Ritter: America’s Most Beloved Cowboy (Austin: Eakin Press, 1998), 111, 129; “Fourth AC&WM Awards,” Academy of Country and Western Music News (Los Angeles; hereafter ACWM News) (February 1969): 1; “Boyd Chairman of Board,” ACWM News (May 1969): 4; Johnny Whiteside, “Academic History,” Daily Variety, 5 May 1995, p. 19; Boyd was president from 1971 to 1973, 1975 to 1977, 1979 to 1981, according to the academy’s Twentyfourth Annual Awards program. 31. “My Brother,” ACWM News (July 1968): 1; “Hal Southern’s ‘Mom, Apple Pie,’ ”ACWM News (February 1969): 3.

Notes to Pages 189–192 / 303 32. Letter from Jay Hoffer, ACWM International News (formerly ACWM News; January 1970): 1. 33. Jean Lekrone, “Los Angeles Scene,” California Country 4, no. 6 (December 1969): 3; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 98; Robert Hilburn, “Haggard Acclaimed in Anaheim,” Los Angeles Times, 22 March 1971, sec. D, p. 1. Also see liner notes and album, Merle Haggard, with Bonnie Owens and the Strangers, The Fightin’ Side of Me: A Program of Haggard Hits and Exciting New Songs Recorded “Live” at his Famous Concert in Philadelphia, 33-rpm record, Capitol ST-451. 34. Notes and album, Merle Haggard, Fightin’ Side of Me; Liner notes and song, Merle Haggard, “Fightin’ Side,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3. 35. Hal Southern, “Mom, Apple Pie, the Bible, and the Flag,” California Country 5, no. 1 (June 1970): 35. 36. Carolyn Johnson, “Lt. Calley,” California Town and Country (Universal City) 1, no. 6 (April 1971): 15. 37. Wren, “Merle Haggard: He Sings for the Folks Who Fought World War II,” 38, 41. 38. On workers, the labor movement, and the war, see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 211; and Tom Well, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 303–9. 39. Melvin Small, Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1994), 49, 53–54, 161–68. Also see Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 71–83. 40. Haggard, “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99; Elizabeth Horton, letters to the editor, California Country 5, no. 3 (August 1970): 3. 41. Ochs, “Merle Haggard,” 40. 42. 1960 Census,” United States Census Data Browser, 24 March 1998, http://fisher.lib.virgnia.edu/census, accessed on 2 April 2002; Haggard, “Big City,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3. 43. Cliff Adcock, “City’s Heritage Inexorably Tied to Black Entrepreneurs,” Muskogee Phoenix (Oklahoma), 14 December 2004, p. 1. For further background on Muskogee’s hostile climate under segregation, see Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the “Negro Problem” during World War II,” Journal of American History 89, 3 (December 2002): 964. 44. Linda Villarosa, “Regina Taylor,” Essence (March 1992): 42. Also see

304

/ Notes to Pages 193–196

Robert B. Allen, “Muskogee School Plan Develops,” Oklahoma City Oklahoman, 1 April 1970, p. 21. 45. John Thompson, “Prisoners’ Civil Rights,” History of Corrections in Oklahoma, 2 April 2002, http://doc.state.ok.us/DOCS/dochist/Hist0800.htm, accessed on 2 April 2002. 46. Southern, “Mom, Apple Pie,” 35; Johnson, “Lt. Calley,” 15. Here it should be noted that the pair of photographs appeared during but not after the war, when the Communist Vietnamese government sent large numbers of its enemies to executions and concentration camps, though significant numbers of state-sponsored killings of civilians certainly occurred during the war. It is also important that the photographic pairing neglected the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and other Western and South Vietnamese attacks that also caused significant civilian fatalities in the region. 47. James R. Mills, A Disorderly House: The Brown-Unruh Years in Sacramento (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1987), 17, 40–46; Kenneth Reich, “Jesse Unruh, Key Political Figure in State, Dies at 64,” Los Angeles Times, 5 August 1987, Metro sec., pt. 1, p. 1; Mark A. Uhlig, “Jesse Unruh, a California Political Power, Dies,” New York Times, 6 August 1987, late city final edition, p. B6. Unruh, the most prominent of the two liberals, steered the passage of bills such as the Unruh Retail Credit Act, which regulated the interest charges on installment purchases, and the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial and religious discrimination among businesses that offered public services or accommodations. 48. Lawrence E. Walsh, interview by Donald B. Seney, typed transcript, 23 October–1 November 1990, Sacramento, California, ii, 2–3, 10, 57–60, 89, 100–101, Oral History Program, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 49. Davis, Prisoners, 158. 50. Richard Lee Colvin, “Dust Bowl Legacy,” Los Angeles Times Magazine (26 March 1989): 8; “Communists Lead Attack on Pixley Food Depot,” Visalia Times-Delta 23 March 1934, sec. 1, p. 1. 51. The phrase “curious one-timers” is taken from the liner notes of Haggard’s aforementioned album The Fightin’ Side of Me. 52. Merle Haggard, “Tulare Dust,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3. 53. Miles Corwin, “The Grapes of Wrath Revisited,” Los Angeles Times, 29 September 1991, pp. A1, A34, A35; Melton McClanahan, interview by author, 20 June 1996, Bakersfield, California. 54. Merle Haggard, “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde” and “Workin’ Man Blues,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3; Merle Haggard, “If We Make It through December,” Going Home for Christmas, 33-rpm record, Epic FE 38307; Merle Haggard, “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” The Lonesome Fugitive: The Merle Haggard Anthology (1963–1977), double compact disc set, Razor and Tie

Notes to Pages 196–201 / 305 RE 2059; Davis, Prisoners, 304; Merle Haggard, “No Hard Times,” Same Train, Different Time, compact disc, Koch 3–4051–2; Merle Haggard, “1929,” Chill Factor, audiocassette tape, Epic ET40986; Merle Haggard, “Are the Good Times Really Over,” Big City, audiocassette tape, Epic PET 37593. 55. Merle Haggard, interview by author, 11 September 1993, Palo Cedro, California. Portions of the interview appeared in Peter La Chapelle “Older, Wiser,” Bakersfield Californian, 26 September 1993, pp. E1, E2. Also see Merle Haggard, “I Take A Lot of Pride in Who I Am,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3. 56. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 245; Buck Owens, “California Okie” backed with “Child Support,” 45-rpm record, Warner Bros. 8255; Gerald W. Haslam, Okies: Selected Stories (San Rafael, Calif.: New West Publications, 1974); Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, The Red Coffee Can: Poems and Stories of the Unique Spirit of a San Joaquin Valley People (Fresno, Calif.: Valley Publishers, 1974); James Houston, The Men in My Life (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1987); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “One or Two Things I Know about Us: ‘Okies’ in American Culture,” Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 23. 57. Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues, 204. 58. “Hootenannies Sweep Los Angeles,” People’s Songs (New York) 1, no. 10 (1946): 3; “Folk Music, Los Angeles,” Caravan (Los Angeles) (February 1959): 4–5; Walter Comps, “Folking in Los Angeles,” Broadside (Los Angeles) 1, no. 3 (May 1962): 3; “The Dillards: Ozark Humor Goes West,” Country Music Life (January 1968): 22–25; Mitch Jayne, “Bluegrass: A Question of Survival?” Country Music Life (March 1968): 32–34; Peter Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country: Elvis, Dylan, Parsons, and the Roots of Country Rock (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 49–56; Einarson, Desperados, 21–48. 59. Einarson, Desperados, 85; Doggett, Are You Ready, 63. 60. Quote from Doggett, Are You Ready, 62. Also see Einarson, Desperados, 21–22; the Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, compact disc reissue, Columbia/Legacy CK 6150. 61. Gilded Palace has been reproduced on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ compilation, Hot Burritos! The Flying Burrito Bros. Anthology, 1969–1972, twocompact-disc set, A&M 069 490 610–2. 62. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Hot Burritos!; Doggett, Are You Ready, 73. 63. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Hot Burritos!; Doggett, Are You Ready, 58, 74. 64. Haggard, Okie from Muskogee. 65. John Grissim, “I’m Still Not Sure It Wasn’t Planned,” Rolling Stone 59 (28 May 1970): 14; Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, Old Testaments and New Revelations, audiocassette; Stephen R. Tucker, “Kinky Friedman,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Ox-

306

/ Notes to Pages 201–207

ford University Press, 1998), 184; Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99; Robert Hilburn, “Collins, Guthrie at the Bowl,” Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1970, sec. F, p. 1; Burton, “We Don’t Smoke Marijuana,” 48. 66. Archie Green, “Idea for paper on Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee,’ ” 1 November 1969, no. 20002, series 3, folder 670, Archie Green Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; “Harrah’s, Reno: Merle Haggard,” show review, Variety, 29 March 1972, p. 87. 67. Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 102; Bob Allen, “Merle Haggard: A Good Ol’ Boy Lets His Hair Down,” Quarter Notes 96 (September 1981): 78. 68. Reference to Haggard’s marijuana use quoted from Bryan Di Salvatore, “Merle Haggard,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 223. 69. Haggard, Sing Me Back, 284; Malcolm MacKinnon, “Merle Haggard: A Patriot’s Song,” Hemp Times (April–May 1997): 45–47. 70. Jerri Blake, “Objectively Speaking,” California Country (August– September 1969): 5; Jerri Blake, “Objectively Speaking,” California Country (June–July 1969): 20; “America,” California Country (December 1969): 2; photo caption of the longhaired country rock band Backpocket, California Country 5, no. 5 (October 1970): 5. 71. Hemphill, Good Old Boys, 126. 72. Einarson, Desperados, 24; Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues, 183. 73. Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99, 100. 74. Einarson, Desperados, 98; “Clean Country, Dirty Rock,” California Country 5, no. 6 (November 1970): 15. 75. Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 99; “Lord, They’ve Done It All,” 54; Allen, “Merle Haggard: A Good Ol’ Boy Lets His Hair Down,” 76. 76. Hemphill, “Merle Haggard,” 103; Merle Haggard, “The Farmer’s Daughter,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-8-35711-2-3. 77. Haggard, Sing Me Back, 239–44; Haggard, “Are the Good Times Really Over.” 78. Ochs, “Merle Haggard,” 40; Merle Haggard, “Irma Jackson,” Down Every Road, 1962–1994, boxed compact disc set, Capitol Nashville 7243-835711-2-3. 79. Merle Haggard, “Irma Jackson,” Let Me Tell You about a Song, Capitol Records 882. 80. Hemphill, Good Old Boys, 127; Ochs, “Merle Haggard,” 40; review of Let Me Tell You about a Song, Capitol Records 882, Rolling Stone (22 June 1972): 62; Grissim, “I’m Still Not Sure It Wasn’t Planned,” 14. 81. Doggett, Are You Ready, 73; Holly George-Warren, liner notes, Hot Burritos!; “Lord, They’ve Done It All,” 54. 82. Merle Haggard, “Rainbow Stew,” Rainbow Stew: Live at Anaheim, 1981, MCA 1464; MacKinnon, “Merle Haggard: A Patriot’s Song,” 45–47.

Notes to Pages 207–209 / 307 83. These contradictions are particularly emphasized in the 1990 album, Blue Jungle, Curb Records D2–77314. I also refer to Haggard, interview by author. 84. Jason DeParle, “Workin’ Man Blues: An Interview with Merle Haggard,” Journal of Country Music 16, no. 1 (n.d.): 11–15; Schneckloth, “Merle Haggard: Country Jazz Messiah,” 16–19, 63.

reprise: dueling populisms 1. Paul Kingsbury, “Capitol Records,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78. 2. See Amy Corin, “Queer Country, Line Dance Nazis, and a Hollywood Barndance: Country Music and the Struggle for Identity in Los Angeles, California,” in Country Music Annual 2000, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 144; and “The Times Have Changed at the Foothill,” Grindstone Magazine 5 (21 July 2001), www.throwrag.com/grindstone5.html, accessed on 4 April 2003. 3. On the scope of Emmis and the CBS Corporation’s corporate holdings, see Alan B. Albarran and Gregory G. Pitts, The Radio Broadcasting Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 68. On the region’s strong retail market for country, see Jonny Whiteside, “Heartaches by the Numbers,” LA Weekly, 21 June 2000, www.laweekly.com/music/music/heartaches-by-the-numbers/ 11392, accessed on 25 July 2006. 4. Bob Paxton, “CMT,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100–101. Also consulted were all three channels’ Web sites. 5. Gerald Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, 231. 6. Joe Selvin, “Henley Back at Work with Inside Job,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 May 2000, Sunday Datebook, 40; Holly George-Warren, liner notes, Hot Burritos! The Flying Burrito Brothers Anthology, 1969–1972, two-compact-disc set, A&M 069 490 610–2. 7. Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn’s Top Country Albums, 1964–1997: Chart Data Compiled from Billboard’s Country Albums Charts (Menomonee Falls, Wis.: Record Research, 1997), 48; George-Warren, liner notes, Hot Burritos!; Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 187–97. 8. See Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues, 264–73; Peter La Chapelle, “This John Doe Certain of ‘Weird’ Identity,” Bakersfield Californian, 24 June 1994, p. E1; Peter La Chapelle, “Loud, Fast, and Rockin’: Social Distortion Plays Grown-Up Punk,” Bakersfield California, 9 July 1993, pp. E1, E8; Sean Mitchell, “With the Blasters and X, Dave Alvin’s Career Seemed Headed for Stardom,” Los Angeles

308

/ Notes to Pages 209–212

Times Sunday Magazine (9 July 2000): 10–14. This section is also informed by my personal music collection and concert attendance in the area in the late 1990s. 9. Beck, Midnight Vultures, Geffen Records, 1999, DGC0694904852. 10. Peter H. King, “ ‘Cosmic Music’ Fills Desert Air,” Los Angeles Times, 12 August 2001, pp. B1, B8; Manuel Cuevas, interview by author, 5 September 2000, Nashville, Tennessee. 11. “Mark Humphrey, “Desert Rose Band,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, comp. the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 143. 12. Mitchell, “Dave Alvin’s Career,” 14. 13. Jonny Whiteside, “Hillbilly Deluxe,” LA Weekly, 8 December 2000, p. 36. 14. David Bennahum, ed., k.d. lang: In Her Own Words (London: Omnibus Press, 1995), 5, 41–49. 15. Bob Allen, “Gary Allan’s Honky Tonk Surf Party,” Country Music (Westport, Conn.) 194 (November–December 1998): 40–41; Bob Allen, “The Spellbinding Music of Iris Dement,” Country Music 192 (July–August 1998): 48, 50. 16. My analyses of these bands and the general country music scene is based on my own concert attendance in the late 1990s. For an alternate view, see Jonny Whiteside, “Hollywood Country,” LA Weekly, 6 January 2005, www.laweekly.com/general/features/hollywood-country/1074, accessed on 15 July 2006. 17. Corin, “Queer Country, Line Dance Nazis,” 142–47. 18. Handscript inventory of fan letters, in Woody Guthrie, “Original Songs,” 176–77, notebook 1, folder 4, Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, New York; “Metropolitan Los Angeles—2 County Area: Pulse—Sept/Oct 1969,” in “Radio Station KBBQ” files, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 19. Steve Carney, “Country Radio Is Now ‘Music of the Suburbs,’ ” Los Angeles Times, 8 March 2002, p. F38. 20. See Beverly Keel, “Between Riot Grrrl and Quiet Girl: The New Women’s Movement in Country Music,” A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 155–77; and Monica Kendrick, “Reel Live Women: A Video Essay,” Journal of Country Music 21, no. 3 (2000): 32–37. 21. Corin, “Queer Country, Line Dance Nazis,” 141–50; drawn from quotes in Bennahum, k.d. lang, 27–32. 22. John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, as reprinted in the trilogy U.S.A. (1930; reprint, New York: Library of America, 1996), 89. 23. Chris Neal, “American Dream: Darryl Worley,” Country Weekly 10, no. 13 (24 June 2003): 22, 25, 26.

Notes to Pages 212–215 / 309 24. John Gerome, “Flag Waving Sells in Country Music,” CBS News online, www/cbsnews.com/stories/2004/ 06/10/entertainment/printable622274.shtml, accessed on 15 June 2004. 25. Never released on compact disc, “Iraq and Roll” was officially available only as a download though Clint Black’s Web site (www.clintblack.com) for a short period in 2003, but it was one of the most popular country downloads of the time. Copies of lyrics and file-sharing MP3 downloads of the song were still readily available with a quick search of the Internet in July 2006. On the Bush administration’s admissions about its claims prior to the Iraq war, see, among others, Dana Priest, “Iraq Terror Breeding Ground: War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report,” Washington Post, 14 February 2005, sec. A, p. 1. 26. Geoffrey Himes, “Toby Keith: Home Is Where the Heart Is,” Country Music 191 (May–June 1998): 40–43; Alanna Nash, “Red, White, and the Cowboy Blues,” USA Weekend, 31 October–2 November 2003, p. 6. 27. Nash, “Red, White,” 6; “News of Note,” Country Weekly 10, no. 13 (24 June 2003): 1; Craig Havighurst, “Country Music in Battle over Patriotism, Free Speech,” Nashville Tennessean, 1 June 2003, www.tennessean.com/entertain ment/music/fanfair/archives/03/05/33619336.shtml, accessed on 10 July 2005. 28. Himes, “Toby Keith,” 42. 29. See Alanna Nash, review of Have You Forgotten? by Darryl Worley, 2003, DreamWorks Nashville 000006402, on Amazon.com, www.amazon .com/gp/product/B0000856C7/ref=sr_11_1/002–1799653–3165628?ie=UTF8, accessed on 26 July 2006. 30. Chris Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (New York: New Press, 2005), 65. 31. Steve Huey, “Toby Keith: Biography,” All Music Guide, http://allmu sic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:fwm865x4tsqe~T1, accessed on 14 May 2006. 32. Havighurst, “Country Music in Battle.” 33. Jamie Reno, “Getting Out the Music Lovers,” Newsweek Web site exclusive, 16 March 2004, www.msnbc.com/id/4542018, accessed on 25 July 2006. 34. Peter Cooper, “Should Singers Strike a Political Note?” Nashville Tennessean, 14 December 2004. 35. Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks, 29. 36. Reno, “Getting Out the Music Lovers.” 37. Ibid. Also see Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks, 68–70. 38. Dixie Chicks, Home, compact disc, 2002, Columbia CK 86840. 39. Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now, compact disc, 2004, Artemis Records, ATM-CD-51565. In interviews, Earle has said he takes his cues from Parsons’s incarnation of country-rock. “He made me feel not so weird, that it was OK to have long hair and wear cowboy boots, to listen to country music and rock ’n’ roll,” Earle told the Los Angeles Times. “I mean those weren’t just separate types of music, but the people who like them were in separate camps back then. Gram saw the humanity in both and brought us a lot closer together.” See

310

/ Notes to Pages 215–221

Robert Hilburn, “Still Dreaming: Norah Jones, Keith Richards, and a Host of Other Musicians Gather for an Enchanting Salute to Gram Parson’s legacy,” Los Angeles Times, 12 July 2004, p. E1. 40. Malcolm MacKinnon, “Merle Haggard: A Patriot’s Song,” Hemp Times (April–May 1997): 45–47; Dan Bacher, “Merle Haggard and the Politics of Salmon: ‘Clearcutting Is Rape,’ ” CounterPunch online, 2 March 2004, www.counterpunch.org/bacher03022004.html, accessed on 15 June 2005. 41. Alexander Cockburn, “Beat the Devil,” The Nation 275, no. 9 (23 September 2002): 9; Alexander Cockburn, “The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics,” CounterPunch 14 November 2002, www.counterpunch.org/cockburn 114.html, accessed on 7 May 2005. 42. Merle Haggard, “Hag’s Editorial,” www.merlehaggard.com, accessed on 4 May 2005. 43. Cooper, “Should Singers Strike.” 44. “Country Music Legend Merle Haggard against War in Iraq,” Associated Press, 22 March 2004. 45. Merle Haggard, Haggard Like Never Before, compact disc, Hag Records, 2003, 0005. 46. Cooper, “Should Singers Strike”; Chet Flippo, “Reagan Belongs on Mount Rushmore, Says the Hag,” CMT online, www.cmt.com/artists/news/ 1488341/06112004/haggard_merle.jhtml, accessed on 10 April 2005. 47. Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks, 259. 48. Merle Haggard, Chicago Wind, 2005, compact disc, Capitol Records Nashville/Hag Records, 7243–8–74929–2–9. 49. Gerome, “Flag Waving Sells.” 50. Cooper, “Should Singers Strike.” 51. Andrew Gumbel, “California Dreams of Union Rights as Poverty Rate Soars,” The Independent (London), 10 September 2000, p. 23. 52. Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, The Other Los Angeles: The Working Poor in the City of the 21st Century (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, August 2000), vii, xi, 17–25, 31, 41, errata. 53. Lisa A. Lawson, “Commentary: Perspective on Earlier Immigrants: Scorned Outsiders of Another Era: The Okies of the Late-1930s Were Blamed for Job Losses,” op-ed, Los Angeles Times, 28 December 1993, Metro sec. B, p. 7. 54. Merle Haggard, “The Immigrant,” I’m Always on a Mountain When I Fall, 1978, 33-rpm phonograph record, MCA-2375. 55. Leo Chavez and Don Barletti, “Between Two Worlds: The People of the Border,” presentation, 24 April, 1997, Leonard Davis Auditorium, Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Also see Leo Chavez, Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998). 56. Haggard, “The Immigrant.” 57. Colin Escott interviewed Dwight Yoakam in Tattooed on Their Tongues: A Journey through the Backrooms of American Music (New York: Schirmer

Notes to Pages 221–222 / 311 Books, 1996), 206; Carney, “Country Radio Is Now ‘Music of the Suburbs,’ ” p. F38. 58. Don Cusic, “Latin America and Country Music,” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 3 (1999): 39–47. On Mexican and Mexican American markets and rural-themed music, see Elijah Wald, “Polkacontrabandista,” in American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, ed. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Malnick (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 211–30, as well as recent and classic studies such as Manuel Peña, The TexasMexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Steven Loza, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Sam Quinones, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); and Cameron Edberg, El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S.-Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 59. “EMI’s Capitol Nashville Wants Latin Country Star,” Reuters, 2 April 2006, on Reuters.com, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type= entertainmentnews&storyid=2006–04–02t224348z_01_n02244700_rtrukoc_0 _us-capitolnashville.xml, accessed on 29 April 2006. I am not suggesting that country music become a platform for a new version of cultural imperialism whereby American culture industries replace local community-level forms of cultural production, but rather that country music become more involved in making listeners aware of social inequities.

Selected Bibliography

collections of papers and audiovisual archives Archie Green Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Armed Forces Radio Service Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Bob Pinson personal collection, in the possession of Bob Pinson, Nashville, Tennessee. California Odyssey Project Oral History Transcripts, Special Collections, Walter W. Stiern Library, California State University, Bakersfield. Carey McWilliams Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Charles Leland Bagley Collection, collection 16, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Gilbert Louey Country Music Collection, Division of Cultural History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Harry Hay Phonograph Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles. Hiram Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. James Daugherty Collection, Southern California Library of Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles. Lee Hays Papers, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Los Angeles Examiner files, Hearst Collection, Department of Special Collections, East Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Los Angeles Urban League Records, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

313

314

/ Selected Bibliography

Motion Picture and Television Room film holdings, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Western Equipment Collection, Research Division, Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles. Performing Arts Reading Room recorded and print holdings, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Professional Musicians Local 47 American Federation of Musicians Archive, Los Angeles, California. Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Simon J. Lubin Society Papers, Special Collections, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thomas Sims Archives, in the possession of Thomas Sims, San Diego, California. Urban Archives, Special Collections, California State University, Northridge. U.S. Home Owners Loan Corporation Papers, Record Group 195, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Victor Wolfenstein Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopied materials in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, New York. Woody Guthrie Manuscripts, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Woody Guthrie Papers, Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

periodicals Academy of Country and Western Music News, became Academy of Country and Western Music International News (Los Angeles), 1967–1971. American Aeronaut (Los Angeles), 1942–1965. American Guardian (Oklahoma City), 1937–1940. Bakersfield Californian, 1939–2001. Billboard (Cincinnati, Ohio), 1940–1971. Broadside (Los Angeles), 1962. California Country (Covina, California), 1968–1971. California—Magazine of the Pacific (San Francisco), 1938–1940. California Progressive Leader, emerged from Progressive Leader and Light: The Democratic Leader (Los Angeles), 1939. California Town and Country (Universal City), 1970–1971. The Capitol (became Capitol News) (Los Angeles), 1943–1950. Caravan (Los Angeles), 1959–1960.

Selected Bibliography / 315 Clef (Santa Monica), 1946. Country Gentleman (Albany, New York), 1937–1940. Country Music Life (Orange, California), 1965–1969. Country Music Report, became Country Music Review (Orange, and later Anaheim, California), 1963–1964. Country Song Roundup (Derby, Connecticut), 1949–1967. Douglas Airview (Santa Monica), 1941–1944. Down Beat (Chicago), 1940–1952. EPIC News (Los Angeles), 1936–1940. Eugenical News (New York), 1937–1940. Eugenics (New Haven, Connecticut), 1930–1931. Hollywood Tribune: An Independent Weekly (Los Angeles), 1939. Jamboree Magazine (Ventura, California), December 1948–1949. John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (JEMFQ) (Los Angeles), 1969–1985. Lakewood Enterprise (California), 1965. Light: The Democratic Leader, became California Progressive Leader (Los Angeles), 1938. Lockheed Star (Los Angeles), 1940. Long Beach Airview News, 1941–1943. Los Angeles Times, 1935–2001. Music City News (Nashville), 1967–1970. National Hill-Billy News (Wheeling, West Virginia), 1945–1951. North American Skywriter (Los Angeles), 1944. Overture (Los Angeles), 1939–1951. People’s Songs (New York), 1945–1947. People’s World (San Francisco), 1937–1990. Rolling Stone (San Francisco), 1969–1974. Rural Radio (Nashville, Tennessee), 1938. Rustic Rhythm (New York), 1957. San Francisco Chronicle, 1940, 2000. Tophand (Hollywood), 1946–1947. Trails of the West (Moffett, Oklahoma), 1945. Utopian News (Los Angeles), 1934–1936. Western Music, became Western and Country Music (Los Angeles), 1951–1952. Wilmington Press (California), 1941–1945.

interviews and oral histories Allard, John. Interview by Richard Furmanovsky. Typed transcript of audio recording, Bell, California, 18 March, 2 April, 6 May, and 9 June 1986, Oral History Program, collection 300/285, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Aston, William C. Interview by Thomas J. Connors. Typed transcript of audio recording, 18 April, 28 April, 3 May, 12 May, 24 May, 1988, Los Angeles, Oral

316

/ Selected Bibliography

History Program, collection 300/285, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Barrett, Minnie, and Bob Barrett. Interview by Richard Reuss. Field notes, 8 June 1968, Pampa, Texas, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Boyle, Mary (Guthrie) Jennings. Interview by Ed Cray. Typed transcript, 19 August 1998, in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Cohn, Nudie. “An Interview with Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor.” Typescript by unidentified student of contemporary art at the University of California, Irvine, n.d., in box 1, clippings and correspondence, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Western Equipment Collection, Research Division, Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles. Cuevas, Manuel. Interview by author. Audiocassette recording, 5 September 2000, Nashville, Tennessee. Dempsey, Maxine (Crissman). Interview by author. 11 November 1999, Carson City, Nevada. ———. Interview by author. 2 February 2001, Carson City, Nevada. ———. Interview by Richard Reuss. Field notes, 14 June to 18 June 1968, Sun Valley, California, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Desy, Shirley. Interview by author. 7 August 2001, Long Beach, California. Duncan, Glynn. Interview by author. 8 April 2001, San Dimas, California. ———. Interview by author. 19 April 2001, Hemet, California. Ferguson, Joe Frank, and Eldon Shamblen. Interview by David Stricklin. 19 May 1985, Dallas, Texas, Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Garcia, Benny. Interview by author. 4 March 2001, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Geer, Will. Interview by Victor and Judi Wolfenstein. Audiocassette recording, ca. 1970, Los Angeles, Victor Wolfenstein Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopied materials in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Goodman, Dick. Interview by author. 27 June 2002, Sun City, Arizona. Haggard, Merle. Interview by author. 11 September 1993, Palo Cedro, California. Halsey, Jim. Interview by author. 23 July 2001, Los Angeles, California. Hay, Harry. Interview by author. 16 February 1999, West Hollywood, California. Jennings, Matt. Interview by Ed Cray. Typed transcript, December 29, 1998, photocopied materials in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. ———. Interview by Richard Reuss. Typed notes from tape recording, March 1972, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies

Selected Bibliography / 317 in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. ———. Interview by Victor and Judi Wolfenstein. Typed notes, January 1972, Victor Wolfenstein Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopied materials in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Johnston, Buck Wayne. Interview by author. 27 March 2001, Alpine, California. McClanahan, Melton. Interview by author. 20 June 1996, Bakersfield, California. Montana, Patsy. Radio interview, KXLA Studios, Pasadena, California. 25 June 1959, audiocassette, Field Recording Collection no. FT2682, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Nelson, Ken. Interview by author. 16 May 2000, Camarillo, California. Patterson, Tim. Interview by author. 17 October 2000, San Francisco, California. Pierce, Don. Interview by author. 15 September 2000, Hendersonville, Tennessee. Pierce, Norman. Interview by Richard Reuss. 8 July 1967, typescript notes, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Ray, Buddy. Interview by Jean A. Boyd. 22 June 1993, Fort Worth, Texas, Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Reed, Eddie. Interview by author. 2 May 2001, Los Angeles. Remington, Herb. Interview by author. 26 March 2001, Houston, Texas. Robbin, Ed. Interview by E. Victor and Judi Wolfenstein. December 1969, box 8, folder 3, Victor Wolfenstein Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopied materials in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Shamblen, Eldon. Interview by Jean A. Boyd. 21 July 1992, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Sharpe, Henry. Interview by author. September 26, 1994, Bakersfield, California. Sims, Lloyd R. Interview by author. 29 April 2001, San Bernardino, California. Sudmeier, Glenn W. Interview by author. 8 April 2001, San Dimas, California. ———. Interview by author. 16 April 2001, Hesperia, California. Tenney, Jack B. Interview by Donald J. Schippers. 22 July 1965–12 May 1966, Hacienda Heights, California, Oral History Program, collection 300/56, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Thompson, Hank. Interview by author. 3 August 2001, Red River, Texas. Thornton, Oliver. Interview by Richard Reuss. 27 July 1967, Richard Reuss Papers, Indiana University, Bloomington, photocopies in possession of Ed Cray, Department of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Tuttle, Wesley, and Marilyn Tuttle. Interview by author. 7 February 2001, San Fernando, California.

318

/ Selected Bibliography

Waldie, Donald J. Interview by author. 12 July 2001, Lakewood, California. Walsh, Lawrence E. Interview by Donald B. Seney. Typed transcript. 23 October–1 November 1990, Sacramento, California, Oral History Program, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Wilkinson, Frank. Interview by author. 14 June 2000, Los Angeles, California. Williams, Robert. Interview by author. 20 June 1996. Buttonwillow, California. Wills, Betty Anderson. Interview by David Stricklin. 3 November 1974, Fort Worth, Texas, Arts and Culture Project, Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Wills, Bob. Interview by Buck Wayne Johnston. Audiocassette recording, April 1967, El Cajon, California, Johnston personal collection. Wills, Lorene. Interview by author. 6 April 2001, Shawnee, Oklahoma. Wills, Luther J. “Luke.” Interview by Jean Boyd. 21 July 1993, Las Vegas, Nevada, Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Worthington, Cal. Interview by author. 28 August 2001, Folsom, California.

selected published sources Adorno, Theodor W. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Trans. from the German by E. B. Ashton. 1962. Reprint, New York: Continuum, 1989. ———. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. 1951. Reprint, London: Verso, 1974. Almaguer, Tómas. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Autry, Gene, with Mickey Herskowitz. Back in the Saddle Again. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Barnouw, Erik. The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Bass, Charlotta. Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1960. Black, Edwin. War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003. Bond, Johnny. Reflections: The Autobiography of Johnny Bond. JEMF special series no. 8. Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, 1976. ———. The Tex Ritter Story. New York: Chappell Music Company, 1976. Bowie, Patricia Carr. “The Cultural History of Los Angeles, 1850–1967: From Rural Backwash to World Center.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1980. Boyarsky, Bill. The Rise of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House, 1968. Boyd, Jean. The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Selected Bibliography / 319 Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Bull, Debby. Hillbilly Hollywood: The Origins of Country and Western Style. New York: Rizzoli International, 2000. Burke, Robert E. Olson’s New Deal for California. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1953. Carman, Bryan. A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Cendrars, Blaise. Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies. Trans. Garrett White. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Originally published as Hollywood, La Mecque du Cinéma. Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1936. Chin, Ronald E. “Democratic Party Politics in California, 1920–1956.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1958. Ching, Barbara. Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cobb, James C. Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South. Athens: University of Georgia, 1999. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Cooper, Daniel. Lefty Frizzell: The Honky-Tonk Life of Country Music’s Greatest Singer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Couch, Gretchen Palmatier. “An Analysis of School Attendance and Child Welfare Services in Glendale City Schools.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939. Cox, Bette Yarbrough. Central Avenue—Its Rise and Fall (1890–c. 1955): Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles. Los Angeles: BEEM Publications, 1993. Cray, Ed. Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Cross, William T., and Dorothy E. Cross. Newcomers and Nomads in California. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1937. Daniel, Cletus E. Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage, 1992. ———. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. ———. “The L.A. Inferno.” Socialist Review 22, no. 1 (January–March 1992): 57–80. ———. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. London: Verso, 1986. de Graaf, Lawrence B. “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930–1950.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1962.

320

/ Selected Bibliography

Delmatier, Royce Deems. “The Rebirth of the Democratic Party.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1955. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Deverell, William. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. DiMaggio, Paul, Richard A. Peterson, and Jack Esco Jr. “Country Music: Ballad of the Silent Majority.” In The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture, ed. R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson, eds. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972. Doggett, Peter. Are You Ready for the Country: Elvis, Dylan, Parsons, and the Roots of Country Rock. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. New York: Times Books, 1999. Dugdale, Richard L. The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity. 1877. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. “One or Two Things I Know about Us: ‘Okies’ in American Culture.” Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 4–34. ———. Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. London: Verso, 1997. Eatherly, Patricia Travis. In Search of My Father: A Warm, True Story by the Daughter of Merle Travis. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman Press, 1987. Einarson, John. Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow, 1999. Fisher, J. Donald. “A Historical Study of the Migrant in California.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1945. Fleischauer, Carl, and Beverly W. Brannan, eds. Documenting America, 1935–1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Country. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Fornatale, Peter, and Joshua Mills. Radio in the Television Age. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1980. Fowler, Gene, and Bill Crawford. Border Radio. Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1998. Frank, Miriam, Marilyn Ziebarth, and Connie Field. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter: The Story of Three Million Working Women during World War II. Emeryville, Calif.: Clarity Educational Productions, 1982. Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Franklin, Jimmie Lewis. Journey toward Hope: A History of Blacks in Oklahoma. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Fulton, William. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. Point Arena, Calif.: Solano Press Books, 1997.

Selected Bibliography / 321 George-Warren, Holly, and Michelle Freedman. How the West Was Worn. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Ginell, Cary. Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Gluck, Sherna Berger. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Goldschmidt, Walter. As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness. 1947. Reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1978. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1997. Green, Archie. “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol.” Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965): 204–28. ———. Only a Miner: Studies in Coal-Mining Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1979. Green, Douglas B. Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy. Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. “Southernizing the American Working Class: Post-war Episodes of Regional and Class Transformation.” Labor History 39, no. 2 (1998): 135–54. Grein, Paul. Capitol Records: Fiftieth Anniversary, 1942–1992. Hollywood: Capitol Records, 1992. Grundy, Pamela. “ ‘We Always Tried to Be Good People’: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933–1935.” Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995): 1594–1619. Guthrie, Woody. Pastures of Plenty: A Self Portrait. Comp. and ed. Dave Marsh and Howard Leventhal. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. $30 Wood Help! Los Angeles: Self-published, 1939. ———. Woody Guthrie Folk Songs. New York: Ludlow Music, 1963. Guthrie, Woody, and Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman. Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection of Old Time Hill Country Songs: Being Sung for Ages, Still Going Strong. Gardena, Calif.: Spanish American Institute Press, 1937. Haggard, Merle, with Tom Carter. Merle Haggard’s My House of Memories: For the Record. New York: Harper Entertainment, 1999. Haggard, Merle, with Peggy Russell. Sing Me Back Home: My Story. New York: Times Books, 1981. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993. ———. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and KuanHsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. Harrod, Merrill Leonard. “A Study of Deviate Personalities as Found in Main Street of Los Angeles.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939.

322

/ Selected Bibliography

Hartigan, John, Jr. “ ‘Disgrace to the Race’: Hillbillies and the Color Line in Detroit.” In Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, ed. Phillip J. Obermiller et al. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. Haslam, Gerald W. Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Hemphill, Paul. The Good Old Boys. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. ———. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music. 1970. Reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1971. Herbold, Paul. “Sociological Survey of Main Street Los Angeles, California.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1936. Hines, Thomas. Populuxe. New York: Knopf, 1986. Horne, Gerald. Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. ———. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1997. Hoskyns, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. The Interplay of Influence: Mass Media and Their Publics in News, Advertising, and Politics. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1988. Jensen, Joli. The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music. Nashville: Country Music Foundation and Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Johnson, Daniel J. “‘No More Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1911.” Labor History 41, no. 1 (2000): 28–39. Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Killian, Lewis M. White Southerners. Rev. ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. Kingsbury, Paul, and Alan Axelrod, eds. Country: The Music and the Musicians. 1st ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. Kirby, Jack Temple. The Countercultural South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. 1980. Reprint, New York: Delta, 1999. Kraft, James P. Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. La Chapelle, Peter. “All That Glitters: Country Music, Taste, and the Politics of the Rhinestone ‘Nudie’ Suit.” Dress: The Annual Journal of the Costume Society of America 28 (2001): 3–12. ———. “At the Crossroads of Whiteness: Anti-Migrant Activism, Eugenics, and Popular Culture in Depression-Era California.” In Moving Stories: Migra-

Selected Bibliography / 323 tion and the American West, 1850–2000, ed. Scott E. Casper and Lucinda Long. Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee, 2001. ———. “ ‘Shadows of the Dust’: The Expectations and Ordeal of California’s African American Dust Bowl Migrants.” Master’s thesis, California State University, Bakersfield, 1996. ———. “ ‘Spade Doesn’t Look Exactly Starved’: Country Music and Negotiation of Women’s Domesticity in Cold War Los Angeles.” In A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. Radio and the Printed Page. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Frank N. Stanton. Radio Research, 1941. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941. Leader, Leonard Joseph. “Los Angeles and the Great Depression.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972. LeFebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. 1974. Reprint, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991. Lembcke, Jerry. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Libby, Joseph Edward. “To Build Wings for the Angels: Los Angeles and Its Aircraft Industry, 1890–1936.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1990. Lipsitz, George. “Looking for a Style: Male Images in Country Music of the 1970s.” In Popular Culture in America, ed. Paul Buhle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. ———. The Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Logsdon, Guy. “The Dust Bowl and the Migrant,” American Scene 12, no. 1 (1971): n.p. Lotchin, Roger W., ed. The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second World War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Lusted, David. The Western. Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2003. Mackay, Jock. “Populist Ideology and Country Music.” In All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993. Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. ———. Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. ———. Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Mandrell, Barbara, with George Vecsey. Get to the Heart: My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.

324

/ Selected Bibliography

Maram, Linda Nueva España. “Negotiating Identity: Youth, Gender, and Popular Culture in Los Angeles’s Little Manila, 1920s–1940s.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996. Marc, David, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. McChesney, Robert W. Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. McCusker, Kristine M., and Diane Pecknold, eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. McFarland, David. “The Development of the Top 40 Radio Format.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972. McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. McIlwaine, Shields. The Southern Poor White: A Literary History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939. ———. The Southern Poor White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939. McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. 1935. Reprint, Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1978. ———. Southern California: An Island on the Land. 1946. Reprint, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1995. Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America. Philadelphia: Temple University, 1994. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Mills, James R. A Disorderly House: The Brown-Unruh Years in Sacramento. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1987. Morgan, Dan. Rising in the West: The True Story of an “Okie” Family in Search of the American Dream. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Mundy, Julie, and Darrel Higham. Don’t Forget Me: The Eddie Cochran Story. New York: Billboard Books, 2001. Neuenfeldt, Karl William. “Sun, Sea, Sex, and Senoritas: ‘Shorthand’ Images of Ethnicity, Ethos, and Gender in Country Songs Set in the CircumCaribbean.” Popular Music and Society 15, no. 2 (1991): 7. Nicolaides, Becky M. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. “ ‘Where the Working Man Is Welcomed’: Working-Class Suburbs in Los Angeles, 1900–1940.” Pacific Historical Review 6 (November 1999): 533–49. O’Neil, Bill. Tex Ritter: America’s Most Beloved Cowboy. Austin: Eakin Press, 1998.

Selected Bibliography / 325 Patterson, Tim. “Notes on the Historical Application of Marxist Cultural Theory.” Science and Society 39, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 257–91. ———. “Popular Culture and Organic Intellectuality.” Insurgent Sociologist 5, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 67–73. Perry, Louis B., and Richard S. Perry. A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Peterson, Richard A. “Class Unconsciousness in Country Music.” In You Wrote My Life: Lyrical Themes in Country Music, ed. Melton McLaurin and Richard Peterson. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992. ———. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ———. “The Production of Cultural Change: The Case of Contemporary Country Music.” Social Research 45 (1978): 292–314. Peterson, Richard A., and Paul J. DiMaggio. “From Region to Class: The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces 53 (March 1975): 467–506. Popenoe, Paul, and E. S. Gosney. Twenty-eight Years of Sterilization in California. Pasadena, Calif.: Human Betterment Foundation, 1939. Prickett, James R. “Communist Conspiracy or Wage Dispute? The 1941 Strike at North American Aviation.” Pacific Historical Review 50, no. 2 (May 1981): 215–33. Pyle, Ernie. Ernie’s America: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s 1930s Travel Dispatches. Ed. David Nichols. New York: Random House, 1989. Quadagno, Jill. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Rafter, Nicole Hahn. White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Reuss, Richard A. “American Folklore and Left-Wing Politics.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1971. Reyes, David, and Tom Waldman. Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ’n’ Roll from Southern California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1998. Robbin, Edward. Woody Guthrie and Me: An Intimate Reminiscence. Berkeley: Lancaster-Miller, 1979. Roediger, David. Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London: Verso, 1994. ———. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991. Rogers, Dale Evans. Cool It or Lose It! Dale Evans Rogers Raps with Youth. Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1972. Rogers, Roy, and Dale Evans, with Jane and Michael Stern. Happy Trails: Our Life Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Rogers, Roy, and Dale Evans, with Carlton Stowers. Happy Trails: The Story of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Waco, Texas: Word, Inc., 1979. Rolo, Orlo M. “The Place of the Study of Heredity and Eugenics in Some High

326

/ Selected Bibliography

Schools of Long Beach, California.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1940. Ross, Steven J. Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Rothel, David. The Singing Cowboy. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1979. Sample, Tex. White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Sanders, Sue. Our Common Herd. New York: Garden City Publishing, 1939. ———. The Real Causes of Our Migrant Problem. Los Angeles: Self-published, 1940. Santelli, Robert, and Emily Davidson, eds. Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. Savage, William W., Jr. Singing Cowboys and All That Jazz: A Short History of Popular Music in Oklahoma. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Saxton, Alexander. Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Scobie, Ingrid Winther. “Jack B. Tenney: Molder of Anti-Communist Legislation in California, 1940–49.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1970. Scott, Allen J., and Edward Soja, eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Shelton, Robert, and Burt Goldblatt. The Country Music Story: A Picture History of Country and Western Music. 1966. Reprint, Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1971. Shockley, Martin Staples. “The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma.” American Literature 15, no. 4 (January 1944): 351–61. Shuker, Roy. Understanding Popular Music. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1991. Sivulka, Juliann. Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1998. Small, Melvin. Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1994. Smulyan, Susan. Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Sonnichsen, C. L. “From Savage to Saint: A New Image of Geronimo.” Journal of Arizona History 27 (1986): 5–34. Spaulding, Charles B. “The Development of Organization and Disorganization in the Social Life of a Rapidly Growing Working-Class Suburb within a Metropolitan District.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1939.

Selected Bibliography / 327 Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Stanfield, Peter. Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Starr, Kevin. Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Stein, Walter J. California and the Dust Bowl Migration. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1992. ———. Their Blood Is Strong. San Francisco: Simon J. Lubin Society, April 1938. Stock, Catherine McNicol. Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage and the American Grain. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Stockdell, Richard P. “The Evolution of the Country Radio Format.” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 4 (1983): 146–49. Stone, Violet Gooch. “Children’s Preferences for Radio Programs.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1937. Stoneback, H. R. “Rough People . . . Are the Best Singers: Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and Folksong.” In The Steinbeck Question, ed. Donald R. Noble. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing, 1993. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin, 1989. Taniguchi, Nancy. “California’s ‘Anti-Okie’ Law: An Interpretive Biography.” Western Legal History 8, no. 2 (1995): 280–82. Tichi, Cecelia. High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. ———, ed. Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and HonkyTonk Bars. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Tjensvold, Faulkner. “An Inquiry into the Reasons for the Post-Depression Migration from Oklahoma to Kern County in California.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1947. Townsend, Charles R. San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Tribe, Ivan M. “The Economics of Hillbilly Radio: A Preliminary Investigation of the ‘P.I.’ System in the Depression Decade and Afterward.” JEMFQ 20, no. 17 (Fall–Winter 1981): 76–83. ———. “The Hillbilly versus the City: Urban Images in Country Music.” JEMFQ 10, pt. 2, no. 34 (n.d.): 41–48.

328

/ Selected Bibliography

Verge, Arthur C. Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second World War. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1993. Viguerie, Richard. America’s Right Turn: How the Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power. New York: Bonus Books, 2004. Wakely, Linda Lee. See Ya’ Up There, Baby: The Jimmy Wakely Story. Canoga Park, Calif.: Shasta Records, 1992. Waldie, D. J. Holyland: A Suburban Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Waldinger, Roger, and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds. Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996. Whiteman, Luther, and Samuel L. Lewis. Glory Roads: The Psychological State of California. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936. Whiteside, Jonny. “Academic History.” Daily Variety, 5 May 1995, p. 19. ———. Ramblin’ Rose: The Life and Career of Rose Maddox. Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Wilbur, Susan Kresnika. “The History of Television in Los Angeles, 1931–1952.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1976. Wilburn, James Richard. “Social and Economic Aspects of the Aircraft Industry in Metropolitan Los Angeles during World War II.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: New Press, 2005. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Cambridge, Mass.: Robert Bentley, 1955. Wolfe, Charles K., and James E. Akenson, eds. Country Music Goes to War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Zeronian, Joseph P. “A Narrative History of Migrating Oklahomans in California, 1935–1940.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1965.

Index

Page references in italics refer to illustrations. Academy of Country and Western Music (ACWM), 135–36, 211; stand on westernness, 136; in Vietnam era, 188–89, 206 Academy of Country Music (formerly the Academy of Country and Western Music), 157 Activism, antimigrant, 21–33; of AFL, 29; of corporations, 29, 236n38; fear of poverty in, 33; ideology of, 32–33 Activism, antistate, 229n43 Acuff, Roy, 133; “Old Age Pension,” 68 Adorno, Theodor, 6; on country music, 14–15 Advertising, media, 123; by automobile industry, 124–25; on Woody and Lefty Lou, 55–56, 125. See also Publicity, country music African American music: influence on Cooley, 109; influence on Guthrie, 255n80; influences in country music, 109, 149; influences on western swing, 77, 79, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94– 95, 97, 109–10. See also Minorities, demonization of; Race, in country music African Americans: in Country Music Hall of Fame, 12, 228n36; Guthrie’s support for, 66–67; performers, xi,

156, 266n37; western swing performers, 88 “After the Brawl” (song), 56–57 Agrarianism, white, 24 Agribusiness, antimigrant activism of, 29 Aircraft industry, 87–88, 89–90, 92, 271n79; women in, 101, 102. See also Douglas Aircraft Company Allan, Gary, 210 Allison, Joe, 121 Almaguer, Tómas, 234n13 Altman, Robert, Nashville, 147 Alvin, Dave, 156 American Civil Liberties Union, 13 American Eugenics Society, 36 American Federation of Labor, 50; antimigrant activism of, 29 American Federation of Musicians, 100, 109 American Federation of Radio Artists, 100 American Foundation for Abundance, 73 American Guardian (newspaper), 73 American Legion, antimigrant views of, 32 Ameringer, Oscar, 73, 259n119 Anarchism, populist, 13 Anderson, Benedict, 60

329

330

/ Index

Anderson, Bill: “Get a Little Dirt on Your Hands,” 202 Anticommunism, 140; in country music, 143–45 Armed Forces Radio, 188. See also Servicemen Armstrong, Louis, 93, 95 Ashcroft, John, 215 Attali, Jacques, 231n56 Automobile industry, sponsorship of country music, 124–25 Autry, Gene, 52, 198; autobiography of, 139; commercial ventures of, 136, 138; conservatism of, 140, 142, 143, 288n102; costumes of, 152; Mexicali Rose, 144; movie band of, 106; movies of, 139; during New Deal, 69, 139; “South of the Border,” 171; support for Reagan, 143, 288n102; television programs of, 135, 137–38, 285n74; and Will Rogers, 139–40 Avila, Eric Raymond, 5 Baby Boom generation, countrywestern music of, 134 Back Where I Come From (CBS radio), 48 Bailey, DeFord, 12, 228n36 Bakersfield (Calif.): anti-Nashville aesthetic in, 185; Central Labor Council, 29–30; country music of, xi, 17– 18, 75, 184–85; country radio in, 184; Haggard in, 184–85; honky tonk in, 184, 185; in post-Vietnam era, 210 Bakhtin, Mikhail, on polysemy, 182, 301n5 Banda music, 221 Bandleaders: in battles of the bands, 96; sexual harassment by, 109 Bare, Bobby, 147 Basie, Count, 150; “One O’Clock Jump,” 94 Bass, Charlotta, 157 Battles of the bands, 96, 262n11 Beachwood Sparks (band), 210

Beasley, Alcyon, 228n36 Beck (funk-rock performer), 209 Becket, Welton, 127 The Beemans (band), 137 Bell Gardens (Los Angeles county), 51, 101; conservatism in, 146, 227n26; radio audience in, 59; social networks in, 130; television ownership in, 119 Bennett, Bobbie, 104, 105 Berry, Chad, 228n28 “Better Stay in the Livery Barn” (song), 61 Beverly Hill Billies, 7; image of, 126; “My Pretty Quadroon,” 172; women’s role in, 164 Beverly Hill Billies (radio program), 123 Bhabha, Homi, 170 Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys, 160, 209 Billboard: on Bakersfield, 184; Cooley in, 85; on western swing, 79–84 Bing Crosby Enterprises, 280n22 Birth Control Research Bureau (New York), 38 B-K Ranch (television show), 84 Black, Clint, “Iraq and Roll,” 212, 309n25 Black, Edwin, 239n59 Blake, Jerri, 202, 219 The Blasters (band), 156 Bluegrass music, 197 Bobby-soxers, 108 Bogardus, Emory, 36 Bond, Johnny, 93, 96, 113; “Cherokee Waltz,” 170; on commercialism, 136; lyrics of, 168 Boone, Pat, 140 Boyarsky, Bill, 146 Boyd, Jean A., 270n68 Braddock, Bobby, 214 Brodkin, Karen, 24 Broonzy, Big Bill, 79, 95 Brown, Edmund Gerald “Jerry,” 143 Brown, Milton, 79; “Fall in Line with the N.R.A.,” 68–69; influences on, 93

Index / 331 Bryant, Anita, 141 Bunker Hill (Los Angeles), 51 Burke, J. Frank, 30, 63; commentaries of, 51, 54; early life of, 249n35; later anticommunism of, 144; political affiliations of, 54–55; postwar politics of, 289n108; programming choices, 53–54; support for Roosevelt, 54 Burke, J. Frank, Jr., 51, 52 Bush, George H. W., 142, 216 Bush, George W., 212, 216; populist critique of, 215 The Byrds, 197; “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man,” 204; on The Grand Ole Opry, 204; Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 198 Cacogenics, 34 Caldwell, Erskine, 40; Tobacco Road, 42, 243n103 Caldwell, I. S., The Bunglers, 243n103 California: eugenics movement in, 34– 35, 85; Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, 144; middle classes of, 236n42; New Right in, 194; Proposition 14, 194; State Federation of Labor, 29; Welfare and Institutions Code, 27; white supremacy in, 234n13; xenophobia in, 32 California, Southern: boosterist citrus orchard image of, 70; culture industry of, 6; jazz tradition of, 98; myths about, 23; political Right in, 114; populism in, 53; in post-Vietnam era, 208; rock world of, 208–9; southernization of, 114, 133, 142– 43, 227n26, 284n68; theme parks in, 137; Woody Guthrie’s critical descriptions of, 70–71. See also Country music (Southern California); Los Angeles California Citizens’ Association (CCA): anti-Okie petition, 27–28, 29–30, 31; mission of, 30–31; publicity techniques of, 32

California Conference on Social Work, 237n52 California Country (tabloid), 189–90, 193; in Vietnam era, 202, 204 California—Magazine of the Pacific, 43, 241n91; Okies in, 39, 40, 41, 42 Californians, white, response to Okies, 21–29 California Progressive Leader (newspaper), 65; Guthrie’s cartoons for, 72 Calley, William L., Jr., 190, 193 Cal’s Corral (television program), 125 Cambodia, U.S. bombing of, 304n46 Capitalism, laissez-faire, 13 Capitol Records, 82; country music recordings of, 110, 127, 129–30; Haggard with, 184; Nashville studios of, 208, 222; square dance records, 149; western swing recordings, 93 Capp, Al, Li’l Abner, 40, 41, 242n97 Carman, Bryan, 245n7 Carman, Jenks “Tex”: “Hillbilly Hula,” 88; “Pretty Geisha Girl,” 172 Carr, James, “Dark End of the Street,” 200 Carrell, Tom, 109, 193 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, “Hurrah for Roosevelt,” 68 Carter Family, 1, 52, 57; women’s role in, 164 Cash, Johnny, 125; antiwar songs of, 188 Cavalcade of America (CBS radio), 48 CBS, corporate holdings of, 307n3 Cendrars, Blaise, 25 Chaplin, Charlie, 242n94 Charro style, influence on western costume, 153, 292n150 Chavez, Cesar, 194 Cherry, Hugh, 280n22 Chessman, Caryl, 186 Ching, Barbara, 231n56, 301n4 Christian, Charlie, 94 Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, 140

332

/ Index

Ciesla, Emily “Sunny,” 105, 163; National Hill-Billy News columns, 100, 162 Civic groups, antimigrant stance of, 31 Civil Rights, backlash against, 133 Clear Channel radio stations, 214 Clements, Zeke, 129; “He’s a Real Gone Oakie,” 91 Cline, Patsy, 210 Clinton, Clifford E., 54 CMT (Country Music Television), 208, 221 Cochran, Eddie, 156 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 152 Cohen, Lizbeth, 3–4, 5 Cohn, Nudie “the Rodeo Tailor,” 152– 53, 155; salesmanship of, 155; zoot suits of, 153 Cold war: in country music lyrics, 171–72; Dust Bowl migrants during, 219; women during, 161 Columbia Records, 82, 83 Commander Cody and His Lost Pilot Airmen, 200 Commercial culture industry, 218 Communist Party, 258n111; cultural front of, 71; Guthrie and, 71–72, 246n10 Community: of country music radio, 60–61; imagined, 60 Conference of Studio Unions, 139, 140 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 30, 50; strikes by, 72 Conservatism: in California social programs, 194; in country music culture, 6, 115, 132–48, 157–58, 218; in gender roles, 161, 163, 168–72, 179; in Okie culture, 133, 161, 179, 227n26; postwar rise of, 115–16; of singing cowboys, 138–48, 181; suburban, 157–58. See also Conservatism, populist; New Right; Republican Party; Right, political Conservatism, populist: cultural, 10; rise of, 3, 4, 132; singing cowboys’ support for, 140–41 Consumerism, 219

Consumption: of Okie country music, 10; in postwar society, 4; suburban, 10 Consumption, cultural, 4–6; sites of, 5 Cooley, Ella Mae, 159–60, 264n17 Cooley, Spade, 79, 80, 89, 156; in battle of the bands, 96, 262n11; black influences on, 109; business manager of, 104; Cherokee heritage of, 84– 86, 88, 264n17; costume of, 107, 133, 152; death of, 160; endorsements by, 125; fans of, 105, 106; in films, 86; home interviews with, 159, 164, 165; income of, 100; innovations of, 81, 96; murder conviction of, 159–60; popular culture depictions of, 160, 294n2; popularity of, 81, 84; recordings of, 83; telecasts of, 83–84, 119; at Texas Day celebrations, 90; use of classical music, 86; use of jazz, 97, 270n68; use of mariachis, 94; violin of, 86, 265n27; western image of, 167 Cooley, Spade, songs: “Jive on the Range,” 90–91; “My Chickasay Gal,” 172; “My Indian maid Pale Moon,” 171; “Shame on You,” 81, 95, 270n68; “Swingin’ the Devil’s Dream,” 94 Cooperation on the Air (KFVD), 54 Corin, Amy, 210, 211 Corkin, Stanley, 285n79 Corporations, antimigrant activism of, 29, 236n38 Costume: charro, 153, 292n150; country music, 152–55; cowboy, 133; rhinestone, 153–54; rock and roll, 153; Ukranian influence on, 153; western swing, 106–7 Cotton, Carolina, 107, 108, 163, 167; radio shows of, 176 Couch, Gretchen, 36 Country Gentleman (farm magazine), 26, 241n91; Okies in, 39–40, 41 Country music: anticommunism in, 143–45; anti-institutionalism in, 13; apoliticalness in, 10, 228n33; black

Index / 333 influences in, 109, 149; black performers and, 88–90; color line in, 152, 155–56; communal politics of, 116; competition from rock and roll, 113; consumers of, 4, 114; costumes of, 152–55; counterculture ties of, 197; cultural borrowings of, 149; cultural ethnicity of, 18, 21, 221; cultural politics of, 11–18, 231n56; cultural studies and, 15–17, 231nn56–57; depoliticization of, 115–22, 123; enforcement of norms, 148; European folk influence in, 7, 149, 227n24; fatalism in, 12, 15; female demographics of, 231n56; female submission in, 167–72, 178; folk inheritance of, 12; gender politics of, 11; girls’ culture in, 173; Guthrie’s influence on, 74–75; Hispanic fans of, 221, 222; influence on rock, 209; and Iraq war, 212–17; jukebox play of, 122; Ku Klux Klan’s use of, 138–39; of later 20th century, 225n10; in mass media, 116, 119, 121; multiethnic outreach of, 222; Okie identity in, xii, 10, 11; politics of, 7, 11; populism in, 13–14, 47, 133–34; post-9/11, 211–17; of post-Vietnam era, 208–11; in postwar era, 10–11; producerism in, 12– 13; protest in, 12, 15; role in social justice, 311n59; suburbanization of, 157–58; support for Roosevelt, 68– 69; on television, 114, 136, 208, 221; theme parks, 137; upscale audiences for, 124; Vietnam War in, 179, 180, 187–91, 202; whiteness in, 148–58; women’s role in, 160–79. See also Honky tonk; Western swing music Country music (Southern California), 17; audience of, 124; Bakersfield sound in, xi, 17–18, 75, 184–85; culture of, 7, 18, 77; dissociation from Okieness, 128–29; feminism in, 174–78; live performances of, 210; Okie identity in, 219; political thought in, 11; of post-Vietnam era,

208–11; postwar venues of, 116–17, 118, 120; race in, xi–xii; religious conservatism of, 145; themes of, xi Country music, commercial, 16, 46; Guthrie’s influence on, 74; thematic development of, 47 Country music, Okie: consumption of, 10; cultural borrowings in, 9; gender conservatism in, 11; hybridization in, 170; liberal populism in, 6–11, 44; populist legacies of, 211–17; “populuxe” elements in, 123, 125; postwar, 110; producerism in, 9; song lyrics, 129, 167–72 Country music culture: conservatism in, 6, 115, 132–48, 157–58, 218; fan magazines in, 162–67; fatalism in, 12, 15; feminism in, 161; gender in, 154, 168–72, 293n154; influence of, 18; live, 77; mass-marketed, 115; misogyny in, 178, 179; Okie, 5, 10; “plain-folk Americanism” in, 8; politics in, 16; postwar, 10; race relations in, xii, 22; of Southern California, 7, 18, 77; stylistic changes in, 246n13; whitewashing of, 152, 155– 56. See also Western swing subculture Country Music Hall of Fame, 12, 228n36 Country music industry: artists’ power in, 48; “good ol’ boy” network in, 173; in Los Angeles, 79–84, 182, 218; military programming of, 188; Okies in, 182, 183; publicity in, 149, 163–67, 206; Reagan and, 143; recording studios of, 82–83, 110, 129; western swing in, 79–84 Country Music Life (magazine), conservatism of, 163; home interviews in, 162, 166; readership of, 124, 127 Country music performers: black, 156, 228n36; feminism of, 12, 174–78, 179, 211; of hillbilly radio, 46, 50; home interviews with, 160; Mexican American, 9; middle-class demeanor of, 125–27; migrant, 4–5, 218; Na-

334

/ Index

Country music performers (continued) tive American, 9; in politics, 69; social mobility of, 126, 165; South Asian, 156–57; union affiliations of, 100–101, 273n87; wages of, 100, 272n86; western image of, 167; of western swing, 80–81; wives of, 160, 163–67 Country music performers, women, 160–69, 172–78; feminism of, 12, 161, 174–78, 179, 211; of western swing, 108 Country music radio: audience of, 59, 100, 123–24, 127–29; automobile advertising on, 124–25; as civic space, 53–58; community of, 60–61; hillbilly, 246n12; postwar, 119, 121– 22; station ownership, 218 Country music recordings: labels of, 129, 283n57; in Los Angeles, 82–83, 110, 129; in Nashville, 82, 129; sales of, 82, 128; western swing, 93 Country Music Report (magazine): “At Home With . . .” series, 164, 165–66, 295n10 Country rock music, 197–98; influence of, 218; in Los Angeles, 185, 302n23; mainstreaming of, 219 Country Song Roundup (magazine), “Meet the Mrs.” series, 163–64, 165, 295n10 Country-western music, 133–37; in movies, 135; regionalism of, 135 Cowboy Church of the Air (television program), 145 “Cowboy code” (oath), 139 Cowboy movies, 135; bands in, 106; postwar, 137, 285n79; protagonists of, 137 Cowboys, myths of, 132. See also Singing cowboys; Western swing music Cowpunk bands, 209 Coyer, Lili, 101, 102 Crazy Horse, 209 Crissman, Maxine “Lefty Lou,” 46, 49, 245n7; activism of, 59; departure

from KFVD, 58; early life of, 49, 50; on fan letters, 60, 61; and Ham and Eggs initiatives, 69; and migrant identity, 51; nickname of, 52; professionalism of, 55; vocals of, 53; on XELO, 56. See also Woody and Lefty Lou Show Crist, Kenneth, 45–46 Crocket Family, 7 Crosby, Stills, and Nash, 208 Cuevas, Manuel, 152, 155; embroidery designs of, 154, 292n154; on Gram Parsons, 209 Culture, commercial, 218 Culture, musical, and social power, 230n56 Culture, Okie: conflict within, 157; conservatism in, 133, 161, 179, 227n26; and mass consumption, 11; national influence of, 218. See also Country music culture; Ethnicity, Okie Curb, Mike, 143, 148 Cusic, Don, 221 Daffan, Ted, “Born to Lose,” 271n79 Dance halls: culture of, 5; decline of, 116; operators of, 104; swing shift dances in, 104; union workers at, 119; western swing, 101–2, 103, 104, 116, 117; women performers at, 108 Dance styles, 227n24; black, 148–49; country, 148–49; jazz, 106; square dance, 149, 290n126 Daniels, Charlie, 13; “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag,” 229n48 Davenport, Devvy, 163 Davis, Edward Everett, The White Scourge, 42 Davis, James Edgar, 27, 92, 235n25; blockades of Okies, 31 Davis, Jimmie, 256n92 Davis, Mike, 30, 196 Davis, Skeeter, 178, 187 Dean, Eddie, 136 Decca Records, 82

Index / 335 DeMent, Iris, 210 Democracy, Wilsonian, 211, 212 Democratic Party: End Poverty in California bloc (EPIC), 54, 69, 72; Okie support for, 9, 43, 44 Denning, Michael, 39, 245n5 Depression, Great: impact on gender relations, 238n56; impact on Oklahoma economy, 49; Los Angeles during, 50–51; middle-class attitudes during, 238n57; personal recollections of, 33; radio during, 246n12, 252n47 Desy, Shirley, 177–78, 179 “Devil’s dream” (reel), 94 Devine, Andy, 143 Dexter, Al, 151; “Honky-Tonk Blues,” 150 The Dillards, 197, 215 Disneyland, country music at, 137 Dixie Chicks, 213, 217, 228n40; antiwar controversy surrounding, 14, 211, 214, 230nn50–51; Haggard’s defense of, 215, 216; “Travelin’ Soldier,” 215 Doggett, Peter, 200 “A Dollar Ninety Seven” (song), 61 “Dollar Now and a Dollar When We Meet” (song), 61 Dornan, Bob, 133, 142 Dos Passos, John, The 42nd Parallel, 211 Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 144 Douglas, Susan J., 3; Listening in, 246n12 Douglas Aircraft Company, 87–88, 92; “minstrel shows” of, 89–90, 109, 266n39; women employees of, 101 Down Beat magazine, on western swing, 97–98 Downing, Big Al, 156 “A Dream in Crackpot Corners” (song), 43–44 Dress. See Costume DuBois, W. E. B., 24 Dugdale, Richard L., 37; The Jukes, 34 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 196

Dungan, Mike, 221–22 Dust Bowl: area of, 6; history of, 226n20 Dust Bowl migrants, 38; activism against, 21–25; antiliberalism of, 114; assimilation of, 133; during cold war, 219; demographics of, 35; dissident, 64; farm labor by, 195; folk art of, 154; gender boundaries of, 9–10; in Greater Los Angeles, 51; Guthrie and, 1, 62–67; harassment of, 1, 62, 72; ideologies of, 7; insect imagery of, 28, 235n32; and later migrants, 220–21; liminal whiteness of, 23–25, 66, 84; modernity of, 92– 99; naïveté of, 61–62; numbers of, 80; performers, 4–5, 218; political identity of, 132–48; populism of, 73; in radio audience, 59; as refugees, 64–65, 77; reproduction rates of, 37; self-depictions of, 5; self-perceptions of, 39; social status of, 21; sociology of, 7–8; suburbanization of, 117, 118, 123, 130, 132; support for Democrats, 43, 44; unemployment of, 91; union affiliations of, 100, 109; voting patterns of, 193–94; as white trash, 27, 34, 233n10; women, 42, 78. See also Okies Dylan, Bob, 2, 206 The Eagles, 208–9; Greatest Hits, 218 Earle, Steve, 217; on Gram Parsons, 309n39; The Revolution Starts Now, 215 Editor of the Air (KFVD), 51, 54 Edwards, Stoney, 156 Egner, Red, 108 Ellington, Duke, 94, 150 Ellroy, James, 160 Ellsberg, Daniel, 147 El Monte (Los Angeles county), 51, 197, 301n12; night life of, 117, 198 Emge, Charles, 97–98 Émigrés, Jewish, 152; Guthrie’s support for, 65, 254n74 Emmis Communications, 307n3

336

/ Index

End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, 54, 69, 72 EPIC News, 73 Erickson, Rody, and His Dude Ranch Boys, 95 Ethnicity, of country music, 18, 21, 221 Ethnicity, Okie, 84–88, 115; unmaking of, 123–32. See also Culture, Okie Eugenics, 23; Nazi, 35; negative, 34, 239n59 Eugenics movement: in California, 34– 35, 85; Okies and, 33–39; origins of, 33–34; sterilization under, 34, 35, 38, 42–43 Evangelicalism, 145 Evans, Dale, 138, 139, 141; evangelicalism of, 145 Exclusion Act (United States), 26 Fan clubs: advertisements for, 279n15; pen-pal style, 119; women members of, 162 Fan magazines, 117; culture of, 162– 67; gender conservatism in, 163, 179; home interviews in, 159, 160, 163–67; honky tonk in, 151; listener participation in, 218; women writers, 105, 162–63 Fanon, Frantz, 24 Fante, John, 54, 70 Farm Security Administration (FSA): migrant housing programs, 28; photographers of, 40, 241n92 Farnham, Marynia, 169 Fascism: European, 33; Los Angeles organizations, 50. See also Nazis Fatalism, in country music, 12, 15 Faulkner, William, 40; As I Lay Dying, 41–42 Federal camps, for Okies, 29 Federation of American Folk Artists, 101, 273n87 Feminism: in country music culture, 161; of country music performers, 12, 161, 174–78, 179, 211 Fetishization, racial, of minority women, 170, 297n28

Film industry. See Hollywood Film noir, 5, 147 Fiske, John, 231n56 Flaherty, Robert J., Nanook of the North, 171 Flippo, Chet, 14, 214; support for Iraq War, 230n51 Flores, Rosie, 209 Flying Burrito Brothers: esteem for Haggard, 200; Gilded Palace of Sin, 198–200, 218; “Hippie Boy,” 199– 200; influence of, 209; “My Uncle,” 198, 206; “Sin City,” 200 Flynn, Errol, 165 Foley, Neil, 24 Folk Left, 47 Folk music, European: in country music, 7, 149, 227n24; in western swing, 94 Folk rock groups, 197–98 Foothill (nightclub), 116, 117 Ford, Henry, use of country music, 13, 138–39 Ford, John, 22 Ford, Tennessee Ernie, 99, 145 Fordism, 281n40 Fort Worth (Texas), western swing in, 79 Four Star records, 129, 173 Frame, Peter, 208 Frankfurt School, 6, 14, 226n21 Franklin, Aretha, “Do Right Woman,” 200 Frazier, Dallas, “California Cottonfields,” 195 Freeman, Quilla Hugh “Porky,” 91, 95 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 179 Friedman, Kinky, 201 Frizell, Lefty, 168, 185, 297n18; on honky tonks, 169 GAC channel (Great American Country), 208, 246n12 Galton, Sir Francis, 33–34 Garcia, Benny, 87, 88 Geer, Will, 71

Index / 337 Gender: in anti-Okie caricatures, 40– 42; in country music culture, 11, 107–8, 154, 168–72, 191, 293n154 Gender relations: among poor whites, 242n96; effect of Great Depression on, 238n56 Gender roles: conservatism in, 161, 163, 168–72, 179; of Dust Bowl migrants, 9–10 The Gene Autry Show, 137 Geronimo, 86, 265n23 Gilmore, John, 264n17 Glaze, Ann, 177 Goddard, Henry Herbert, The Kallikak Family, 34 Golden West Broadcasters, 138 Goldschmidt, Walter, 7, 36 Goldwater, Barry, 194 Goodman, Benny, 81, 98, 270n65 Gore, Al, Jr., 216 Gore, Al, Sr., 144 Gosney, Ezra S., 35, 240n68 Graham, Billy, 145 Gramsci, Antonio, 32–33 Grand Ole Opry, 82 Grant, Madison, 88; The Passing of the Great Race, 36 Grapes of Wrath, The (film), 22. See also Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath Great Society, conservative populism and, 10 The Great Speckled Bird (newspaper), 186 Green, Archie, 201 Green Acres (television show), 124 The Green Berets (film), 187 Green Corn rebellion (1917), 73 Gregory, James N., 7, 8, 92, 226n20; on antisouthern prejudice, 232n3; on Okies as refugees, 234n10 Griffith, Nanci, 214 Grundy, Pamela, 246nn12–13 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (film), 205 Gunsmoke (television show), 124 Guthrie, Arlo, 201, 254n74

Guthrie, Bill Rogers, 58 Guthrie, Leon “Oklahoma Jack,” 52, 91; “Oakie Boogie,” 95, 129 Guthrie, Mary, 49, 58 Guthrie, Woody, 49; activism of, 3, 48, 58, 59, 64; on anti-Okie journalism, 45–46; bad man ballads of, 64, 198; black influences on, 255n80; cartoons by, 58, 72; and commercial country music, 46, 57; in commercial radio, 47, 48; communal politics of, 116; and Communist Party, 71– 72; “Cornbread Philosophy” column, 63; as country singer, 9, 229n36; death of, 2, 3; depiction of migrants, 62–67; early life of, 49; emulation of Will Rogers, 58, 63, 67; fan mail of, 60, 252n55; as folk balladeer, 47; gender politics of, 245n7; and Haggard, 2–3; and Ham and Eggs initiatives, 45, 48, 69–70, 72; hillbilly repertoire of, 244n5; Hollywood Tribune column, 65; “hootenanny” guitar of, 3; influence of, 1–2, 74–75; investigative reporting by, 63; and Jewish émigrés, 65, 254n74; KFVD broadcasts, 46–75; legacy of, 46–47, 74–45; on Los Angeles, 70; Mexican repertoire of, 67; on municipal space, 167; mythology surrounding, 245n8; and Native Americans, 67; newspaper columns of, 58, 63, 66, 72; oil paintings of, 58; and Okie identity, 44, 51, 75; opportunism of, 245n10; and organized labor, 71; political endorsements of, 68, 69–73; political themes of, 65; populism of, 64, 67–73, 75; professionalism of, 55; promotional techniques of, 58; red-baiting of, 144; religious faith of, 254n74; and Seeger, 47, 245n9; On a Slow Train through California, 45; social commentary of, 1; songbooks of, 253n60; songwriting career, 75; Stalinism of, 246n10; support for blacks, 66–67; support for Spanish loyalists, 65;

338

/ Index

Guthrie, Woody (continued) “talking blues” style, 67; and term “Okie,” 2, 92, 254n75, 267n47; $30 Wood Help!, 73; use of commercial hillbilly music, 57; vocals of, 53; western material of, 251n42; “Woody Sez” column, 63, 64, 72; on XELO, 56 Guthrie, Woody, songs and albums: “Ain’t Got a Cent,” 63–64; “Big City Ways,” 7, 70; “Do-Re-Mi,” 62– 63, 253n62; Dust Bowl Ballads, 15, 47–48, 58, 62, 245n5, 253n60; “Dust Bowl Blues,” 62; “Dust Bowl Refugee,” 65; “Fifth Street Blues,” 71; “Fire in Los Feliz Hills,” 70–71; “Give Us That Old Age Pension,” 70; “Oklahoma Hills,” 74, 129, 251n42; “Pretty Boy Floyd,” 64; “Reno Blues (Philadelphia Lawyer),” 64, 74, 174, 251n42; “Skid Row Serenade,” 71, 185; “This Land (Is Your Land),” 146. See also Woody and Lefty Lou Show Guy, Roger, 228n28 Haggard, Flossie, 186 Haggard, Merle, 179; activism of, 186; antielitism of, 207; and antimigrant prejudice, 195; antiwar sentiments of, 204; auteurism of, 181; in Bakersfield, 184–85; Bakersfield sound of, 75; and black performers, xi; blue-collar songs of, 195–96; body of work, 194; Capitol records contract, 184; critique of political right, 205; cultural politics of, 207; early career of, 259n125; early life of, 183–84; farmworking themes, 195; and Guthrie, 2–3; in Hemp Times, 202, 203; on hippie culture, 199; immigrant themes of, 221; income of, 187; influences on, 185; on inner city, 219; liberal dislike of, 183; on Los Angeles, 192; marijuana use, 201, 202; on Nixon, 205; politics of,

181; post-9/11 views of, 215–17; on prisoner abuse, 186; and Reagan, 216; Reagan’s pardon for, 143; recording contracts, 184; Rolling Stone on, 206; in San Quentin, 184, 186, 190, 302n17; and singing cowboys, 181; social background, 181; and Toby Keith, 207, 213, 216; on Vietnam protesters, 190–91; youth culture’s view of, 205 Haggard, Merle, “Okie from Muskogee,” 2, 301n4; audience interpretations of, 181–82, 194, 200; audience reception of, 189–90, 202–3; bluecollar angst in, 190; commercial success of, 187; conservative-populist readings of, 182; counterculture readings of, 197–207; covers of, 201; early analyses of, 181; effect on country music politics, 11; intent of, 206; masculinity in, 191; in migrant culture, 181; migrant pride in, 194– 97; multiple meanings in, 182–83; narrator of, 191; in National Week of Unity, 189; Okie from Muskogee album, 181; Okie identity in, 187, 196, 197; parodies of, 200–201; as pro-Vietnam anthem, 183–94; reception of, 180; release of, 186; right-wing conservatism in, 4, 183– 84; sales of, 206; social order in, 192; urban culture in, 200; whiteness in, 192; youth perception of, 197 Haggard, Merle, songs and albums: “Branded Man,” 186; Blue Jungle, 307n83; “California Cottonfields,” 185; “Farmer’s Daughter,” 204–5; “Fightin’ Side of Me,” 186, 189, 191, 213; “The Fugitive,” 186; Haggard Like Never Before, 216; “Hungry Eyes,” 185–86, 195; “If We Make It through December,” 181, 195; “I’m a White Boy,” 205; “The Immigrant,” 221; “Irma Jackson,” 172, 205–6; “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” 196; “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde,” 195; Let Me Tell

Index / 339 You about a Song, 205–6; “Life in Prison,” 198; “Silver Wings,” 181; “Sing Me Back Home,” 186; “Skid Row,” 184, 185; “Tulare Dust,” 195; “Where’s All the Freedom?” 217; “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” 195; “Workin’ Man Blues,” 195 Haley, Bill, 109–10 Hall, Stuart, 182 Hall, Tom T., 187; “Mama Bake a Pie,” 188 Ham and Eggs initiatives, 45, 48, 69– 70, 72, 73; Burke and, 55; defeat of, 70; liberal support for, 256n99 Hamblen, Stuart, 69; conservatism of, 140; evangelicalism of, 145; home interviews with, 165, 166; and liberal causes, 140; political candidacy of, 140, 256n92, 286n92; red-baiting by, 144; right-wing ideology of, 138; upward mobility of, 165 Hamblen, Susie, 166 Hanson, Curtis: L.A. Confidential, 160 Harjo, Thomas Jefferson, 88 Harrell, Alfred, 28, 32, 235n31 Harrelson, Woody, 215 Harris, Emmylou, 208–9, 210; support for Kerry, 214 Harris, Jim, 131, 163 Harris, “Porky,” 156 Hartigan, John, Jr., 232n5 Haslam, Gerald, 196 Hawkins, Slim, 126–27 Hay, Harry, 72 Hayden, Judy, 91 Heap, Jimmy, “Wild Side of Life,” 122 Hearst, William Randolph, 28, 32; radio ownership of, 53 Hemphill, Paul, 183 Hemp Times, Haggard in, 202, 203 Henderson, C. Phil, 97, 162 Herman, Woody, 95 High Noon (film), 135 “Hillbilly” (term): in country music, 126–27, 131; Guthrie’s use of, 62– 63, 64, 126

Hillbilly artists, Guthrie’s use of, 57 Hillman, Chris, 198–200, 199; Desert Rose Band of, 209 Himes, Chester, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 157 Hine, Thomas, 123 Hinson, Don, 131 Hipsterism: in Okie identity, 99; in western swing subculture, 90 Hoffman Hayride (television show), 83 Hofner, Adolph, 94 Hogsed, Roy, “Cocaine Blues,” 122 Hollywood: depiction of Okies, 22, 42, 43; Spade Cooley’s career in, 86; depiction of country music, 147; impact on Merle Haggard’s songwriting, 205 Hollywood Barn Dance (KNX), 52, 104; studio audience, 271n80 Hollywood Hussers (fascist organization), 50 Holocaust, refugees from, 234n19 Home ownership, in postwar society, 3, 4 Hometown Jamboree (KLAC), 84, 119 Honky tonk, 147, 148–58; in Bakersfield sound, 184, 185; beat of, 149; car culture of, 156; closure of venues, 151; costume of, 152; etymology of, 150; male emotion in, 168, 296n17; misogyny in, 168–69; multiethnicity of, 154–58; origins of, 149, 152; of poor whites, 151; repertory, 297n18; roadhouses, 150; women in, 167–69, 179; women performers, 158 hooks, bell, 90 Hoovervilles, 36 Horton, Elizabeth, 191 Horton, Johnny: lyrics of, 168; patriotic songs of, 147 Houston, James, 196 How to Build the Radio Audience (trade guide), 61 Human Betterment Foundation, 35

340

/ Index

Husky, Ferlin, 152; “China Doll,” 172 Hybridization, racial, 170 Identity, Okie: conservatism in, 133; in country music, xii, 10, 11, 219; and country music politics, 7; ethnicity in, 84–88, 115, 123–32; Guthrie and, 44, 51, 75; hillbilly image in, 126– 27; hipsterism in, 99; as liability, 128; middle-class virtues in, 125; multiculturalism in, 182; Native American, 85; New Right and, 207; in “Okie from Muskogee,” 187; political, 132–48; post-9/11, 212; postwar, 132; suburbanization of, 131; waning of, 114, 116, 132; westernized, 133; in western swing, 77, 90– 91. See also Culture, Okie; Okieness I Hear American Singing (concert), 140 Immigrants: Asian, 28; Chinese, 26; and Dust Bowl migrants, 220–21; European, 255n78; poverty among, 220; transnational, 221. See also Dust Bowl migrants Immigrants, Latino: country music audience among, 221–22; poverty among, 220 Immigrants, Mexican, 117; country music audience among, 221–22; country music depictions of, 221; Okies and, 26–27; in western swing music, 86–87, 88, 93, 94 Ingraham, Laura, Shut Up and Sing, 14, 230n51 Institute of Family Relations (Los Angeles), 35 Iraq war: country music and, 212–17; and Dixie Chicks controversy, 14, 211, 214, 230nn50–51; Haggard on, 216, 217 Ishi (Yahi Indian), 234n12 Jackson, Kenneth T., 3 Jackson, Michael, Thriller, 209 Jackson, Wanda, 156; “Fujiyama Mama,” 176; Okieness of, 177

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 24 Jamboree Magazine, 162 James, Harry, 81 Jamieson, Stuart M., 7, 29 Jarvis, Al, 81, 262n11 Jazz: Cooley’s use of, 97, 270n68; dance styles, 106, 148; influence on western swing, 79, 93, 95, 97–99, 105, 108, 150; Southern California tradition, 98; Wills’s use of, 79, 252n11 Jeffries, Herb, 133 Jennings, Waylon, 188 Jewish Classical Hour (KFVD), 51 Jim Crow laws, 192 Jingoism: postwar, 211–12; suburban, 8 Johnny Cash at San Quentin (album), 121 Johnson, Hiram, 30, 31 Jordan, David Starr, 35, 36 Jordan, Glenn, 16 Kay, Lambdin, Rural Radio, 67 Kazin, Michael, 13 KBBQ (San Fernando Valley), 121; DJs of, 123, 136 Keep West Slauson White campaign, 27 KEHI (Los Angeles), 53 Keith, Toby, 217; Haggard and, 207, 213, 216; Shock’n Y’all, 213; Unleashed, 212–13 Kent, George, 188 Kenton, Stan, 96 Kentucky Colonels, 197 Kerry, John, 216; country music supporters of, 214 Kesey, Ken, 196 Kessel, Barney, 95 KFI (Los Angeles), 53 KFOX (Long Beach), 122, 131; audience of, 124; disc jockeys of, 176, 280n22; George Wallace on, 146 KFRG (San Bernardino), 208 KFVD (Los Angeles), 1; commercial broadcasting of, 47; coverage of, 51, 73, 75; Montana on, 173; political

Index / 341 programing of, 54; populism of, 53; programming of, 5, 51, 53–54. See also KPOP (Los Angeles); Woody and Lefty Lou Show KGBS (Los Angeles), 122 KIEV (Glendale), 122 King Records, 93 KLAC television, 119 Klein, Joe, 144 Kleinow, Sneaky Pete, 199 KMPC (Los Angeles), 60 Knights of Labor, 73 Knott’s Berry Farm, 137, 149 KNX (Los Angeles), 51; Hollywood Barn Dance, 52, 104, 249n28, 271n80 KPOP (Los Angeles), 113; format of, 144. See also KFVD (Los Angeles) KRAK (Sacramento), 188–89 Kristofferson, Kris, 203–4 KTLA-TV, 83; Autry’s purchase of, 138 Ku Klux Klan, 73; fiddle contests of, 13; use of country music, 138–39 Kumar, Yar, 157 KWOW (Pomona), 122 KXLA (Pasadena), country music on, 83, 121 KZLA (Hollywood), 208; women listeners, 211 Laboe, Art, 113–14 Labor, organized: Dust Bowl migrants in, 100, 109; xenophobia of, 29 Labor’s Non-Partisan League, 72 Landau, Marty, 104 Landy, Marc, 7 lang, k. d., 210, 211 Lange, Dorothea, 87; “Migrant Mother,” 22 Lawson, Lisa, 220–21 Lazarfeld, Paul F., 74, 259n120 Leadon, Bernie, 203 LeFebvre, Henri, 17, 70; on differential spaces, 257n102 Left, political, Okies in, 196–97. See also Liberalism Lewis, Samuel L., 50

Lewis, Texas Jim, 102 Leyshon, Andrew, 15–16 Liberalism: country music supporters of, 214–15; New Deal, 3, 5; postwar attacks on, 116; working-class, 5. See also New Deal Liberty/Blazon records, 129 Light: The Democratic Leader (newspaper), 54, 63, 69 Line dancing, 210 Lipsitz, George, 117 Literature, Okie, 196 Lomax, Alan, 47, 67; Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 133; “Home on the Range,” 133 Long, Huey, 54 Lorentz, Pare, Plow That Broke the Plain, 22 Los Angeles (California): Central Avenue, 87; Central Labor Council, 29; Chamber of Commerce, 80; country music culture of, 7; country music industry in, 79–84, 182, 218; country rock in, 185, 302n23; country television in, 136; fascist organizations in, 50; Frankfurt School in, 226n21; during Great Depression, 50–51; Guthrie on, 70; Haggard on, 192; housing conditions in, 99, 271n80; Los Feliz fire, 70–71, 257n104; multiethnicity in, 221; as “Nashville West,” 301n12; Okieness in, 219; Okie responses to, 17; political activism in, 3; poverty in, 220; progressive politics in, 68; recording studios of, 82–83, 110, 129; Rotary Club, 31; segregation of swing clubs, 270n67; skid rows, 51, 71, 258n104; urban development, 226n22; western swing dance halls, 101–2, 103, 104, 116, 117; working class of, 6, 196; working class suburbs, 101–2, 146. See also Bell Gardens; California, Southern; El Monte (Los Angeles county) Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, The Other Los Angeles, 220

342

/ Index

Los Angeles Metropolitan Country Combination, 122 Los Angeles Police Department: blockades of, 62, 72; closure of honky tonks, 151; Red Squad, 50 Los Feliz fire (Los Angeles), 70–71, 257n104 Loveless, Juanita, 102 Lubin, Simon J., 30, 237n46 Luce, Henry, 39, 162 Lynn, Dusti, 86–87, 108, 163; sophistication of, 105 Lynn, Loretta, 135–36 Lynwood (Los Angeles county), 51 Macias, Anthony, 156 Mackay, Jock, 12–13 Macon, Uncle Dave, 228n36; “Run, Nigger, Run,” 66 Maddin, Jimmy, 95 Maddox, Rose, 74, 108, 119, 121, 173; costume of, 152; “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again,” 174; “Oklahoma Sweetheart Sally Anne,” 177; public image of, 126; radio shows of, 176 Maddox Brothers and Rose, 173–74 Madonna (singer), 231n56 Maines, Natalie, 13, 14, 213; Haggard and, 216 Malneck, Matty, 95 Malo, Raul, 214 Malone, Bill C., 188, 244n5; Country Music, U.S.A., 12 Mandrell, Barbara, “The Midnight Oil,” 177 Maphis, Joe and Rose Lee, 166; “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke,” 169; lyrics of, 168 March of Progress (radio program), 53 Marriage, intercultural, 297n28, 298n35 Martinez, Pete, 87 Masculinity: costumes and, 107, 154; effect of Great Depression on, 238n56; in “Okie from Muskogee,” 191; working-class, 154. See also Gender

Matless, David, 15–16 May, Ellen Tyler, 169; Homeward Bound, 160–61 Mayer, Louis B., 43 Maynard, Ken, 52 McBride, Martina, 211 McCarthy, Joseph R., 46 McCarthyism, 197 McChesney, Robert W., 47 McClary, Susan, 231n56 McClintock, Harry “Haywire Mac,” 7, 133–34 McCrae, Marcy D., 105 McDaniel, Wilma Elizabeth, 196 McGirr, Lisa, 7, 227n26, 284n69 McGovern, Charles, 74, 148 McLuhan, Marshall, 116 McManus, Thomas W., 22, 28, 235n31; political views of, 31–32; radio background of, 238n55 McNaught, Dave S., 188 McNeely, Big Jay, 156 McWilliams, Carey, 29 Media, corporate ownership of, 218 The Melody Ranch Show, 138 Mercer, Johnny, 82, 93 Merchant and Manufacturers Association (Los Angeles), antiunionism of, 50 Merriam, Frank, 43 Mexican Americans: audience for country music among, 221–22; country music costume designers, 152–55; country music performers, 9, 86–88, 221–22; fetishized stereotypes of, 170–71, 172. See also Minorities, demonization of Meyerowitz, Joanne, 160; Not June Cleaver, 161 Middle classes: antimigrant activism of, 28–33; of California, 236n42; during Great Depression, 238n57; reformism of, 30 Migration: from Appalachia, 232n5; folkways of, 7; as tragedy, 234n19. See also Dust Bowl migrants; Immigrants

Index / 343 Miller, Emmett, 185; influence on Haggard, 185 Mills, C. Wright, 29, 30 Ming, Dave, 104 Minorities, demonization of, 26 Misogyny: in country music culture, 178, 179; in honky tonk, 168–69 “Mission myth,” 23 Mitchell, Joni, 209 Mix, Tom, 152 Modernity: of Dust Bowl migrants, 92–99; limits of, 109–10; in western swing music, 95, 96, 97 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 72 Monroe, Marilyn, 107 Montana, Patsy, 133; “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” 173, 198 Mosrite records, 185 Moten, Bennie, “South,” 94 Motown, 231n56 Murrell, Joyce “Red,” 91, 95 Music Row Democrats, 214, 217 Muskogee (Oklahoma): racial tensions in, 192–93, 303n43. See also Haggard, Merle, “Okie from Muskogee” My Lai massacre, 190, 193 Narcocorrido music, 221 Nash, Alanna, 213 Nashville: artistic freedom in, 214; commercialism in, 136; preeminence in country music, 113; recording studios of, 82, 129, 208, 222 Nashville West (dance hall), 117 National Army of America (fascist organization), 50 National Barn Dance: audience of, 59; Montana on, 173; syndication of, 52; on WLS, 58 National Hill-Billy News, 87, 98; on middle-class virtues, 125; women in, 162 National Labor Relations Act, 50–51 National Recovery Act, 69 Native Americans: in aircraft industry, 87–88; Guthrie and, 67; intermar-

riage with, 298n35; in Okie identity, 85; stereotypes of, 171; in western swing music, 86–88. See also Minorities, demonization of; Race, in country music Natural selection, 38 Nazis: eugenics programs of, 35; resistance to, 65 Nelson, Ken, 122, 127, 144 Nelson, Willie, 201–2, 217 Neuenfeldt, Karl William, 297n28 New Deal: conservative populism and, 10; contradictions in, 139; liberalism of, 3, 5; National Recovery Act, 69; Okie participation in, 5; populist economics of, 9; segregation during, 228n32 New Right, 194, 207; media strategies of, 115; racism of, 142; role of social status in, 284n69; in Southern California, 142. See also Conservatism, political; Right, political Nicolaides, Becky, 7, 284n69 97th Street Corral (dance club), 106, 116 Nixon, Richard, 133; attacks on, 202; Haggard on, 205; red-baiting by, 144; Ritter’s support for, 142 Nixon Administration, National Week of Unity, 189 Noble, Robert, 54 “Nordic outpost” myth, 23 North American Aviation, strike at, 271n79 Norvo, Red, 270n65 O’Daniel, W. Lee “Pappy,” 69 O’Dell, Doye: commercial ventures of, 138; “Dear Okie,” 91–92; home interview with, 164; “Okies in California,” 129 O’Dell, Ruth, 164, 165 Office of Radio Research, 74, 259n120 Ogilvy, David, 125 “Okie” (term): Guthrie on, 2, 92, 254n75, 267n47; Haggard’s use of, 2, 3; negative connotations of, 130–

344

/ Index

“Okie” (term) (continued) 31; in song titles, 129–30; in western swing, 92 Okie, Arky, and Tex (trio), 85 Okieness: allegiance to, 114; country music’s dissociation from, 128–29; relationship to minorities, 219; and southernness, 133 “Okie Pride” (slogan), 196 Okies: Californians’ response to, 21– 29; confusion with poor whites from other regions, 241n93; conservatism of, 146; in country music industry, 182, 183; degeneracy of, 36; Democratic affinities of, 9, 43, 44; in eugenics discourse, 33–39; federal camps for, 29; foodways of, 225n14; generational differences among, 194; harassment of, 1, 62, 72; Hollywood image of, 42, 43; legislation against, 27–28; liminal whiteness of, 21–29, 33, 44, 66, 84, 219, 220; media attacks on, 8, 21, 22, 26–27, 28, 45; and Mexican immigrants, 26–27; Native American heritage of, 84–88; in New Deal, 5; in New Left, 196–97; phenotypes of, 23, 24, 37, 233n10; in photo magazines, 39–40; political awareness of, 43–44; postwar poverty of, 128; Protestantism of, 226n14; racial conflicts among, 157; response to Southern California, 17; scapegoating of, 8, 21, 22, 24–29, 232n3; social mobility of, 133; “southernization” of, 7, 8, 114–15; stereotypes of, 23, 24, 62–63, 64, 78, 99, 219; suburbanization of, 130; in wartime industries, 6, 80, 87–88. See also Culture, Okie; Dust Bowl migrants; Ethnicity, Okie; Identity, Okie Oklahoma Sweethearts (band), 108 “Old Dan Tucker” (song), 57 Olson, Culbert L., 29, 54, 69, 73 On a Slow Train through California (songbook), 57 Origin myths, American, 132 Overture (magazine), 86

Owen, Fuzzy, 204 Owens, Buck, 147–48, 180; Crystal Palace museum, 210 Palace Barn Dance (dance hall), 104 Palomino (dance hall), 116–17 Parker, Charlie, 87 Parsons, Gram, 198–200, 199, 309n39; death of, 209; and Emmylou Harris, 208–9; liberal causes of, 219–20 Patton, Jimmy, “Okie’s in the Pokie,” 130, 182 Paycheck, Johnny, 201–2; “Take This Job and Shove It,” 12 Pearl, Minnie, 228n36 Penny, Hank, 96–97, 98; costume of, 107; “Politics,” 99 People’s Songs Movement, 140, 197 People’s World, The (newspaper): Guthrie’s column in, 63, 72; Haggard in, 186 People’s World, The (KFVD program), 54 Peruna Tonic, 125 Peterson, Richard A., 12, 46, 145; Creating Country Music, 245n5 Phillips, Bert “Foreman,” 97, 98, 104, 110, 116; influence of, 271n77 Photojournalism, depiction of poor whites in, 39–40, 41, 241n91 Pierce, Don, 128 Pipe Smoking Time (CBS radio), 48 “Plain-folk Americanism,” 7, 8, 179, 227n26 Poitier, Sidney, 205 Political culture: property-based, 3; of Right, 284n69; suburban, 133 Politics, progressive, 236n42; in Los Angeles, 68; rightward drift of, 237n45 Polka music, in western swing, 94 Polysemy, 182, 301n5 Poole, Cheryl, 156 Popenoe, Paul, 35, 36 Pop’s Willow Lake (dance hall), 101 Popular culture: consumption of, 4–6; poor whites in, 39–44

Index / 345 Popular Front, 67–73 Populism: in country music, 13–14, 133–34; of Dust Bowl migrants, 73; economic, 9, 200, 211, 221; New Deal, 10; post-9/11, 215; rhetoric of, 13; in Southern California, 53 Populism, conservative. See Conservatism, populist Populism, liberal, in Okie country music, 6–11, 44 Populuxe, in country music, 123, 125 Porter, Cole, “Don’t Fence Me In,” 137 Pride, Charley, 156, 157, 228n36 Producerism, in country music, 12–13 Protestantism, revivalistic, 4, 226n14 Publicity, country music, 149, 206; private sphere in, 163–67. See also Fan magazines Publicity, of California Citizens’ Association, 32 Puls, Stan, 95 Purdy, Grace, 104–5, 163 Pyle, Ernie, 80 Quadagno, Jill, 3 Quirk, Charlie, 60 Race, in country music, xi–xii, 22; connection to origins of honky tonk, 14–152; costumes and, 153; dance styles and, 148–49; during the 1940s, 109–10; in “Okie from Muskogee,” 192–93; postwar audiences and, 156–58; in western swing culture, 85–98. See also Honky tonk; Jazz; Western swing Race, cultural-political variables of, 24 Race relations, in country music culture, xii, 22 Racial miscegenation, 36 Racial science, 38 Racial stereotypes, in country music, 169–72 Radio: audience participation in, 10; commercial, 47; during Great Depression, 246n12, 252n47; populist discourse on, 47; promotional gim-

micks on, 252n47. See also Country music radio Rae, Dorothy, 95 Rafter, Nicole Hahn, 34, 240n77 Rangerettes (vocal group), 107 Rasmussen, Ole, “C-Jam Blues,” 94– 95 Reagan, Nancy, 141 Reagan, Ronald, 133, 141; and country music industry, 143; Haggard and, 143, 216; and Proposition 14, 193– 94; singing cowboys’ support for, 142, 143, 288n102; and Southern California School of AntiCommunism, 140; use of western imagery, 143, 288n102 Rebel Rouser Club (Sun Valley), 157 Rechy, John, 133 Reformism, setbacks to, 29–33 Refugees: Dust Bowl migrants as, 64– 65; European, 65 Reichard, Alice, 35–36 Reindel, Edna, 101 Republican Party: country musicians’ support of, 142, 212. See also Conservatism Revill, George, 15–16 Rice, Condoleezza, 215 Right, political: in California, 194; Haggard on, 205; and Okie identity, 132, 207; racism of, 142; in Southern California, 114; southern culture in, 284n69; xenophobia of, 30. See also Conservatism; New Right Ritter, John, 142 Ritter, Tex, 135, 136; conservatism of, 142–43, 211; “God Bless America Again,” 146–47, 213; “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven,” 127; and liberal causes, 140; movie band of, 106; Senate campaign of, 146; Sweet Land of Liberty, 146 Riverside Rancho (dance hall), 116, 117 Robbin, Ed, 65, 71 Robbins, Marty, 13, 125; in Wallace campaign, 206

346

/ Index

Rockabilly, 156, 158; in Bakersfield sound, 185 Rock and roll: competition for country music, 113; costume of, 153; country music’s influence on, 209; do-ityourself in, 259n122; in Southern California, 208–9 Rodgers, Jimmie, 1, 93; influence on Haggard, 185 Roediger, David, 24 Rogers, Roy, 85, 137, 141; commercial ventures of, 136, 138; conservatism of, 140–41; evangelicalism of, 145; and liberal causes, 139; movie band of, 106; support for Reagan, 143, 288n102; television programs of, 135, 138, 285n74; in Vietnam era, 188; and Will Rogers, 139, 140 Rogers, Smokey Oakie, 81 Rogers, Will: Cherokee heritage of, 85; Guthrie’s emulation of, 58, 63, 67; singing cowboys’ emulation of, 139–40 Rolling Stone, on Haggard, 206 Rolling Stones, 206 Romance, intercultural, in country music lyrics, 170–72, 297n28 Ronstadt, Linda, 209 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: Fireside Chats, 61; support in country music, 68–69 Roosevelt, James, 144 Rustic Roundup (magazine), 163 Sadler, Barry, “Ballad of the Green Berets,” 187 Sample, Tex, 12–13 Sanders, George, “Hollywood Hoedown Lowdown,” 163 Sanders, “Mother” Sue, 39 Santa Ana Daily Register, 54 Santa Monica Ballroom, 83, 84 Satherly, “Uncle” Art, 126 Saunders, Dave “Mudcat,” 214–15 Saunders, George, 97 Schiller, F. C. S., 35 Schuler, Loring A., 37, 42

Schwartz, Davis F., 38 Schwartz, Fred C., 140 “Seaport of Iowa” legend, 23 Seeger, Pete, and Guthrie, 47, 245n9 Sensing the News (KBBQ), 121 Servicemen: as country music fans, 100, 101; listening habits of, 100, 272n81 Sessions, Ronnie, 131 Shepard, Jean, 185; feminist recordings of, 174–75; “Girls in Disgrace,” 175; image of, 175; “Two Hoops and a Holler,” 174 Shibley, Jesse “Arkie,” 129; “Hot Rod Race,” 156 Shuler, Robert “Fighting Bob,” 54 Silent majority, 183, 212 The Silver Bandit (film), 86 Silver Shirts (fascist organization), 50 Sims, Lloyd R., 102, 106, 107 Sinclair, Upton, 43, 54 Singing cowboys, 114–15; in ACWM, 136; anticommunism of, 143–44; conservatism of, 138–48, 181; emulation of Will Rogers, 139–40; evangelicalism of, 145; Haggard and, 181; movies, 134; southernness of, 143; support for Reagan, 142, 143; on television, 135, 137–38, 285n74; during Vietnam War, 146–47 Sioux headdress, 292n150 Skinker, Chris, 175 Smith, Gerald L. K., 257n99 Smith, Gladys de Lancey, 38 Smith, Joseph K., 36 Smith, Suzanne E., 231n56 Snow, Hank, 13; in Wallace campaign, 206 Songs for Rounders (album), 122 Sons of the Pioneers, 93, 137 Sooter, Rudy, “Easy Payment Blues,” 99 Southern California School of AntiCommunism, 140 Southerners, poor white, 40, 241n93 Southernization: in New Right, 284n69; of Okies, 7, 8, 114–15; of

Index / 347 Southern California, 114, 133, 142– 43, 227n26, 284n68 Southernness: allegiance to, 114; Okieness and, 133; of singing cowboys, 143 Spade Cooley Show, 83–84 Spade Cooley’s Western Swing Song Folio, 167 Spanish Civil War, 65 Spaulding, Charles B., 59, 72 Spigel, Lynn, 3 Springsteen, Bruce, 74 Square dance, 149, 290n126 Square Dance Jubilee (film), 86 Stanfield, Peter, 139 Starr, Kevin, 42 Stein, Walter J., 226n20 Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath, 6, 64, 117, 204, 253n62; culture of, 21, 221; depiction of migrants, 8; women in, 42 Steinbeck, John, “Their Blood Is Strong,” 39 Sterilization, eugenic, 34, 35, 38, 42– 43 Stewart, Wynn, 184 Stoddard, Lothrop, The Rising Tide of Color, 37 Stone, Cliffie, 149 Stone, Lee A., 37–38, 42 Stoneback, H. R., 253n62 Subsistence Homestead program, 51 Sudmeier, Glenn, 76–77 Sudmeier, Gustav H. W., 76–77 Sugrue, Thomas J., 228n28 Tally records, 184, 185 Taylor, Regina, 192 Teagarden, Jack, 95 Tejano music, 221 Television: barn dances on, 119; country music on, 114, 136, 208, 221; singing cowboys on, 135, 137–38, 285n74; western shows on, 84, 136 Tenney, Jack B., 144 Thompson, Florence, 87 Thompson, Hank, 74; Brazos Valley

Boys, 132; costume of, 107, 153; “Cryin’ in the Deep Blue Sea,” 154; honky tonk of, 151; on Los Angeles, 297n18; lyrics of, 168; public image of, 126; “Squaws along the Yukon,” 171; “Wild Side of Life,” 122 Tillis, Pam, 214 Time-Life corporation, 39 Tiomkin, Dmitri, 135 Tophand magazine, 98; western swing costume in, 107; western swing in, 105, 162 Town Hall Party (KTTV), 84, 119 Townsend, Francis, 69 Trailer camps, Okie, 45 Tramps: “fruit,” 26; white male, 242n94 Travis, Merle, 93, 185; “I Am a Pilgrim,” 198; “No Vacancy,” 99, 271n80; red-baiting against, 144–45; “Sixteen Tons,” 99, 145; on western swing costume, 107 Treviño, Rick, 221 Tubb, Ernest, 133, 134; honky-tonk of, 150–51 Turk, Nathan, 152, 153–54, 291n142 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 25, 187 Tuttle, Wesley, 100 Twain, Shania, 211, 228n40 Tyler, Johnny, “Oakie Boogie,” 91 Tyler, T. Texas, 80–81, 95; “The Deck of Cards,” 145 University of Birmingham (England), cultural studies by, 231n56 Unions: country music performers in, 100–101, 273n87; Dust Bowl migrants in, 100, 109 Unruh, Jesse, 109, 304n47 Vaughn, Al, “She’s an Okie,” 129, 267n45 Venice Pier ballroom, 98 Victor Records, 82 Vietnam War: civilian casualties during, 304n46; in country music, 179, 180, 187–91, 202; draft evasion dur-

348

/ Index

Vietnam War (continued) ing, 198, 199; migrant voting during, 193–94; My Lai massacre, 190, 193; “Okie from Muskogee” on, 183–94; singing cowboys during, 146–47 Viguerie, Richard A., 3 WABC (New York), 68 Wage structures, Fordist, 281n40 Wagoner, Porter, 153 Wagonmasters (band), 137 Wah-Nee-Ota, Chief, 88, 89 Wakefield, Floyd, 133 Wakely, Jimmy, 80, 96; in ACWM, 136; “The Red Deck of Cards,” 145– 46; use of brass instruments, 81, 98 Waldie, Donald J., 130–31 Waldron, Vince “Little Fox,” 76–77 Wallace, George, 142; on KFOX, 146; use of country music, 206 Walsh, Lawrence E., 133, 193 Ward, Bill, 121 Warner, Mark, country music support for, 214–15 Wartime industries: Okies in, 6, 80, 87–88; women in, 99–100, 101, 102, 162 Watts insurrection, 183, 192; role of female racial stereotypes in, 170 Wayne, John, 140, 187 The Weavers, 145; McCarthy on, 46 Weedon, Chris, 16 Welfare systems: conflict over, 232n3; Okies in, 22, 23, 28, 30 Wells, Kitty, 178; “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” 175 West, Speedy, 185 Western and Country Music (magazine), 134–35 Western Hit Parade (radio program), 97 Westernness: consumer, 136, 285n79; in country music, 136; in fiction, 148; on television, 136. See also Country-western music; Singing cowboys

Western swing music, 76; audience of, 261n9; in Bakersfield, 185; black influences on, 77, 79, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94–95, 97, 109–10; black performers and, 88; blue-collar fan base of, 100; consumer base of, 104; diversity in, 9–10; European folk influence on, 94; improvisation in, 95–96; jazz influence in, 79, 93, 95, 97–99, 105, 108, 150; and Los Angeles music industry, 79–84; Mexican-American influences on, 86–87, 88, 93, 94; modernism in, 95, 96, 97; Native Americans in, 86–88; origins of, 79, 268n56; performers, 80–81; polka in, 94; precomposition of, 270n68; recordings of, 93, 110, 262n11; social integration through, 109–10; technical modernizations in, 110; televised, 83–84; women entrepreneurs in, 104–5; women fans of, 99– 108. See also Dance halls Western swing subculture, 77–78; costume of, 106–7; fans in, 99–108; hipsterism in, 90; migrant identity in, 90–91; patois of, 92–99; social relations of, 78 Western Varieties (television show), 84 Wheeler, Bill A., 163 White, Lee “Lasses,” 89 Whiteman, Paul, 98 Whiteness: in country music, 148–58; elite fixation on, 239n66; of European immigrants, 255n78; liminal, 21–29, 33, 44, 66, 84, 219, 220; middle-class, 219; mythologies of, 23–24, 233n7; in “Okie from Muskogee,” 192; scapegoating within, 25; scholarship on, 233n9 Whites, poor: confusion with Okies, 241n93; degeneracy of, 34, 36–39, 40; gender relations among, 242n96; in Georgia, 42; honky tonk music of, 151; media portrayal of, 33; in photojournalism, 39–40, 41, 241n91; in popular culture, 39–44;

Index / 349 racialization of bodies, 240n77; reproduction rates of, 37; southerners, 40, 241n93; sterilization of, 38, 42– 43; women, 40–42 Whiteside, Jonny, 18, 210 White supremacy, in California, 234n13 White trash, 23, 33, 43, 239n64; Dust Bowl migrants as, 27, 34, 233n10 Whitfield, Stephen J., 245n10 Whitley, Ray, 101 Whitman, Luther, 50 Widney, Joseph Pomeroy, 35 Williams, Hank, Sr.: and black performers, xi; “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 154 Williams, Lucinda, 209 Williams, Sollie “Tex,” 81; “Artistry in Western Swing,” 96; costume of, 107; Palace Barn Dance of, 104; use of square dance, 149; women fans of, 108 Willing, Foy, 93 Willman, Chris, 213; Rednecks and Bluenecks, 214 Wills, Bob: in battle of the bands, 96; blackballing of, 272n84; blackface work by, 266n39; and black musicians, 266n37; Cherokee heritage of, 87; costume of, 133; early repertoire of, 262n11; films of, 148; and “hillbilly” term, 127, 252n11; and His Texas Playboys, 76, 79, 94, 102; income of, 100; influence on Haggard, 185; influences on, 93; “New San Antonio Rose,” 94; recordings of, 83; “San Antonio Rose,” 100; use of jazz, 79, 252n11; women fans of, 102 Wilson, Gretchen, 211 Wilson, Sloan, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 153 Wolof language, 150, 289n131 Women: African American, 161; agency of, 160; during cold war era, 161; country music fans, 108,

162–67, 177–78, 210–11; in country music lyrics, 167–72; disempowerment of, 4; in fan magazine culture, 162–67; fan magazine journalists, 105, 162–63; honky tonkers, 158; in honky tonk music, 167–69, 179; migrant, 42, 78, 175; performers’ wives, 160, 163–67; poor white, 40–42; racial fetishization of, 170, 297n28; racial stereotypes of, 169–72; role in country music, 160–79; submissiveness in country music, 167–72, 178; in wartime industries, 99–100, 101, 102, 162. See also Country music performers, women Women, blue collar, 99–100; dress of, 106–7; sexuality of, 107–8; in western swing culture, 77–78; western swing fans, 99–108 Woody, the Lone Wolf (radio program), 63, 67–68, 75; political endorsements on, 70 Woody and Lefty Lou’s Favorite Collection (of) Old Time Hill Country Songs (1937), 56–57 Woody and Lefty Lou Show (KFVD, Los Angeles), 48–67, 49; airtime of, 52–53; artistic freedom of, 55–56; audience of, 57, 59–61; commercial music on, 56–57; fan letters to, 1, 48, 59–60, 61; gender egalitarianism in, 164; political discussion on, 119; regionalism in, 123; repertoire of, 57; role in migrant identity, 51; salaries for, 55; sponsors of, 55–56, 125; western ballads on, 134; women audience of, 210; women in lyrics of, 168. See also Crissman, Maxine “Lefty Lou”; Guthrie, Woody Wooley, Sheb, “Oklahoma Honky Tonk Gal,” 168, 171 Workerism, white, 24 Working class: Americanism of, 45; in country music audience, 128; leisure sites of, 17; liberalism of, 5; of Los

350

/ Index

Working class (continued) Angeles, 6, 101–2, 196; masculinity of, 154; political action by, 117; racism of, 157; radicalism of, 73; southern culture of, 284n69; voters, 3 Works Progress Administration, 50 World War II, antimigrant discrimination in, 32 Worley, Darryl, 213, 217; “Have You Forgotten?,” 212 Worthington, Cal, 165, 282n41 Wyble, Jimmy, 93, 95; jazz music of, 270n65 Wylie, Philip, Generation of Vipers, 169

XELO (Tijuana), 56 Xenophobia: in California, 32; of organized labor, 29; of Right, 30; suburban, 8 Yearwood, Trisha, 12, 229n40 Yellow Peril, 26, 28 Yoakam, Dwight, 18, 21, 221; Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., 210 Young, Neil, 209 Youth culture: British, 231n56; Okies in, 196 Zoot Suit Riots, 85 Zoot suits, 153, 292n152 Zucca brothers, 95