Lester Flatt and Bill Monroe Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry Nashville, Tennessee, 1972

The Country World of Henry Horenstein

Today country dominates American popular music. Country radio stations outnumber all others, and country music outsells everything but rock-and-roll. Indeed, Nashville, the music's national headquarters, has become the modern-day Tin Pan Alley, with its state-of-the-art production facilities, abundance of entertainment conglomerates, and sheer number of artists and cultural workers. Generating $1.5 billion in record sales alone, country music is indeed big business.

More than 2,100 radio stations feature country music today. Virtually all ignore older musicians, hits, and styles with a fervor that amounts to a blacklisting of all but the newest artists and the music manufactured to corporate specifications. A contemporary country music event is as likely to be an arena show as a roadside dance. Today's great country stars play the same stadiums, arts centers, and casinos as their pop and rock peers. An elaborate country tour will utilize dozens of vans and semitrucks, along with numerous technicians, roadies, and support staff. At these shows, devoted fans are no closer to their idols than they are at a Britney Spears, Dave Matthews, or Kid Rock event.

Henry Horenstein's photographs portray the world that preceded today's sophisticated country scene. Horenstein photographed local clubs, dance halls, and outdoor venues that hosted the music. In these images, Horenstein frames the run-down nobility of the Ryman Auditorium, once home to the Grand Ole Opry, the casual atmosphere of Tootsies Orchid Lounge, the community roots of Cajun dances. These images, and the hundreds more from this body of his work, form a remarkable archive of country music in transition in the 1970s. Portraits of artists, shots of workers and fans, and glances at the places where country music lived all transport us to a world so close in time, yet so distant in spirit.

Hillbilly Fever
The country music world of thirty years ago did not resemble this modern system of mass-marketed entertainment and mainstream acceptance. The most important country stars have always won national fame and coast-to-coast exposure on radio, records, and the stage. Yet until recently, the broader world of country music—the bedrock of lesser-known artists, business people, and fans—was largely set off from the mainstream of American entertainment. As Henry Horenstein rightly points out, country music thrived everywhere in the United States. Yet the music flourished in a series of largely unheralded local and regional scenes, sustained by tight-knit communities and cemented by intense loyalties and personal relationships.

After World War II, country music flourished throughout America. War workers and servicemen brought their tastes for rural sounds with them as they migrated for defense jobs or military duties. These migrants created and strengthened thriving country music markets in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The relatively new technologies of the electric pickup and magnetic tape transformed modern recording and country music. New genres—bluegrass and honky tonk country—grew from the collision of rural and urban cultures. Thousands of taverns filled with half-a-million jukeboxes became centers of working-class entertainment. There country music entered a golden age that lasted for three decades, an era evoked by famous names that still define the music for so many: Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Flatt and Scruggs, Patsy Cline, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Kitty Wells, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Moon Mullican. The music thrived in roadside inns and dance halls, its pronounced beat inviting all but the shyest or clumsiest onto the floor. Songs of love and loss, of soul-searching pain and stoic acceptance jostled with anthems of hard living and good times. Keening steel guitars, mournful fiddles, cutting guitars, and propulsive banjos all made country a significant stream of American popular music.

Boston Boy
Henry Horenstein's life embraces the golden age of this honky tonk music, its fading and renaissance. Born after the war, he was a young boy during the high times of electric hillbilly music and the founding generation of bluegrass. He came of age as a member of a younger generation whose appreciation for country both gratified and inspired older musicians. Horenstein grew up listening to country, but it was as a young adult and novice photographer that he really immersed himself in traditional country and bluegrass music. While some rock-and-rollers began to borrow from and trade with country musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, many in the rock-and-roll community came simply to love the music as it was. Profound cultural gaps between older traditional fans and younger listeners were bridged or ignored by a common love of the music. As the folk revival in the 1950s and early 1960s had seen educated and middle-class listeners lovingly embrace mountain and blues music, ten years later many of the counter-culture would find country and bluegrass music that spoke to them. Horenstein was part of that generation, even as he loved country from his childhood.

The roots of country music lay in Southern hills and rural life, but country music has always had a stronghold in American cities. Boston and its surrounding area was no exception. The city and suburbs have long nurtured a thriving country music community: local Boston radio featured live Saturday-night jamborees well into the 1950s, and country music package shows frequently stopped in the area. Disc jockeys Lynn Joiner and the late Brian Sinclair (both of "Hillbilly at Harvard") and Ed the Detective have featured old-time country on Boston radio for decades. The Boston area also had thriving folk and bluegrass societies that have, for decades, brought to town pioneering artists for concerts, dances, and workshops. Horenstein grew up in this environment, where country music was present on the airwaves and in clubs and roadhouses.

Historically minded, Horenstein entered his studies at a fortuitous time. The exciting and crucial redirection of history in the 1950s and 1960s saw scholars emphasizing the importance of everyday experience. For these writers, such as E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, common people in any society were the unsung and crucial makers of their history. Perhaps most significant, Horenstein learned the historical importance of class, the attention to the economic and social relations of those at different social levels. For country was the music of working people, and Horenstein’s photos repeatedly and eloquently show us the working-class roots and branches of country music. Whether in the images of the care-worn and simply dressed patrons of the Hillbilly Ranch, the hard-living denizens of Tootsies Orchid Lounge, or those anxiously and expectantly lined up outside the Grand Ole Opry, Horenstein’s photos show us that country music is firmly rooted in the everyday lives of American working-class people.

Y'All Come
These images show a now largely vanished world of country-music parks and outdoor venues that regularly hosted the best in honky tonk and bluegrass. New River Ranch, Sunset Park, the Hillbilly Ranch, Watermelon Park, Sleepy Hollow Ranch, and many others all featured national artists and local favorites. Here, families regularly congregated on weekends, making all-day excursions to play outdoors, picnic, listen to their favorite music, and mingle with their idols. Even the greatest stars of the Grand Ole Opry regularly toured these parks and roadhouses, in between Opry package tours and weekly appearances at the Ryman Auditorium. Country music royalty such as Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and Kitty Wells, the queen of country music, all played these parks regularly, as did local acts. And of course all these shows featured more than the stars. The great sidemen, the pickers, and backup musicians all had their turns in the spotlight: Buck Graves, the great Dobro man, playing flashy solo turns with Flatt and Scruggs; electric guitar pioneer Billy Bird, stepping up for take-off leads with Ernest Tubb; fiddler Mack Magaha sawing on the strings with Reno and Smiley.

These photos beautifully capture the local working-class worlds of country music and the close community of artists and fans. Fans and stars ate together; smoked and joked; swapped photos, recipes, and stories, before and after show time. Stars performed their latest hits, answered requests, for obscure B-sides, and hawked souvenirs and songbooks. Afterward, they signed autographs and posed for pictures for hours, before climbing into cars and buses to make the next gig further up the road. The fans hung on every note, every phrase, every corny joke and routine. They admired the latest spangly suits and dresses on their favorites, colorful outfits made by Nudie the Rodeo Tailor and Nathan Turk of Hollywood. Sometimes they even pitched in to wash or repair an item between sets. Children played in the woods and on makeshift playgrounds. Those starstruck kids with talent and heart were glued to the front of the stage, drinking in every note and every turn of phrase. Many a country career began when an encouraging headliner invited a young five-year-old on stage to sing a Hank Williams classic. And the next week would see a different bill, a different star, and a whole new round of pickin’ all day and "dinner on the ground."

Hillbilly Heaven
Like any successful artist, Horenstein was a child of both talent and luck; his pictures are not only arresting but important, as he managed to capture historically significant images. Horenstein frequented the Opry in its last years at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville before it was moved permanently out to the Opryland amusement park. Here he caught historic images—Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, long estranged but recently reconciled. Horenstein captured DeFord Bailey, an Opry star of the 1930s and the first African-American country celebrity. He secured the image on one of Bailey's only return visits to the Opry. Horenstein not only sought the great stars but also the supporting players, photographing little-known Opry pioneers like Fiddlin’ Sid Harkreaderas well as longtime stars Hank Snow and Archie Campbell. We see Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones on the Opry stage, now grown into the role he created as a young man in the 1930s. We then see Grandpa's old friend Stringbean backstage at the Opry, framed between a young girl and his own publicity still. By giving us the unheralded as well as the famous, Horenstein remains true to a historical vision that puts the common and everyday ahead of celebrity and commerce. In these images, E.P. Thompson meets Hank Thompson.

Horenstein's eye captures details and clues. In his photograph of Ernest Tubb surrounded by adoring fans, we can see the pen with which he would sign autographs for hours after each performance. Background vocalist Carol Lee Cooper stands at the mirror right before show time, her book of lyrics and chord changes right at hand. Her parents, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, pose in their den, framed by an earlier portrait, done in the early 1950s; overlooking the scene are photos of the publishers Fred and Wesley Rose, who played important roles in their careers. Connie Smith wears a striking cross, revealing that she had already dedicated herself to religion while still performing secular music. Such portraits all present musicians on their own terms: Neither flattering nor harsh, Horenstein's camera offers visions of country musicians and their fans as people who occupy different sides of the stage but who have everything else in common.

Phases and Stages
By the late 1960s, country music venues were attracting another audience along with working people and their families. Young adults, usually city-bred and middle-class, came in search of the music. Spurred on by the folk revival, younger "citybillies," as they were sometimes known, came to hear a music far from their roots but close to their hearts. Many of these newer fans were hippies, whose long hair and unconventional dress may have raised some eyebrows but whose enthusiasm and
sincerity generally earned them a warm welcome.

Horenstein’s camera shows us that by the 1970s, this country music world, so long self-sufficient, had fallen inexorably under outside influences. From rock-and-roll came a loosening of the country dresscodes; iconoclastic artists such as Waylon Jennings in these photographs look as much like hard rockers as country legends. While rock-and-roll offered one alternative for country style, the synthetics revolution brought about another. Horenstein shows traditionalists like Stonewall Jackson, Connie Smith, and Jean Shephard adopting contemporary polyester leisure suits and dresses, even as peers Porter Wagoner and Johnny Wright remained loyal to the Nudie rhinestone look. The light weight and easy care of the polyesters (compared with the heavy yet fragile rhinestone ensembles) made these styles much more attractive to many artists. Bill Monroe dazzles in a vertigo-inducing jacket, while Kitty Wells evokes a rain forest in her stage gown. Longer hair and sideburns came to country as well, as artists claimed a look once primarily associated with truck drivers and rock-and-rollers. Conway Twitty's magnificent pompadour reminds us of his rockabilly days when, as Harold Jenkins, he tore up roadhouses from Newport, Arkansas, to Ontario.

But more than just the look of country was changing. The eclipse of this music and these venues says much about the social changes and cultural workings of American life in the past forty years. The parks, roadhouses, and bars in Henry's photos coexisted in a fragile yet stable ecology. Artists, promoters, club owners, and fans all participated in a system in which one hit record could sustain a career for years through loyalty, hard work, and a modest profit motive. Not only did artists and fans enjoy long-term relationships, but promoters, club owners, and venue operators also worked for many years with artists, agents, and one another. Promoters booked the same acts for decades, working their children into the business. (Two generations of the Waltman family ran Sunset Park in Pennsylvania for more than sixty years!) But ultimately, the whole economy began to change.

The major record labels began a long cycle of consolidation and contraction in the early 1970s. They eventually purged their rosters of steady but unspectacular sellers. The overwhelming multimillion record sales in the 1970s of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack compelled labels to devote excess energy to seeking blockbuster hits while channeling fewer resources to so-called marginal markets such as country.

By the mid-1980s, when Horenstein took a break from photographing musicians, few of his subjects still had major label record deals, or indeed any deal at all. While independent record companies like Rounder and Rebel signed bluegrass artists such as the Johnson Mountain Boys or J. D. Crowe and the New South, they could not always provide a home for Opry stars like Jean Shephard. Without new records to promote and sell, artists had fewer revenue sources. The centralization of entertainment in corporate hands further undermined this country music scene. Taverns closed, and entertainment shifted to the confines of home. National promotion, cable television, and corporate theme parks all crowded out small-scale operators.

Busted
Most important, the face and place of the audience was changing. The inexorable contraction of family farming and the transfer of that land to development and corporate interests (what we might call "rural renewal") destroyed many jobs that sustained the country audience. Long recessions in the Ford and Reagan eras saw deindustrialization and job loss. Fewer workers were making or buying those Torinos and Bonnevilles we see in these photos. Population shifts in the Northeast andMidwest found workers heading for different jobs and for lives in the South and Southwest. Post-1965 immigration to the United States created a new working class with vastly different traditions and tastes. In short, the changes that remade American life after 1970 put an end to the fragile country music world Horenstein chronicled in these photos.

While young people from all walks of life and musical backgrounds filled the ranks of traditional country fans in the 1970s, there was no denying the aging of the audience and of the artists. Corporate marketers have long favored youth and ignored older consumers; as long as that pattern held true, country would not be a growth industry locally or nationally. When country music did receive a major commercial boost in the late 1980s, it came from a singer who adapted the arena techniques of rock-and-roll shows and who sold himself with marketing strategies he studied in college: Garth Brooks. Suddenly, country found a much larger and younger audience. Good-bye Hillbilly Ranch, hello MCI Center.

A Way to Survive
Most of the venues, and many of the performers seen in Horenstein's photographs, are no longer with us. But although the country music parks have faded, and the Hillbilly Ranch is gone, the music that filled them all lives on, tenuously but tenaciously. If country radio ignores its roots, you can find them throughout the nation on public radio and the Internet. The commercial margins of American music are more sizable today than they were in the past. Many who make, hear, and preserve traditional sounds neither seek nor desire overarching mainstream success. They pursue their calling with an eye on the same modest profits that once sustained the old economy. As long as such ventures can break even and grow sufficiently, music matters more than market share.

Older musicians, styles, and songs persist, rediscovered, remade, and preserved by a coalition of younger artists, new audiences, and longtime fans. Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard today enjoy revived recording careers on independent labels. We are witnessing another in a series of resurgences in traditional country music, sounds strongly rooted in the folk musics of the Appalachians, Southwest, and West. The unanticipated and overwhelming success of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its multimillion-selling soundtrack, has revealed a widespread hunger for older country sounds, sensibilities, and songs. That hunger is echoed in the continued respect and reverence held by young people today for older country musicians such as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, George Jones, and Ralph Stanley.

We can welcome the publication of these unseen photographs as part of this moment of preser-vation, reconsideration, and renewal. Henry's images always turn us back to the music. They direct us to traditional country, whether we locate it in a slick new CD box set or a battered 78 unearthed at a Salvation Army store. Anita Carter's beatific photo invites us to listen to her aching country classic "Is This My Destiny?" Jimmy Dickens's portrait reminds us that he was a consummate balladeer as well as an entertainer. Horenstein’s shot of Jerry Lee Lewis captures all his swagger as well as his vulnerability, and we recollect that he had a long career as a country hitmaker after his rocking years.

Henry Horenstein has made a career of loving, quirky, and honest engagement with small subcultures hidden from the mainstream. These music photos offer a vision of enduring art in a slowly changing world. His work thus takes its place in the larger process of preservation and memory that is central to country music's history, and indeed central to American culture.

—Charles F. McGovern
National Museum of American History
Smithsonian Institution